The Uncivilizing Revolution of The West

The Autonomist ^ | 05/16/07 | Reginal Direhammer

[Blind Eye Jones]

Yes, Bloom said the 50s were a high point. But you would never think that if you saw the movie Pleasantville.

[grey_whiskers]

Hank!!! I was just wondering what you had done with yourself.

Thanks for posting this most excellent piece.

Cheers!

[Billthedrill]

If you could bring someone from the 1950s into today's world, they also would not recognize it; they would, in fact, be horrified.

Well, no, not exactly, and I speak as someone who very clearly remembers the 1950's. That individual might well be horrified, but it would be at the world that he or she helped build. And what would be horrifying about it would be as much the success as the failure - the success of winning an unwinnable Cold War and the moral failure attendant with the widespread condemnation of the Western mores that went along with that.

I am inclined to agree with the author's six main precepts and enjoyed reading them. The belief in an objective reality especially is most unfashionable and is, in fact, the bedrock of many disparate schools of Western philosophy - as that old bully Samuel Johnson said when he kicked the rock, "I refute it thus!" And so he did.

But it must be understood that what is loosely termed the culture of the West contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction and rebirth. That is not at all an unhealthy thing but it is inherently unstable and the uncertainties it promises are anathema to those who hope, or think they do, for a stable, "peaceful" society that promises only the known at the price of irreparable and stupefying stagnation. That is the siren song of Marxism and it simply isn't going to happen.

Politics and philosophy are fields that are particularly subject to popular fads, enthusiasmes in that apt but untranslatable French term. I would class both multiculturalism and Postmodernism respectively in those roles, and while such enthusiasmes appear overwhelmingly convincing to their adherents they fade in time to the antics of children viewed by amused adults. That does not make them harmless. Good people went to the guillotine under them in the eighteenth century and to the gas chamber and the Gulag in the twentieth.

And so one must take them seriously while deploring them and pitying their earnest followers. These ideas kill as children kill - carelessly, casually, and with utter amorality. There are those who find that attractive, even romantic. These are, in my opinion, lost souls.