WHEN A CIVILIZATION GOES MAD
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.
Historian
Arnold Toynbee, who developed the theory of challenge-and-response
to account for the survivability of civilizations, has said
that great civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide
— by not meeting their challenges. A variation of this
historical insight may be phrased thus: When a civilization
or an empire feels inwardly that it is dying, or as Oswald Spengler
put it in The Decline of the West, that it wants to
die and “wishes itself into the darkness,” it begins
to go mad. Collective madness is a sure portent that an end
is approaching, that an axial transformation is about to occur,
that an entire worldview or cultural habitus is on the verge
of disintegration. It signals that a people has surrendered
to a mortal destiny, repudiated its sustaining tradition and
condign principles, and indeed has gone so far as to regard
the enemy at the gates as a form of salvation. “They were,
those people, a kind of solution,” say Constantine Cavafy’s
effete Romans in his celebrated poem, “Waiting for the
Barbarians.”
“Western
politics,” Raymond Ibrahim has said, discussing the befuddled
American and European outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood with
its clever, phased project for infiltrating Western society,
“have descended into idealism and fantasy.” The
same can be said about the state of the Western media. The media
are like the neural pathways establishing connections between
the various parts of the “world brain.” When they
begin to transmit false representations and misleading messages,
the response to world events is at best incongruous and at worst
drastically contorted. Both public sentiment and public policy
lurch about in a kind of no-man’s land, unable to make
contact with things as they are. Obviously, there will always
be a certain amount of ‘misfiring’ in the circuitry,
but when the entire system is warped and deformed, it becomes
next to impossible to properly “read” the empirical
world and react in appropriate ways. This creates a disjunction
between mind and reality, which is one definition of madness.
The
gradual but unrelenting insinuation of socialist and neo-Marxist
doctrine into the liberal West, after it has been reliably shown
to falter or collapse wherever it has been implemented, is still
another index of severe mental disconnect and maladjustment
to reality. Command economies are proven to be inefficient,
and the welfare state, predicated on the punitive taxation of
a shrinking and increasingly insolvent productive base to subsidize
ever-inflating entitlement programs, has been properly described
as a gigantic Ponzi scheme. Redistributionist and womb-to-tomb
security states, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, will eventually
run out of other people’s money. Nevertheless, this ideological
will-o’-the-wisp continues to be diligently pursued.
Or
consider the phenomenon of multiculturalism, as interpreted
and practiced in the West, which has led the countries that
have adopted it into a state of social and political bedlam.
Based, as Salim Mansur argues in his new book Delectable
Lie, “on the false idea — another official
lie, really — that all cultures are equal,” it is
progressively destroying “the West’s liberal democratic
heritage…by extending recognition to groups defined through
collective identity” and by elevating ethnicity over nationality.
As a consequence, under the glazed and permissive view of the
political class, the social fabric has critically unraveled,
no-go enclaves have sprung up in many cities, the specter of
homegrown terrorism haunts the public square, the structure
of Western law and normative conduct has come under threat,
and growing tension is the order of the day. Multiculturalism
has seen the heritage culture adapting to the demands, institutions,
and usages of immigrant societies rather than the other way
round.
Indeed,
the European Union has promulgated laws which militate against
the criticism of Islam on the grounds of hate speech. Politicians,
journalists, and ordinary citizens, like Geert Wilders, Lars
Hedegaard, and Elisabeth Sabbaditch-Wolff, respectively, have
found themselves prosecuted in court for warning their fellow
citizens against the infiltration of radical Islam into the
body politic. The same travesty is being repeated in Canada,
whose misnamed Human Rights Commissions, which are essentially
kangaroo courts that are not required to follow the rules of
evidence, have tried such forthright and respectable journalists
as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn for offending Muslim sensibilities.
If this is not madness, I don’t know what is.
Perhaps
the most conspicuous current example of collective delirium
was the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of
the United States. A man with no record of significant prior
achievement, who sat for twenty years in the pews of a dubious
church under the ministry of an anti-American and anti-Jewish,
hate-spewing pastor, who has associated with various compromised
individuals such as former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, antisemite
and black supremacist Louis Farrakhan, unrepentant former terrorist
Bill Ayers, pro-Islamist plutocrat Khalid al-Mansour, and corrupt
businessman Tony Rezko, whose political sentiments lie far to
the Left, whose dossier remains in large measure under seal
and whose verifiable biography is to a disturbing degree a matter
of conjecture — all this and much more should have alerted
the electorate to his gross unsuitability for office, prompted
the legacy media to investigate, and disqualified him immediately
from running for the Democratic nomination.
But
the emotional frenzy surrounding his candidacy ensured that
sanity would not prevail in outing a man whom Robert Kimball
has called “a typical hothouse product of our self-satisfied
liberal elite.” Kimball continues, with much justification,
that “tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer
because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s
malevolent stupidity.” The sequel has made it amply clear
to all but the partisan, the myopic, and the myriad barnacles
clinging to the ship of state and dependent on the largesse
of the Democratic Party that America has been gravely weakened
both domestically and abroad, and that it might not recover.
And yet it is entirely conceivable that Obama may be re-elected
to the most powerful office in the world. We recall it was not
only a besotted American electorate that hoisted him on its
collective shoulders; all Europe also went berserk over the
man. Even the Israelis treated him like royalty when he gave
his lying Sderot speech. If this is not madness, I don’t
know what is.
These
are only a few examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely,
of a civilization losing control of its future. The riots we
are currently witnessing in the UK, ignited to a great extent
by an entitlement culture that cannot meet the expectations
it has created, is only a modest symptom of what is coming down
the pike. The overall spectacle we are observing today —
the dramatic erosion of a sense of civic responsibility, the
nihilistic relativizing of moral principle, the insidious effects
of political correctness, the reluctance to deal adequately
with terrorism, the mounting hostility toward Jews and Israel,
the return of autocratic rule in Europe with the appointment
of authoritarian bureaucrats answerable to no one to the European
Parliament, the cosseting of Islam, the election of incompetents,
as in the U.S., as well as in Britain, Sweden, France, Spain,
Australia, and many other places — the list goes on and
on — are infallible harbingers of cultural and civilizational
decay. Good things come to an end, just like everything else.
It seems highly probable that the United States in particular
and Western civilization in general have begun to circle the
drain. The symptoms of an imperium in its dotage are unmistakable.
The
greatest civilization the world has ever known has lost confidence
in itself, infected by a plague of self-doubt and self-recrimination.
Having lost its bearings, it is no longer willing or able to
think clearly, to make difficult choices, to defend its patrimony
and resist demographic subversion, to accept the need for sacrifice,
to value the radiant catalogue of its triumphs and achievements
in art, science, technology, medicine, and statecraft, and,
with its declining birthrate, even to reproduce itself. This
is total madness. Further, the leftist “illiberal trajectory”
it has embarked upon, as Caroline Glick writes, has led to the
“bid to criminalize ideological opponents and justify
acts of terrorism,” a radical political shift that “will
destroy the liberal democratic foundations of Western civilization.”
Is
a return to psychic health at all possible? Do civilizations
convalesce? Can those who follow the maxim of the Roman emperor
and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations
— “the object of life is…to escape finding
oneself in the ranks of the insane” — influence
events for the better or at least defer the inevitable? Is the
writing on the wall erasable graffiti or is it, shall we say,
Biblically indelible?
Any
way we look at it, the prognosis is not encouraging. As Martin
Heidegger deposed in a 1966 Der Spiegel interview,
the only one of the philosopher’s utterances that keeps
on echoing, “Only a god can save us now.”
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