THE WEAKNESS OF THE WEST
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity. His editorials appear regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
and Pajamas
Media. He
speaks about his latest book, Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books), at frontpage.com.
In
a recent colloquium at the National Archives in Ottawa on the
subject of multiculturalism and the advancing subversion of
the West, the question arose as to why the most advanced and
preeminent civilization the world has ever seen appears to be
imploding. It is in every respect stronger than its enemies
and competitors and yet is clearly faltering, insecure in its
purposes, given to appeasement and self-doubt, and dismissive
of its own unmatchable history. Many reasons have been put forward
for what is plainly an inward decline, from the natural inevitability
of civilizational decay to the loss of religious faith and moral
conviction to the apathy and narcissism of a flaccid and materially
pampered citizenry.
Muslim
author Salim Mansur, whose new book Delectable Lie
was the focus of the discussion, steered a different tack, suggesting
that our fate might be explained by two iconic figures from
literature, Oedipus and Hamlet. This is a provocative insight
that needs to be unpacked. Both are royal leaders, one a king
and the other a prince in succession to the throne. Both wish
to purge their kingdoms of corruption, sickness, and the scourge
of illegitimacy. Both are driven to find and expose a buried
truth so that the realm may be healed and purified.
Herein
lies the problem and the paradox, for in seeking to disinter
what is hidden or suppressed, both Oedipus and Hamlet in their
diverse ways bring disaster upon themselves, one as a result
of a relentless pursuit and the other owing to relentless reflection.
One acts and the other fails to act, but the consequences are
no less destructive: blindness and death.
If
I understand him aright, Mansur’s point is that the central
strength of Western civilization is also its attendant weakness,
namely, contradictory as this may initially sound, the fostering
of critical thought. The valorizing of the concept of truth
and the search to discover it rather than adhere to a dogmatic
authority which declares without evidence what a people are
to believe and to accept as indisputable — or in a current
formulation, “the science is settled” — represents
the best that civilization has to offer. The conflict between
truth and doctrine is, of course, inherent in Western civilization,
but the steady progression, despite innumerable setbacks, toward
the vision of the European Enlightenment and the legacy it bequeathed
to the modern age was ultimately unstoppable. The problem is
that the search for truth can — and does — issue
in calamitous revelations, as with Oedipus, or in prolonged
introspection leading to inaction, as with Hamlet.
If
we examine the intellectual and political history of the West
from the Enlightenment to the present day, it becomes obvious
that Mansur’s theory is persuasive. The Oedipal pursuit
of truth conducted by some of the celebrated philosophical minds
in the West has led to the destabilizing and ironic conclusion
that there is no such thing as “truth.” The pivotal
tenet of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of
Morals, the source of the postmodern movement in contemporary
academic thought and scholarship, is that “there are no
facts, only interpretation.” In What Is History,
E.H. Carr defines the study and writing of history as a “hard
core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.”
French post-structuralist Michel Foucault, in works like The
Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge,
claims that what we call truth is only the expression of dominant
power relations that control the cultural semiotic, or “episteme.”
In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida, the founder of
the “Deconstructive” school of thought, which has
infected the curriculum of the Humanities in European and American
universities, notoriously argued that “origins”
are infinitely recessive and that words appeal not to facts
but to other words—what he designates as différance,
suggesting both deferral and difference. His colleague, the
Belgian scholar Paul de Man whose Allegories of Reading
has had an equally deleterious affect on intellectual life,
developed the notion of “rhetorical slippage,” the
imp that inhabits language and sees to it that we can never
say what we mean or even determine what we mean in the first
place.
These
are only a few of the names among the burgeoning caste of iconoclasts,
schismatics, deconstructors, nihilists, post-structuralists,
post-modernists and post-whateverites who have embarked on a
campaign to undo the heritage of Western culture. This revisionist
movement has been massively influential and, indeed, instrumental
in preparing the way for the plague of cultural relativism from
which we suffer today. Oblivious to the inconsistency intrinsic
to such thought—that their argument is invalidated by
the very position they have adopted respecting truth claims—these
anti-cognitive guerrillas have nonetheless distorted a fundamental
element of Western thinking: that truth is discernible. The
Oedipal search for truth has paradoxically undermined and eviscerated
the cultural investment in the epistemological quest for truth
itself and those who have sought the grail will find themselves
holding a Styrofoam cup. A virtue has become a vice.
