Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as
six impossible things before breakfast. - Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness - Allen Ginsberg, Howl
We live in an age
characterized by belief -- that is, belief in things that do not exist, belief
in complete figments of unanchored imagination, abstractions that have no
contact with or bearing on reality. Call it the age of irrealism, of pervasive
virtuality, of estrangement from the objective world.
Consider several popular
notions or beliefs, memes as they are sometimes called, which operate as
delusions erroneously confirmed as fact.
- There are more
than two sexes, biology notwithstanding. Indeed, there are “57 Varieties” of gender. Also,
in contradiction, gender is a “social construct.”
- Islam is a
“religion of peace.”
- The university
campus is aswarm with female victims of rape and sexual assault.
- The planet is
entering a carboniferous period as temperatures rise to unsustainable
levels.
- There is an
organized and historical campaign in the Judeo-Christian West of men
against women known as the “Patriarchy.”
- There is a vast
movement of White Supremacists ruthlessly oppressing those of other races
and creeds.
- America is
bedeviled by institutional racism.
- There is no such
thing as truth.
- Looting, vandalism
and physical violence are legitimate forms of civil protest.
- The value of
people derives from their membership in a group rather than from their
status as unique individuals.
We have entered the looking-glass world. None of these beliefs
correspond to reality, as every sensible person knows. They are to a
significant extent forms of what Angelo Codevilla calls “subrational
submission,” or conformity to the political diktats of a leftist ruling class,
but they transcend politics insofar as they are signs of a spreading cultural
malady -- the inability to think. Years of bad education, political
indoctrination, and welfare dependency have much to do with a demonstrable
decline in intelligence and basic knowledge -- a veritable contagion of
cultural illiteracy, to quote E.D. Hirsch.
I have spent more than ten
years writing books and articles examining and refuting each one of these
credos or presumptions with documented evidence. But common sense and a little
attention to the world should be more than enough to show how such convictions
are merely politically correct hallucinations -- fantasies and fallacies that
Sir Francis Bacon in the Novum Organum termed “Idols of the
Theater,” sophistries propounded by influential authorities and unquestioningly
accepted by the masses. The facts confute the memes.
- Biology has
determined that in the non-cellular world there are only males and females
and that survival of the species depends on procreation. Every sane person
knows this.
- Islam is a violent
and imperialistic religion and has been so since the early 7th Century.
Every informed person knows this.
- The university
campus is one of the safest spaces in the country and sexual assault is
rare. Every rational person knows this.
- There is no AGW
(Anthropogenic Global Warming), but there is climate change for the simple
reason that climate is change,
driven mainly by solar cycles. Moreover, carbon is an element
absolutely essential for plant
and crop growth. Every attentive person knows this.
- There is no
organized conspiracy in the Western world called the “Patriarchy” any more
than there is something called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There
are only men doing what they are supposed to do, including building a rich
and inventive civilization from which everyone profits. Every honest
person knows this.
- There is no such
beast as a widespread White Supremacy movement. Rather, apart from a
fringe” of “Aryan” persuasion which is of little to no importance, there
is a social group of “Caucasian” origin, emanating from Persia, the Middle
East, Greece, Rome and Europe, that has created the most advanced
civilization so far known to history. Every educated person knows this.
- America has become
one of the most racially tolerant nations in the world. A country in which
blacks are materially represented in the national community as
entertainers, sports figures, journalists, broadcasters, police chiefs,
surgeons, notable scholars, university presidents, corporate executives,
municipal mayors, state governors, members of Congress and Supreme Court
Justices, including a black President and two black Attorneys General, is
not a racist country. Every unbiased person knows this.
- To say that there
is no such thing as truth, as postmodernists claim, is a statement
intended to be true, belied by its own inherent paradox. Consequently,
there is such a thing as truth. Every sentient person knows this.
- Civil mayhem and
the destruction of property -- the sacking of people’s homes, shops and
livelihoods -- do not constitute acts of protest but acts of insurrection
and de facto domestic
terrorism. Every decent person knows this.
- A human being
feels, loves, suffers and dies as an individual, not as a social integer
or member of an identity group. Every thinking person knows this.
