In 1968, the film Planet Of The Apes ended with the then-shocking shot of a half-submerged Statue of Liberty, revealing that the future dystopian world was none other than our own. The revelation has been part of Western consciousness for quite some time. The Bible continuously warns that if the Land does not have its Sabbaths, the Lord will impose them. It is a fixture of Western consciousness that some day the West, like every other civilisation, will die.
Every Victorian reader understood allusions to The New Zealander, a rhetorical figure in Thomas Macaulay’s 1840 essay. He was a traveller to a long-vanished civilisation, and gazes, uncomprehendingly, on the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. At around the same time, Marx believed that capitalism was a necessary stage of decay, from which communism could come into being. We see his prediction proved correct — in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela and, now, in the United States. But his vision was of decay-into-perfection; rather than into chaos, savagery and dissolution, which we see to be the case.
Marx stopped too soon in his equation. For if force was necessary to replace Capitalism with Communism, it would be necessary to ensure its continuation. Tsar Nicholas was replaced by Stalin, and Batista by Castro; the Philosopher King was not on the ballots as there were no ballots. The people were “saved” through the imposition of a force — no less necessary after their unconvinced salvation.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the firemen of the future exist to set fire to books, the reading or possession of which is a crime. Books are, today, being censored and banned by destructive forces, and, soon, these will take to their burning, as, today, they burn flags. The joy of their licensed rage is augmented by their unity with a zeitgeist, or time-spirit.
We might understand this as an era-specific fashion that runs in a cycle. But, from a greater remove, the zeitgeist can be seen as a progression. Here, however the quiddities of politics or fashion appear as the result of human reason, civilisation, being an organism, evolves towards its own death and dissolution.
Some day we will be gone, and the monuments we have built will be one with those we have desecrated. Even those books which might remain will eventually share the fate of the little plastic phones. How are we to behave while we’re here? It’s no wonder that our operating manual, or quick-start guide, the Bible, is denigrated by anarchists and dismissed as absurd by intellectuals. They are both on the same team, unconsciously in the service of acceleration.
Walter Scott wrote that the sword outwears the sheath, as the heart outwears the breast, and all that lives must breathe, and love itself take rest; and our contemporary, Tom Ropelewski similarly concluded his 1990 film Madhouse, with Kirstie Alley’s “after the nuclear war, only two things will remain, cockroaches and houseguests”.
A quarter of a century later, Seattle is now distributing hard drugs and paraphernalia gratis, to any requesting them. New York is importing illegal immigrants and housing them in hotels, and the Governor of California wants to pay “unemployment benefits” to illegal immigrants.
Future generations, with a kibbitzer’s interest in our history, will opine we were as foolish, and intermittently fortunate, as any other lost civilisation: we will be understood as one not only with Nineveh and Tyre, but with the hunter-gatherers of the Pacific Northwest, doing the best we could while contending not only with Nature and depredations, but with our own nature.
Will our Millennial folly be considered more savage than the Aztecs’ yearly slaughter of 20,000 victims; our economics more absurd than the Haida’s destruction of surplus through the immolations of the Potlach? Will our genital mutilation of children be seen as less savage than the clitoridectomies of Islam or the sub-incision of African tribes? The Left’s ferocious proclamation of the primacy of abortion, of transsexualism, and of non-procreation is the propitiatory prayer: “I will forgo my right to progeny: but spare me.” Their prayer is the acknowledgement that something is terribly wrong.
People in a state of panic (as opposed to mere “fear”) will search for a bearable proximate cause. To Leftist Israelis, it is not the savagery of Iran and the world’s rediscovery of Jew-hatred, it’s Netanyahu; to the American Liberal, it’s not the decay of the cities, but Trump. To the world-at-large, it’s the Jews. The abused child always sides with the abused against the passive parent, as the passive parent has proved him or herself too weak or unwilling to offer the child protection.
The dying civilisation, like the dying individual, will display symptoms consistent with those of its predecessors in decline. Machiavelli writes that the cure of a disease in its preliminary stages would be simple if a diagnosis could be correctly made; but when the disease progresses sufficiently to have “declared itself”, the cure is difficult.
Chicken Little screamed: “The sky is falling, run for your lives!” All school children delighted in the idiocy of her claim, inspired by a pinecone falling on her head; more adult appreciation is that, if in fact it were falling, there would be no point in flight.
Today, we are not simply witnessing, but participating in a civilisational displacement. We are too close to understand it easily, save as the interplay of comprehensible forces: Left vs Right; Islam vs Christianity; Communism vs Capitalism. The attendant allegiances and enthusiasms will be as puzzling to future scholars as the internecine wars of Christianity, over points of doctrine, and Greta Thunberg’s historic truancy as a “response to climate change” understood as analgesic: treating intellectual challenges by curtailing education.
What is the “cure” for our civilisational decline? There is no “cure”, for it is an organic progression. We can no more return to the healthy unionised working class of American Industry of the Fifties than we can to the slash and burn cultivation techniques of the Australian Aboriginals.
We may prognosticate more clearly after the coming election, in which the conservatives propose a return to prosperity and peace, and the liberals “joy”. The West will die at some point, but it need not do so on November 6. It might even continue in some revised but operable and recognisable form — in a rededication to the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian writ and ethics which inspire it.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/