A similar
result flows from what we might term the Hamletic inquiry into
the “problem” of truth, which differs from the Oedipal
enterprise in that Hamlet is more preoccupied with the action
to be taken in the wake of his conclusions. Once the truth is
discovered—Hamlet is no relativist—how is one to
proceed? Is violent intervention called for? Or protracted diplomacy?
Or continued investigation to ascertain if the “truth”
conceals yet more intricacies that must be isolated, turned
over and over, examined for minute distinctions that require
yet further study before settling upon a course of action? The
outcome is that there is no outcome but only more reflection
and intellectual stasis—until the moment arrives when
it is too late to respond effectively to a growing peril or
an imminent disaster.
We
can observe this access of dysfunctional inertia, this phlegmatism
of the mind, conspicuously at work in our politicians and diplomats,
who cannot bring themselves to determine upon a sensible, coherent
and effective mode of action in the face of pressing complexities.
Admittedly, they are sometimes capable of reacting, but their
reactions resemble reflex gesticulations or autonomic responses
that generally make things worse. The American president lunging
into Egypt and Libya is a perfect example of such immediate
buffoonery. What we note on such occasions is the glaring absence
of thought.
For
the most part, however, our leaders are like lower-class Hamlets,
the proletarians of impotent rumination. Unable to decide upon
a rational and meaningful reply to unfolding events, they continue
either to vacillate or to remain numb and torpid, engaging in
one or another form of self-justifying evasion. More committees
must be struck, more “talks” must be held, more
time is needed, and more “resolutions” must be compiled
and passed whose words die on the page and vanish unmourned.
Hamlet, of course, said it best:
And
William Blake crystallized the notion in The Proverbs of Hell:
“He who desires and acts not, breeds pestilence.”
The
West now finds itself the victim of its own essential and defining
quality as a civilization. Unlike the civilizations of the Orient,
Western thought at its best and most characteristic is engaged
in the noble adventure to seek out truth, which accounts for
the major scientific breakthroughs of the modern era, a stellar
literature and grand historiographic projects that attempt to
probe and comprehend the vast currents of world events. In the
course of time the quest inexorably begins to undermine its
own foundations, finding that truth is asymptotic, ultimately
inaccessible or even non-existent on the one hand, or on the
other, that it demands ever-prolonged investigation either because
it is insolubly complex or because the seeker subjectively fears
the consequences it entails.
The
result is a kind of intellectual embolism, a clotting of the
arteries of thought. The modern Oedipus concludes that the truth
is that there is no truth—this is the nowhere land his
inquiries have taken him to. His conduct is thus based on whim,
appetite, fantasy or ungrounded hope and usually culminates
in disaster. The modern Hamlet refrains from proceeding in order
to avoid compromising himself or losing the perquisites he may
have to surrender by committing to a distinct and irreversible
course of action. His condition of lassitude or paralysis also
tends to culminate in disaster. And this is pretty well where
the West finds itself today, between the Scylla of nihilism
and the Charybdis of passivity.
If
I am not mistaken, this is the brunt of Mansur’s thesis.
And he would likely agree that, barring a far-reaching cultural
reorientation, there is no way out of this dilemma—in
the “true” etymological sense of the word. What
would be needed is a genuine educational revolution, a neo-Enlightenment,
in which the twin vices of hubris and lethargy are eradicated
and the twin virtues of humility and courage could take root:
the humility to acknowledge that there is such a thing as discernible
truth existing outside the narrow and confining circle of rampant
subjectivity, and the courage to act decisively when circumstances
leave us no plausible alternative.
Perhaps
only a profound crisis or debacle, a calamity we cannot escape
in which our lives and our society are threatened with collapse
or military defeat and we are brought to the brink—perhaps
only this can issue in the restoration of common sense and a
determination to retrieve what made us great. Perhaps only the
advent of catastrophe can rescue an Oedipus gone awry or a Hamlet
gone rogue, one having gone too far and the other not far enough.
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