This Is Your Civilization On Acid

In a post from January called Degeneracy Pressure, I remarked on the similarities between a collapsing star and a collapsing civilization. In both cases the differentiated parts of the system that once created stabilizing and uplifting forces have been transformed, by an irresistible alchemy, into a homogeneous, inert mass that exerts a crushing gravitational pressure. One by one, as catastrophic thresholds are crossed, the structural members of the system fail and give way, until at last nothing remains to give it form — and the star, or the civilization, falls in upon itself and winks out of existence.

Of course the analogy is not perfect. A star is a simple thing, really, and the course of its collapse is, in general terms, entirely determined by its mass and a few physical laws. A civilization is not so simple, but its collapse does, nevertheless, proceed in what we might call a ‘lawful’ way, and we can identify some of the principles at work.

For example:

One of the central mechanisms by which high civilizations seem always to fail is by declining birthrates among their most successful and intelligent classes — the very segment of the population that is necessary for carrying forward the civilization’s ever-increasing heritage of knowledge and culture, and for providing sufficient numbers of offspring in the succeeding generation having the qualities, both innate and acculturated, that are necessary to receive it.

To connect this to our stellar-collapse analogy, we could say that the mass of accumulated culture becomes too great for a shrinking structure to bear. But unlike the physical structure of a star, the scaffolding of civilization can fail not only by quantitative, numerical attrition of its load-bearing members, as described in the quoted passage, but also by their qualitative degeneration and decay.

Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially ‘memetic’ — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle. Moreover, the less a nation depends upon tangible factors such as territory and ethnic homogeneity for its stability, the more vulnerable it is to this hazard — and the modern, rapidly diversifying United States, which describes itself more and more as little more than “an idea” — is most vulnerable of all.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”: given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse.

Our reader and commenter Dom, in our most recent Open Thread, has linked to an article that illustrates this process.

12 Comments

  1. Whitewall says

    I read the Standard article and it is a clear road map for the SSM crowd. But I just am not one to accept sitting idly by and allowing evil to carry the day in my country. Those of us who oppose them can very well use some of the Leftist playbook. It will be necessary for us to refuse their law, we can demonstrate and riot and anything they have done. As the culture rot from these people begins to rise to where families can no longer keep their kids rinsed off from its smell, the day to day ruin that is called “normal” will gradually be rejected. As rejection grows, the SJW types will act out even more thus proving the need for their rejection by an increasingly aware and aroused population that knows something better came before all this.

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 8:42 am | Permalink
  2. Troy says

    Very perspicacious, Malcolm. Successful and intelligent classes are like the hydrogen that fuses creating both energy and higher-order matter (i.e. iron, oxygen, carbon). And what we have today is people not creating, inventing, or investing but living off the hydrocarbons of the creative class that preceded us. That is a finite amount and will, eventually, unless replaced, run out.

    This analogy is very apt and I think it complements your “(gas/thermodynamics) posts.

    My following opinion may be biased because I an an introvert. But it seems to me that the atomization of the US populace is almost complete. And what I man by that is that I don’t see Americans associate in groups any more. When I was a kid, there were Masons, Shriners, Jay Cees, the VFW, Demolay, Bowling Clubs, Church Clubs, Square Dancing clubs, etc. It seemed that it was common for Americans who had some sort of common interest to actually take the time to meet somewhere voluntarily and discuss or engage in said common interest. Other than sports teams, I don’t see Americans gathering for any sort of common purpose.

    When is the last time you’ve seen American congregate like this to protest anything?

    http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/20/asia/gallery/island-protest/index.html

    In a land where one supposedly has the right to peaceably assemble, yet you get out-assembled by the Chinese, then maybe something about your country is broken.

    My intuition tells me that this sort atomistic existence cannot sustain a civilization. An atomized population is easier to control. An atomized population cannot challenge those who hold the leash. Anything that require the effort and resources greater than that of what an individual can provide, is now left to Big Brother Government.

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 11:52 am | Permalink
  3. Malcolm says

    Right, Troy. You wrote:

    But it seems to me that the atomization of the US populace is almost complete. And what I man by that is that I don’t see Americans associate in groups any more.

    Quite so. If I may quote a recent post of my own:

    All of the erosive forces at work here – demographic displacement by poorly assimilated immigrants, low birthrates among cognitive elites, multiculturalism, galloping secularism, centralization of Federal power at the expense of local government, anti-traditionalism, hedonistic apathy, instutionalized disparagement of America’s history, mission, cultural heritage, and mythos, and behind it all the universal acid of radical doubt that is the “poison pill” of the Enlightenment itself – all of these things attack and corrode the horizontal ligatures of American civil society, leaving behind only an atomized population with no binding affinities save their vertical dependence upon a Federal leviathan that is, increasingly, the source of all guidance and blessings.

    What this means is that as these forces do their work, they weaken at every point our society’s structural integrity – even as the disintegrative influences, particularly the destructive action of demographic replacement, intensify. It follows naturally, then, that the pace of decay accelerates.

