When one surveys the current culture of the West, one
can only conclude that it flows from the broken mind of
man, that is, Western man. For we are now, with few exceptions,
a broken people, and our culture reflects the fractured
symmetry of what we once felt as a reasonably cohesive
and unified way of being in the world, a mode of largely
unformulated understandings experienced as normal.
The sense
of the normal has now become unnatural — destabilized,
confused, incoherent, bizarre, even grotesque. This is
why our future as a nation and, in a greater supervening
perspective, as a civilization has grown increasingly
precarious.
Those who
have eyes to see need only look to behold a political
estate whose complete ineptitude is eclipsed only by its
endemic venality, an expert class that earns its prerogatives
by being wrong about mainly everything, a caste of remote,
self-interested, and profoundly ignorant government bureaucrats,
a media apparat that has offered what is left
of its tattered soul to a remunerating master and a prevailing
orthodoxy, an intellectual clerisy that has sold its cultural
integrity to the allurements of power and privilege, a
medical profession that has colluded with a corrupt viral
industry, and a majority public indifferent to the disaster
that awaits it.
What, then,
are our options? Will the cashiering of a given tyrannical
leader, the election of a potential savior, the collapse
of a particular destructive ideology in the face of unforgiving
reality — would such eventualities reverse the suicidal
course on which culture and nation have embarked? The
drift toward critical denouement, toward a life among
the ruins, seems inexorable. Its ETA cannot be precisely
determined, but it is, on the historical calendar, uncomfortably
close.
If this is
so, there is, perhaps, a scintilla of consolation. What
can’t be stopped may at least be slowed. I suspect
that the best we can then hope for is a stay of execution.
Several years ago, the noted psycholinguist and educationalist
Frank Smith delivered a lecture at Brigham Young University,
where I was guesting, in which he argued that the cultural
Titanic was foundering and we should all jump ship. The
problem, I countered, so far as I could see, was that
there was nowhere to jump. Everything is the Titanic.
The Titanic is the Titanic. The lifeboats are the Titanic.
The sea is the Titanic. The land is the Titanic. Even
the iceberg is the Titanic. Perhaps a thin spit of coastline,
a promontory or an island of reason, might gradually emerge
from the turbulence — what Charles Eisenstein calls
“communities of sanity” — but meanwhile
the only option is to keep the pumps working, so to speak.
Better to go down tomorrow than today. The day after tomorrow
is even better.
This does
not mean we should give up and prostrate ourselves on
a sick man’s couch, waiting despairingly for the
end. Those whose minds are still sound struggle to defer
what cannot be evaded. We elect the right leaders. We
work to protect, as best we can, the democratic process.
We continue to speak out. We write articles, essays, and
books. We create alternative media of communication and
commentary. We organize in protest and do not back down.
We seek to repair, so far as possible, an educational
system in complete disarray, recognizing that while China
teaches its kids calculus, our educators teach our kids
gender pronouns. We don’t concede. We preserve our
moral dignity in the face of an onslaught of derision,
hatred, and censorship. We strive against the odds, however
formidable.
Ultimately,
we will have to find ways to survive the new and repressive
dispensation that is gathering, with its “bullying,
moralism, and interest-group politics” and its “sustained
assault against the private-sector middles class and the
ideals of self-government,” in the words of Fred
Siegal from his prescient The Revolt Against the Masses.
It is rather too early to travel to Mars with Elon Musk,
but there are still small enclaves off the pervasive grid
of corruption and madness, jurisdictions — counties,
states, and countries — here and there that remain
socially and economically livable. Populist revolts seem
promising, but they are insecure phenomena. Meanwhile,
we continue to work within the system via elections, occasional
court judgments, and legislative procedures where feasible
even though, as Mattias Desmet says in The Psychology
of Totalitarianism, we cannot in the long run “remediate”
the “current cultural impasse” on its own
terms.
Nonetheless,
those of us who hold to our traditions remain clear-eyed
and resolute. We are not poet T.S. Eliot’s straw
effigies and “hollow men” wandering among
the “broken columns” of the “twilight
kingdom.” We seek to keep nation and civilization
— or at any rate, pockets of good sense —
going for as long as we can in spite of what we know.
We tilt against wind turbines. This is neither comforting
nor cause for celebration, but it is, I am convinced,
as close to the truth as we can get. As Catholic philosopher
William Kilpatrick writes, the signs are all around us
that “a stupid and gullible generation such as the
one we live in” is herding toward history’s
abattoir. America’s proxy war in Ukraine that may
conceivably lead to nuclear annihilation is another sign
of the collapse of reason that defines the age.
For the near-total
collapse of reason is the real pandemic of our time. Raising
questions against establishment views and cultural shibboleths
is the kiss of death for those who wish to pursue their
careers or live their lives independently and peacefully.
Duke University biology professor John Staddon persuasively
argues in his recent Science in an Age of Unreason
that it is not only the scientific community that is being
polluted by the accepted views of the age—political
correctness, politicized passions, the diversity-inclusion-equity
syndrome, self-promotion over factual research, white
fragility and identity criteria. Unreason is spreading
throughout the entire culture, warping every profession
and compromising all the walks of life. The prognosis
does not inspire confidence in the likelihood of cultural
longevity, let alone the world we have far too long taken
for granted.
Perhaps the
worst may be mitigated for a time, but we should not deceive
ourselves into believing that we are fighting to win against
the forces of dereliction since no decisive victory is
now to be expected. We are fighting to lose another day,
in order to delay a bitter destiny while we plan for alternatives.
At best, we may achieve a partial victory in preparing
the ground for surrogate spaces, scattered regions where
the Western mind is still improbably intact, where the
remnant of a great civilization and its originary mind
may yet be preserved.
Such may be
the only viable response to the challenge which confronts
us: working within the zeitgeist to prolong what remains
to us while at the same time seeding democratic colonies
where we may conceivably conserve a basis for our moral
and intellectual survival. That, it now appears, is our
condition.
