From our reader and commenter “Whitewall” comes a link to an excellent piece by Richard Fernandez: a review of Michael Walsh’s new book, The Fiery Angel. (Mr. Walsh’s previous book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, is excellent, and I recommend it to you all.)
What struck me in particular as I read Mr. Fernandez’s review was a fantastic metaphor for the self-destruction of high Western culture (which was brought about, as I have argued often in these pages, by the unstoppably corrosive effect of the radical skepsis bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment — of which modern secularism, and the post-modernist rejection of objective reality, are merely late-stage symptoms). Metaphors, which can illuminate deep isomorphisms between things we understand well and things we don’t, are a tremendous help in making sense of the world, and this is a startlingly good one.
We read:
No one in the captured institutions was prepared for malfunctions displaying the missing-dependency error message. Yet every system, including the one the Left paradoxically relies upon to keep its programs in clover, depends on a non-obvious chain of libraries going all the way down to the foundation. Deleting God, patriotism, heroic myths and taboos and all the “useless stuff” from Western culture turns out to be as harmless as navigating to the system folder (like C:\Windows\System32), “selecting all,” and pressing delete.
That’s brilliant. Read Mr. Fernandez’s article here.