In our previous post we linked to Victor Davis Hanson’s gloomy column on the many symptoms of Western decline. Our e-pal David Duff also sent along a link to a similar essay entitled Like Cattle Before a Thunderstorm. Both of these pieces acknowledged a widespread sense of foreboding, but both also showed a curious paralysis, of the kind we experience in a nightmare:
Why is this? Why should a scholar and critic of Hanson’s erudition be unable to offer any prescription? Why is the American nation so inert in the face of onrushing calamity? The signs, after all, are there for all to see; in particular, what should attract everyone’s attention is the collapse of great urban centers such as Detroit and Baltimore. That major port cities in a nation of imperial power, in peacetime, should fail so utterly in a mere half-century is almost without historical precedent — while for such cities to collapse at all is, without any exception of which I am aware, a sign of impending general disintegration.
As I said in the previous post, I believe the answer is that it is increasingly clear, to more and more of us, that nothing can be done. It will be for future historians to say just when we crossed the “event horizon”: some may pick out the Wilson administration, while others may look at the Depression years, or the Sixties; others yet may move the Schwarzschild radius all the way out to 2012. (Some already look farther back, all the way to the beginning of the Enlightenment.) But it is plainer and plainer that it’s been crossed, and that all future timelines take us, at accelerating velocity, through the singularity. It may take years, or even a generation, to get there — but already the tidal forces have begun their irresistible work.
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Professor Hanson, as a pundit, has been unwilling to “connect the dots” his entire career. His “only time will tell” softball conclusions to his pundit pieces are a standing joke, even among those who admire his insightful historical analysis. Without being able, in the present academic and pundit environment, to assign causes to our present troubles, he is unable to prescribe any solution.
The NeoReactionary kids came up with progressivism as the embodiment of entropy the other day. Clever, but again, impossible to turn into a prescription.
“Why is this?”
I’ve come around to the ‘because Hitler!’ hypothesis.
There is no antidote for entropy’s inexorable increase. So our only hope for our representative democracy is that progressivism is not entirely the embodiment of entropy. Nevertheless, I have yet to hear anyone prescribe a course of legal action to counter destructive progressivism.
I am saying a prayer for the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. What are the odds?
My worry is this. As seen from ‘over here’, America is a violent country. For most of the time in most of the places, the violence is contained but I sense a constant bubbling cauldron. Thus, if and when the Right attempt a correction the ‘brown stuff’ will hit the fan – big time! Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), the Left loves a crisis. It is under the impetus of a crisis that all those beloved ’emergency regulations’ can be promulgated – and the Left is home and dry.
David, accepting for the moment that all is as dire as has been presented here…and I don’t, the surest weapon against the Left is the Left. If one wins something, one must somehow hold on to it. It won’t take long for the Left to turn upon itself and its inner totalitarian nature will show.
Violence may come, but useful violence is best kept within the players on the Left. We who oppose them should help them along in this. If and when the violence spreads outside, then we who oppose them are called upon to deliver to them their just deserts.
Freedom is not free.
We are where we are because this must be. I am a Christian man and believe that the end times really are very near. All men must choose and they must be able to choose freely where there allegiance lies. They must have clear choices and they must take a stand.
I am noting more and more in the many blogs I read a rising uncertainty on the part of some who rejected the old Christian beliefs as crude, “unscientific”, unreasonable, etc. The signs are becoming unmistakable and some are beginning to wonder if maybe the prophecies are true. Others are becoming more determined and more desperate to force a solution through the mechanisms of the world. In all cases the necessity of faith is in full effect and with faith there is always doubt. The greater the stakes the greater the risk. With the perception that survival (eternity) is at the core of what is happening (survival of self, family, group, anything and everything held as good and necessary) the stakes cannot be higher nor the risks greater. Of course there is anxious foreboding.
In any event the result will be to take a stand with God or with the opposition. Most will choose the opposition.
My diagnosis is that the problem is rooted in the prevailing morality, which is centered around the idea that universal human equality is the highest moral value. It’s evolved into a higher value than freedom, a higher value than excellence, a higher value than any other.
The reality of life however is that all humans are not equal in almost any sense. And certainly the races and genders and sexual orientations and religions and cultures are not equal. But our society’s highest moral value commands us to believe, to affirm, and to act as if they are all equal. To do otherwise, we are taught constantly, is morally wrong.
So we are paralyzed by our dominant morality of equality-above-all-else. Our morality does not permit us to notice that it is blacks, muslims, etc who are causing the problem. So there is nothing that can be done to actually address the problem because we are not morally allowed to notice the nature of the problem.
That’s why nothing is happening. The morality has to change first. The morality has to switch back to something in accordance with the realities of life. So the question is, what changes the morality of a society? I’m guessing that the only thing that changes it is severe enough pain that the mass of people has nothing left to lose by speaking up and abandoning the dysfunctional morality. Right now we all have a lot to lose by doing that – our jobs, etc.
Kreitzer, you wrote:
Yes, like many others on the Right, I’ve shared this view for years now. As an entropic agency, the Left has always put the ‘leveling’ principle of egalitarianism front and center, but it took the horrors of the Nazis to make any consideration of the realities of human differences truly heretical. The religious intensity of radical non-discrimination in the post-war West — the “dominant morality of equality-above-all-else”, as Jeff puts it just above — is a neurosis, a phobia, a social hysteresis, that arose in response to the Holocaust.
The evil done by the Nazis also catalyzed as a cultural reaction a radical self-doubt that had been latent in the West as a legacy of the Enlightenment. The Howard Zinn vision of the West was gestating for a long time, but it was midwifed by Hitler.
When I get depressed by the way Western civilization is, seemingly needlessly, self-destructing, I find some comfort in my belief that in the very long run, the relentless drive within all forms of life towards excellence will triumph one way or another. It may, and probably will, mean the end of our civilization, but our civilization was infected by or built on a premise – equality – that is contrary to life. Life is not built on equality; it’s built on a relentless drive towards fitness, towards conquest and expansion, towards excellence. The more excellent always ends up triumphing eventually, and excellence is measured in fitness for life as it actually exists, not as we might dream it “should” be.
So, yes, our faulty civilization with its fatal “equality above all else” flaw will collapse, but what survives will be raw excellence – even if that doesn’t include me , and even if it takes a thousand or ten thousand years of more mistakes cascading from this gigantic mistake. In the big picture, this is just another lesson being learned, another way NOT to organize a civilization.
I would agree that “speaking up” is a prerequisite; but I don’t think it’s “the only thing that changes it”. Plenty of people are already speaking up. But, admittedly, words are cheap. Necessary — but not sufficient.
In the long run, I think the only viable alternative to physical strife is an education renaissance. Let’s face it — the masses are ignorant asses. How can you explain anything of consequence to anybody for whom reading a history book is an impossible chore?
Unfortunately, many, if not most, of the politically powerful have a vested interest in treating the masses like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Wherefore art thou, Honest Abe?
Why an Abraham Lincoln–because we need morecentralized power in Washington D.C.?
At this point, it would take a Pinochet or a Franco, and that is not going to happen either. So I think what you will eventually see is the Real Money will purchase their own civil order in response to increasing State dysfunction. And if you and I are lucky, we can afford the rents necessary to live under their aegis. I think the future is looking neo-feudal.
Why an Abraham Lincoln? Because the guy was a f*cking genius, that’s why.
Have you read his Gettysburg Address lately?
If anyone could save this America from destructive progressivism, it would be another Abraham Lincoln, if that is even possible in today’s sorry state of our society.