    In passing, we should note also that this horizontal ‘unbinding’ is, of course, a natural precursor for Fascism. The ancient symbol of the Fasces, from which the movement took its name, is a bundle of wooden rods, individually weak, but lashed together with an external binding. It is the perfect symbol for a society that has lost its organic, endogenous coherence, and so must be united by an artificial and external power.

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 12:51 pm | Permalink
  4. Whitewall says

    Malcolm, it is inevitable then? No hope? An intellectual exercise to understand and then accept? One way only and that is down?

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 1:04 pm | Permalink
  5. Malcolm says

    Malcolm, it is inevitable then?

    Yes, lately I think it is. As I said somewhere previously, I believe that we’ve crossed the “event horizon”, and so all future timelines for this civilization must pass through the onrushing singularity.

    That doesn’t mean there’s no hope, but I think that there are difficult times ahead.

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 4:16 pm | Permalink
  6. You may be right, Malcolm, but I also agree with Robert that everyone who gives a damn should keep on keeping on …

    “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
    By Dylan Thomas

    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
    Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
    Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    And you, my father, there on the sad height,
    Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 5:44 pm | Permalink
  7. Troy says

    Hopefully, when the collapse happens, it takes American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Kim Kardashian, and Deep Dish Pizza [shudders] with it.

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 7:39 pm | Permalink
  8. Malcolm says

    Henry, I am as concerned as anyone that the light not die. (And with a nod to Dylan Thomas, I’ve done a fair bit of raging around here, I think.)

    The decrepit apparatus we see disintegrating around us, however, is no longer any kind of lamp. If we really want to preserve the light, we must find a way to keep the flame alive during the coming storm.

    Posted June 15, 2015 at 9:58 pm | Permalink
  9. Whitewall says

    I learned about Communism fairly early in life. Some of my college life was spent at a university in far southeastern Austria, just an hour from Hungary and an hour from Yugoslavia. This was some 45 years ago. One of my professors was a Hungarian ex pat who had managed to get his family and then himself out of Budapest months before the Soviet tanks rolled in. In his company along with a few others, I went to East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and elsewhere behind the “iron curtain”. That was a dicey experience as we had to be careful of what we said in public and how we said it. Free speaking and even thinking could prove dangerous if actions followed that could be misinterpreted. It happened sometimes. This period was not long after the “Prague Spring” and while in Prague and elsewhere, we saw buildings where chunks of concrete were still missing from tank fire and from automatic weapons as well.

    I left that part of Europe and not long after, found myself in Latin America at a time when Marxist guerillas were infiltrating Guatemala and Cuban backed elements were doing the same in Nicaragua and El Salvador, giving way in time to the Sandinista forces backed by Cuba and Moscow. I will leave out a great deal here as it doesn’t need to be set down in print. Long story short, what I see in some elements of the radical Left in America today…their actions and tactics…are very familiar to me.

    It is from this perspective that I approach my opposition to them and everyone who sides with them. As with the Soviets, their own evil and immorality will eventually undo them. What is needed now is what was always needed with their predecessors…constant opposition, constant pressure. Goad them into acting out in their true nature. In a phrase I learned from an old Navy vet in Grenada, Nicaragua–“fight ’em ’til hell freezes and then fight ’em on ice” I did, I do and I will.

    Posted June 16, 2015 at 6:52 am | Permalink
  10. JK says

    Only … well the primary motivator for my putting this on the thread is, I note the author’s name as being Scalia, and no, I don’t know if any relation.

    Mark it down, people. June 2015 is when the human animal declared “who the hell are God and Science to dare tell us what the truth is, anyway?” Faith in one’s feelings trumps both. Individual feelings are become a personal truth, and personal truth is absolute and unassailable reality.

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2015/06/12/transrace-transsex-transabled-objective-truth-and-self-marginalization

    Posted June 16, 2015 at 11:58 am | Permalink
  11. “Henry, I am as concerned as anyone that the light not die.”

    I know you are, Malcolm.

    “I did, I do and I will.”

    Robert: Good on you, mate!

    “Individual feelings are become a personal truth, and personal truth is absolute and unassailable reality.”

    To which I respond:

    “Honor and good sense can only be lost. What you must fight for is Liberty.”
    – TheBigHenry’s Personal Truth

    “Truth is not assertion, and assertion is not proof.”
    – TheBigHenry’s Truth Predicate

    “Entitlementalia is the audacity of dopes.”
    – TheBigHenry’s Truth Axiom

    See more at: http://hl98.blogspot.com/p/older-posts_22.html#sthash.Kowje7OA.dpuf

    Posted June 16, 2015 at 12:54 pm | Permalink
  12. Troy says

    I am as concerned as anyone that the light not die

    Keep burning Malcom. To steal from Roger Waters…..

    Each small candle lights a corner of the dark
    When the wheel of pain stops turning
    And the branding iron stops burning
    When the children can be children
    When the desperados weaken
    When the tide rolls into greet them
    And the natural law of science
    Greets the humble and the mighty
    And the billion candles burning
    Lights the dark side of every human mind
    ….each small candle, lights a corner of the dark.

    Posted June 16, 2015 at 1:57 pm | Permalink

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