The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless.[1]
The West is literally unmoored. Nothing controls us except untouchable elites, a corrupt press, arrogant billionaires, special interests, a degraded judiciary, and a goony-bird academy. These are the source of our degradation and decay into rule by the grade-A, vitamin enriched, non-GMO, tofu-flavored, yoga-toned Virtuous Ones. It’s all top down from now with nothing springing from the soil of past human experience. The bitter clinging remnants fight only a rear guard action, essentially at the mercy of the bankers, the federal courts, and the police-surveillance state.
Not every decision made by someone else is necessarily a threat to your well being but it’s as plain as can be that for just about every major decision to be made in society as a whole the more people in on the decision the better. And I don’t mean the big decisions like legislation, regulations, treaties, or elections primarily but those daily ones made in the humblest of circumstances by the millions of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” and pursuant to Tocqueville’s widely-distributed “spirit of association.” Give me trial and error over the centuries by the millions of our ancestors over the ultra-recent agendas of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros, visionaries all with their Agendas. For us.
It’s a tepid defense of Western civilization to say that at least there was a there there. A lot more can be said of course but this stripped down celebration of it aids us some when considering the utter wasteland of the “progressive” vision. Think building your house on sand or hydroponic gardening in tanks of distilled water. Good luck with that human reason deal and cue the uncertain trumpets.
Cults, buses in the Alaska forest, Negroism, multiculturalism, living Constitutions, feminism, license, and socialism lead to distortion (AKA “progress”), dissolution, death, mobocracy, civil war, arbitrary rule, and economic devastation. All brilliantly marketed and with personal destruction for the dissenters. But if it’s gospel truth throughout the land that the Constitution can be ignored, someone with a dick can compete in women’s sports, sodomy is a sacrament, and (funny) money can be conjured out of thin air, you know for a fact that the center has collapsed.
Notes
[1] “The West has lost its virtue. We have abandoned the taboos that held us together.” By Paul Kingsnorth, UnHerd, 8/30/21.
2 comments
Loss of civilizational will is a very real phenomenon. This and other aspects of the decline of the West were beautifully summarized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 address to the Harvard University graduating class. Consider this excerpt from that speech:
If we fail to find our courage, we simply don’t deserve our civilization. There must be a reckoning, a retribution, a retaliation so grim, so dire that it will resonate through the next millennium. The Gramscian, Machiavellian Left have removed any last iota of concern, care or compassion for their fate that I might have once had.
Author
I admire Solzhenitsyn enormously. Every word of his weighs a ton.
I recently spoke to a small group and observed that communists in America have been an enduring presence. But what is extraordinary is the utter failure of patriots to push back effectively. It’s been clear sailing for the left and so-called conservatives have been nothing but feeble in their efforts to defeat it. Plain vanilla citizens, too, have been remiss. Millions have swallowed the leftist propaganda uncritically. How many books do you have to read about the USSR, E. Germany, Cambodia, China, or N. Korea to develop even minimal skepticism about the claims of socialism? Just one freaking book would be enough to cause the reader to cease thinking that proper pronouns are an important contribution to human life. But no books are read and it’s the rare person who defends his own system. It’s as though all a leftist has to do is merely mention “Nazi,” “capitalism,” or “slavery” and most people are immobilized and turned into quivering jelly.
We did indeed give up our birthright for a mess of pottage. Period. Full stop. It’s axiomatic that there are wide swings to the pendulum that marks human beliefs and delusions. Right now it is our curse to live just when it’s about to swing back but the signs of reversal are faint and no leaders seem to be able to make any headway. It’s curious that some of the women in public life are the most effective and brave.