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IS WESTERN CIV ON THE WAY OUT?
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random
Walks). His editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials
of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His
latest book is Notes
from a Derelict Culture. A CD of his original
songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
When a civilization decides it wants to destroy itself,
it seems there is no stopping it. As Toynbee wisely said,
civilizations do not die of murder but of suicide. It
is in its way a perversely exhilarating spectacle: not
many get to see in their lifetime a civilization coming
to pieces before their very eyes, like a star going supernova.
But it is also, and principally, a tragic spectacle, for
this is the detritus we leave our children. In On
the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy Through
an Age of Unreason, Irish historian Conor Cruise
O’Brien generously gives us until the third century
of our millennium. He may be wrong. The momentum toward
self-destruction proceeds slowly, gradually accumulating
velocity until a moment arrives when the collapse appears
to happen overnight. As John of Patmos warns in Revelation
(18:10), “for in one hour is thy judgment come.”
The omens
are all around us and are unmistakable. Nations institute
crippling global warming policies, restricting travel
and imposing crushing carbon levies, when all the signs
indicate an impending period of global cooling. The Green
crusade with its arsenal of wind turbines and solar arrays
has devasted the reliable energy sector, promising exorbitant
costs, power brownouts, and even colder winters. The woke
and social-justice movements double down on their gender-fluidity
compulsion that flies in the face of biological fact.
The feminist psychosis is poisoning the relation between
the sexes and destroying the family. The press has abdicated
its function of reporting the news and become the propaganda
arm of increasingly repressive governments. The education
establishment from K-12 to postgraduate study has grown
decadent, politically partisan, and likely unsalvageable.
Medical fascism is on the march. The absurd and counter-productive
pandemic mandates have led to soaring unemployment, school
closures, the shuttering of businesses, excess deaths,
social division, and devastated economies, turning everyday
life into a deranged parody of itself. The daftness of
these measures defies understanding.
In such times
of general distress, societal upheaval, intellectual vacancy,
worldwide plague, and widespread hysteria amounting to
a kind of universal madness, one is tempted to turn again
to the Book of Revelation with its lurid imagery
and prophetic imprecation—even if one is not a believer.
The fit between the ancient book and the contemporary
scene is too close for comfort. Is a divine prophecy about
to be fulfilled? One thinks also of the four beasts of
the prophet Daniel’s vision (Book of Daniel 7:1-28),
representing four mighty civilizations or empires: “they
had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged
for a season and time” (7:12). Civilizations rise
and fall and are always at the mercy of the irruption
of the bestial.
Indeed, as
many have observed, the sculpture of a winged beast recently
unveiled outside UN headquarters in New York, called “The
Guardian of International Peace and Security,” bears
a startling resemblance to the beast described in Revelation
(13:1-3) and Daniel (7:4-5). Of course, winged theriomorphic
statues are not unique and can be found in various cities
around the world—Madrid, Venice, Prague—but
the UN statue has the aura of the premonitory. Newsmax
magazine reports on the surprising number of Americans
who expect Christ’s return and examines the reasons
why many believe the Second Coming is imminent. As they
say, it’s in the air.
Or are we
merely witnessing the mechanics of a natural process?
Does the entropic principle in nature apply not only to
the physical cosmos but to human civilization as well?
Is entropy historical as well as cosmological? Does what
occurs at the molar level translate to the molecular?
Is a civilization only a human life writ large?
Such questions
abound. What can explain this deadly accumulation of factors—“evils”
some would call them—impinging in a perfect storm
of destructive forces at a unique moment in history? They
are, clearly, symptoms of a larger civilizational sickness.
Have we simply grown weary of sustaining the elaborate
and demanding social structure that we—or our predecessors,
rather—have so laboriously built over the centuries?
Have we grown too pampered and forgetful to assume the
labor of self-preservation? Or is it that, in a protracted
spasm of self-laceration, we have turned against a civilization—our
own—that has spent too heavily for our sentimental
tastes and attitudes in the necessary imperial work of
exploration and colonization? Is it absolution we crave
for our supposed “hegemonic” transgressions
in a final, morally inevitable Götterdämmerung?
Have we engaged in what Albert Camus in Resistance,
Rebellion, and Death called a “policy of expiation”
that can only mortgage our future?
There is
a disturbing poem by the German poet Gottfried Benn, entitled
Gesänge (“Songs”), written on the eve
of World War I, which expresses this pivotal moment in
the cultural life of a people when it feels itself overwhelmed
by the struggle of existence and craves instead the palliative
of ease, forgetfulness, and indifference, the surrendering
of will and ego:
O
dass wir Ururahnen wären.
Ein
Klümpchen Schleim in einem warmen Moor.