It is hard to understand how
a vast stratum of a population, whether classified as elites or as marginals,
arrives at a condition of virtuality. Is it a function of perpetual
dissatisfaction with things as they are, a tendency inherent in the very nature
of humanity? Is it the decision to profit, whether financially or in terms of
status and power, by redefining the reality of things -- a decision which gains
cultural momentum until it becomes a communal principle? Is mass derangement, as Melanie Phillips
(among many others) argues in The World Turned Upside Down, the product of the
rejection of Judeo-Christianity which underpinned both Western reason and its
moral code? “Concepts such as truth and justice,” she writes, “have been stood
on their heads, with the result that irrationality and perversity are now
conspicuous in public life.” Thus, “objectivity has been replaced in large
measure by ideology.”
Or is the descent into civic
dotage a function of the adage: “those whom the gods would destroy they first
make mad,” as Longfellow in The Masque of Pandora readapted the famous
verses from Sophocles’ Antigone.[i] In
other words, have we in the privileged West become so pampered and complacent
and arrogant and weak that the gods -- or the force of history -- are driving
us to our own eclipse?
This is where the ancient
doctrine of anacyclosis comes
in. Historians as various as Polybius, Cicero, Vico, Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee hold that
civilizations are labile and tend to traverse the natural span of birth, youth,
maturity, senescence and dissolution, like human beings writ large. According
to this doctrine, we would now be in the stage of senescence, if not senility,
incapable of recognizing what stands before us and contracting with phantoms
and projections rather than with objective facts and verifiable data. Is the
translation of a subjective fiction into a counterfeit of objective reality a
symptom of a culture in the last throes of its historical trajectory?
The question is moot. How
long can a post-truth culture be expected to survive, a culture in which
language has been so debased that the valid nature of things cannot be named?
As Venezuelan poet and author Fernando Baez writes in A Universal History of the Destruction
of Books, “our souls persist only through language.” But when language
is systematically used
to be factually incorrect -- Bacon’s “Idols of the Marketplace” -- when words
bear false significance and, deployed as substitutes for true ideas, are
cemented in public and institutional discourse, our souls wither, as do the
culture and the nation.
Whatever the explanation may
be, we have created a kind of Erewhon (an anagram
for “nowhere”) where everything is backwards and common usages are turned inside-out
-- in effect, a social, cultural, political and scientific mirage that has
become all-encompassing, a virtual reality, an ersatz world that must, as every
reasonable person knows, eventually collapse. We believe that, and act as if,
things that are, are not; things that are not, are. We have become denizens
of Wonderland; as Alice says, “If I had a
world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is,
because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it
wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” We now live the lie --
or at any rate, far too many of us have been recruited by the political left,
the legacy media, the Internet platforms, the feminist cabal and the nation’s
professoriate into a gossamer world of intricate duplicities.
But reality always has the
last word. Those who believe in the rhapsody of dereliction and the pathology
of inversion will find themselves “cancelled” by the revenge that reality
always inflicts upon illusion. People who kneel before a deception may find
they cannot get up again. Those who live in a virtual world must one day
succumb of oxygen deficiency. Those who believe that gravity does not exist, or
that “gravity” is a word signifying stasis, will hurtle to their deaths,
however lengthy the fall. One thinks of the old joke about the man who falls
from a fifty story building and, as he passes the tenth floor, says: So far, so
good.
The real question is whether
a plummeting culture, nation or civilization can right itself and correct
course before it is too late. The verdict of history is not encouraging. It may
happen, but it would take a miracle.
David Solway’s latest book
is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House Publishing,
2019, London. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
[i] The celebrated passage
from the Antigone reads:
κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾽ ἐσθλὸν τῷδ᾽ ἔμμεν’ ὅτῳ φρένας θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν. My Greek
is rusty but I translate the phrase as: “harm (or damage) sometimes seems good
in the heart (or mind) of those whom god leads toward (near to) destruction.”
The theme is also developed in Aeschylus’ Oresteia (particularly the
third play of the trilogy, The Eumenides) and Seven Against Thebes, where the Furies are the
agents of delirium. In Eurpides’ The Madness of Heracles, it is the goddess Hera who
drives the hero mad, leading him to slaughter his own family, that is, his
future. There is a deep insight to be found in the insights of the Greek
tragedians. Whether ordained by “the gods” or simply in the nature of things,
individuals, polities and civilizations eventually enter a condition of
senility or madness and events unfold as they must. The Greek dramatists knew
all about the intimate relation between egoism, self-deception, madness and
ruin -- an illustration of the Greek concept of Μοῖραι (moirai), or
fate.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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