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THE DYSPHORIA OF MODERN TIMES
by
VINCENT McCAFFREY
__________________________________________________________________
Vincent
McCaffrey is a novelist and bookseller. Visit his website
at www.vincentmccaffrey.com.
The anxiety
and depression common in Western countries with abundant
time for self-appraisal, feeds on itself. Europe and the
far-flung outposts of the British Empire, including America,
have embraced postmodernism, thus replacing 2,000 years
of rigorously considered philosophy and layered moral values
with 100 years of dissipation and debauchery, and with that
infection have made themselves most susceptible to socialism.
Poetry and its
revelation of our world has been replaced by word games.
The novel, an almost magical device for opening the mind
of one human being to the lives of others, has been replaced
by a tepid literature of self-doubt, complaint and blame.
Theater has become an endless display of our shortcomings.
The manifest fine arts, representing 4,000 years of critical
self-awareness and an expression of the human spirit beyond
mere words, has been reduced to the mimicry of a political
formula.
To ask why,
or how, this could happen is to ignore the obvious. The
old virus of socialism offered no enlightenment to the rest
of the world because it was already omnipresent in their
lives. But using the vehicle of postmodernism, the West
was easy pickings at a time when it was triumphant, having
quit on itself prematurely to enjoy the spoils. The often-cited
example of the Roman Empire is not misplaced. But dissolution
such as this had also happened to the Persian, Byzantine,
Han, Tang, Kushan, Mongol, and lest we forget, the Egyptian
empire of Ozymandias. The difference now is only that this
is us. And we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.
We are responsible. Any hope of salvation must come from
our own sinews, our own will, to be reclaimed with our own
purpose.
The lie of postmodernism
is in its very name -- it is neither ‘post’
nor ‘modern.’ It is parasitic. Its unabashed
success is primarily due to the wealth of its host. Western
culture was fat. With a loss of faith amplified by war in
the 20th century, science and politics had replaced religion
and philosophy. Science, understood only as a methodology,
had little resistance to any who used it. Politics, on the
other hand, was its own reward. If conducted on its own
terms, the practical result of promising anything to achieve
a goal while safely beyond any restrictive philosophical
framework, would win every time it was tried.
Religion --
primarily Christianity, also decadent with wealth -- failed
most miserably to minister to this sickness, even to blaming
the victim, or at least not holding the perpetrator responsible
for his actions, in a sort of self-destructive flagellation
of guilt, while spreading that secular doctrine rather than
its own, and offering no alternative to the powerless. Moreover,
as this rising cohort of the underclass found itself suddenly
free of unrelenting labour by the natural mechanisms of
Western society and the so-called capitalism thus labeled
by its enemies, it was able to organize and become a viable
political entity in its own right.
The irony of
postmodernism, a critical metaphysics which dwells on irony
for sustenance, is that there is ‘no there there.’
Woven from an imitation fabric of language and pose, it
was a perfect vehicle for a political philosophy that disparaged
its victims as a means of bullying them. It has nothing
to replace what it disparages or belittles, and cannot recreate
an original of anything because it lacks the DNA -- as if
a photograph of a mother were to be used to replace your
mother. The photographs were easy to reproduce. Mothers
were not. Especially so in an age that had reduced motherhood
itself to a political act.
Any resistance,
much less a rebellion against such an ancient and pervasive
evil as socialism, will not succeed by means of words alone.
Yet without the words, resistance is truly futile. There
is a treasury of great works from which we can still draw
inspiration. Our enemies know this and that is why their
most vigorous efforts today are directed toward language,
grammar and the books themselves. Any successful resistance
must begin there. The schools and the libraries are already
in their hands. But something can be done. The future is
in yours.
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