Leben
und Tod, Befruchten und Gebären
glitte
aus unseren stummen Säften vor.
(O
that we were our primal ancestors.
A
little clump of slime in a warm moor.
Then
life and death, insemination and birth
would
glide out of our dumb lymph.)
It is difficult
to disentangle the psychological and historical salients
at work in these orgies of renunciation, but it is also
hard to repress the suspicion that, at the barometric
levels of the cultural sensibility, we really do want
to die. The data at our disposal are manifold. The world
is equal to the sum of the information we have of it.
But one thing is certain in our own historical moment:
the news is not good.
The most damning
explanation of all would be that we are facing what is
irrevocable and foreordained, that we are casualties of
inexorable historical forces that thinkers and historians
like Polybius, Ibn Khaldun, Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee
spelled out for us, each in his own way elaborating a
cyclical theory of the rise and fall of civilizations.
Spengler’s notion of historical “contemporaneity”
involved not present contiguity among civilizations sharing
the calendar but “corresponding phases” and
“chronological parallels” over long tracts
of time. In this sense we would be contemporary with late
fourth century-early fifth century Rome, a civilization,
as Spengler writes, “los[ing] its desire to be,
and . . . wish[ing] itself out of the overlong daylight
and back into the darkness . . . ”
The momentous
question that now confronts us is whether civilizational
collapse, which cannot be halted, can nevertheless be
delayed owing to the restoration of the faculty of reason
in a significant minority of the population. Can a lucid
remnant manage to rise above the censorship regimes of
the digital platforms, intelligence agencies, health bureaucracies,
and mob vigilantism? In short, can we learn to think again?
As poet and author James Sales writes in the provocative
essay How Dante Provokes Thinking, “unless we get
serious about understanding what great thinking looks
like—found in works by theologians, philosophers,
writers, and poets—we as a civilization are going
to fall. The falling will be into the stealth ideologies—equality
[he means equity], diversity, woke-ism—all underpinned
by a virulent form of Marxism, and the end of all true
values as we know and love them.”
The crisis
in which the West now finds itself is largely one of its
own making and is rooted primarily in the false relation
it has entered into with history. Its response to the
tangled exigencies of the contemporary world is grounded
in a willful and Procrustean tendency to mutilate and
reconfigure the past in such a way as to oversimplify
and deform the issues that confront and surround it. Many
Americans, especially those associated with the Left—East
coast intellectuals, West coast thespians, teachers’
unions, the University rabble, the Twitter pack, the Democrat
leadership, not to mention the putatively non-aligned
mainstream Churches—have reinterpreted moral bankruptcy
and political short-sightedness as advanced social thinking
and liberal high-mindedness. Such prodigies of cognitive
stupefaction are obviously true of the West in general.
What Camus
stigmatized as “the follies . . . to be found in
the habits and functioning of our intellectual and political
society” have borne their tainted fruit. A defunct
education apparatus; race hucksterism; guilt for past
faults that have been largely rectified; contempt for
a literate, scientific and highly advanced civilization
without rival in the historical ledger; and massive ignorance
of unprecedented accomplishment in all the domains of
thought and discovery are now the order of the day. As
Sales wrote, “so many people have now lost the ability
to think” that they fall in with the mindless memes
of political correctness, intersectional feminism, social
justice binaries, transgenderism, sexual depravity, trick
science, rampant virtue-signalling, and unrelieved sensuality
in place of analytic rigor.
The lesson
we might have learned by this time is that our distorted
view of Judeo-Christian civilization cannot serve as an
image of the good, as an ideal that can mold beneficially
both the present and the future, unless we also struggle
faithfully to preserve the traditions of cultural coherence
via a thorough and meticulous study of the annals and
muniments of the past. As William Butler Yeats wrote in
one of his greatest poems, Sailing to Byzantium:
Caught
in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments
of unageing intellect.
The signs
of cultural debasement and civilizational decline are
everywhere to be seen across the entire cultural spectrum
from small to large, from the stumbling hyphenation of
the word “like” in ordinary speech to irresponsible
gain-of-function research. The sorcerer’s apprentice
is sweeping us out of house and home. If Benn and Spengler
are right, and the Books of Revelation and Daniel are
indeed prophetic, there is no saving a civilization that
has surrendered its informing principles of intellectual
vitality and belief in itself and that has lost the will
to survive. Surely, if our knowledge of history—of
who we are—and the inclination toward reason remain
incomplete or defective, we can only expect to suffer
what we have imprudently attempted to remake. Any hope
of at least deferring the inevitable resides in the efforts
of a brave and enlightened cultural residue, currently
under prolonged and unappeasable attack by the befuddled
heirs of a sustaining yet despised civilization.
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