Motus Mentis

I’ve just run across a glum and deeply reactionary essay by Gregory Hood, written in November of 2014, on the spiritual exhaustion of the West, and the durable appeal of Islam. It examines four possible foundations for the future of our civilization: Christianity, paganism, techno-liberalism, and submission to Islam.

Some excerpts:

To most people, being a minority is alienating–even if no one is specifically insulting you, you recognize you exist at the sufferance of someone else. However, to many liberal Whites, this feeling comes as a relief. In a kind of parody of Christianity, powerlessness constitutes a certain moral authority because it removes the possibility that you can inadvertently oppress someone else…

…Lawrence Auster touched on a central reality of today’s Western Man in that dhimmitude is actually a pleasurable idea to many liberals because it would allow them to set down the burden of Whiteness. Christianity may have told Western Man that he was “born sick, and commanded to be well,’ but it at least provided an answer in the grace of Jesus or the sacraments of the Church. In contrast, leftism tells Western Man that he is inherently sinful (or “privileged’) and that there is nothing he can do to escape from it except seek collective annihilation or submission.

On religion:

At the risk of sinking into mysticism, one explanation for religion is that it is a kind of “race consciousness’ or evolutionary adaptation in its own right.

Almost certainly true, in my opinion; see my own old posts Is Secularism Maladaptive? and One God Further.

On Islam:

Islam is Nature’s solution. Like the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded, it is Nature’s way of saying that “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.’ It is stultifying, depressing, and tyrannical. It is an enemy of real culture, with the most militant variations smashing the tombs and shrines not only of other religious traditions, but of their own. Modern Wahhabism is funded by Western decadence, enabled by Western weakness, in many ways a product of Western postmodernism and self-hatred.

And lest what I say be misunderstood, it is obviously, laughably, and comically false. It is sustained by the protective cordon it has created around criticism. Yet believing that a pedophiliac illiterate transcribed the literal word of God still makes more sense than believing all men are created equal. Islam’s refusal to allow critical analysis of itself is a sign of strength, not weakness.

More importantly, there is already a sense among both Western progressives and conservatives that Islam is the future for European civilization.

The essay concludes on this grim note:

We fight in defiance of this future. Yet we must remember the desperation of our situation to lend strength to our arms and urgency to our actions.

Read the whole thing here.