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CHAPTER 3
DENAISSANCE
Reverse-engineering the West
But what of those decadent ages in which no ideal either grows or blossoms?
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution.
The toxification of the universities, the poisoned wells of academia, will have a wide effect over time. Once a “woke” generation or two have passed through higher education, replete with all the new and accelerated, grievance-based prescriptions and proscriptions they have learned in lieu of a real education, they will pass into the workforce, most of them working for the Western public sector or, in other words, for the government, the state. Very soon, malevolent, socially stunted, and uneducated graduates in worthless non-subjects will assume full control, in the West, of public administration and finances, the arts, media – both mainstream and social – and the law. They have already won the battle, essentially, but are about to bayonet the corpses. Where Europe had its Renaissance, that continent is now going through a Denaissance.
Governmental employees, who once took stringent examinations, will now graduate with a skill-set which is worthless and dangerous to any society forced to host it. Not only will they be stoked with grievance, their teachers having fed their emotive side and not their rational side for at least three years, they will also entirely lack the ratiocinative tools to make any sense of meaningful discourse. And there will be no one to correct them because, as in the film Idiocracy, in which the genuinely stupid inherit the earth, the populace will have been, are currently being, cretinised, infantilised and kept in small virtual game reserves, fed on spectacles, far away from the texts they require. Debord writes of “the infantilising operations of the spectacle.” The trash that passes for culture today is a strategic distraction while the elites use the woke Left to go about their business of mining the bridges and tearing up the tracks. Jamie Glazov writes, with specific reference to Noam Chomsky, in United in Hate:
“The capitalist oppressors used all forms of entertainment, therefore, including televised sports and movies, to distract the masses from their victimization and make them unwilling or unable to revolt.”
Once philosophy goes, she takes a lot with her. This is not to say a once proud and philosophical West will suddenly stop reading philosophy – it never really started – but philosophy is a coalmine canary, and what happens to her is indicative of what is in store for the rest of the Humanities. Just as the Renaissance centred around the reappearance of philosophy, so correspondingly the Denaissance features its disappearance.
Before we bemoan the current Denaissance, however, perhaps we should glimpse its progenitor, the Renaissance.
Homer Simpson: Name me one thing that’s better than TV!
Lisa Simpson: The Renaissance?
Homer (after some thought): TV’s better!
The Simpsons
The last time philosophy took an extended leave of absence in the West, still breathing but stifled by church doctrine, the result was the Renaissance. As the name suggests, this was a rebirth, a rediscovery of classical knowledge, philosophy, architecture, art, music: culture, in short, above all, culture. The Italian word cultura does not indicate that you have just paid a lot of money to see Il Barbiere de Siviglia, but rather that you are intelligent and educated. And, in the opera of Italy’s rebirth, philosophy during the Renaissance sang the aria. Previously mired in gloom – with occasional beams of light through cracks in the church’s defence during what Petrarch termed “the Dark Ages” – philosophy now emerged from darkness, like the prisoner of Plato’s cave, to see the sun.
Most of this rich harvest was complete by the time the Turks overran Constantinople in 1453, but the work of salvage was immense, and among many, many other treasures of the classical age, we owe to the Renaissance the retrieval of the works of Plato, translated by Cosimo del Medici’s amanuensis Marcilio Ficino. But there was one aspect of this great rebirth, a great reset of actual worth, which we should especially note: it was for the elites and not for the masses. There were no Michelangelo fridge magnets or Da Vinci T-shirts in 15th-century Florence (although, admittedly, there were also no fridges).
The Renaissance was elitist. It was decidedly not for the people. That’s what elitism is, and this is not peculiar to the Italian Renaissance. How many Germans do we imagine heard a Beethoven symphony while he was alive? Nietzsche once walked 30 miles to attend a performance. What percentage of Italians do we suppose ever set eyes on a painting by Giotto or Crivelli while those artists were alive? Even post-Renaissance, do we think Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a coffee-table book in every Swabian household, or that Provençal vignerons sat around discussing Descartes’ correspondence with Mersenne? The Renaissance was thrillingly elitist, which gives it its décolleté-like attraction for the few and decidedly not for the many.
And this was because the Renaissance was bought and paid for. A country, an age, has to be able to afford a Renaissance, and it is instructive to note the difference between what the Italian aristocracy considered worth patronising, and where billionaire philanthropists place their charitable giving today.
That said, the Denaissance is funded every bit as much as the Renaissance was, it’s just that the nature of the donors has changed, their place in the social apparatus has shifted. Where the Renaissance was fiscally enabled by rich patrons attempting to outdo one another in the hiring of renowned artists, musicians, engineers and architects, the Denaissance is bankrolled by Western income tax, redistributed to governmental workers briefed either to remove and replace anything of cultural value, or risk losing their jobs and never working again. The rich paid for the Renaissance. The poor are funding the Denaissance.
Lee Harris, in Civilisation and its Enemies, uses the word ‘de-civilisation’:
“…defined as [English philosopher R. G.] Collingwood defined barbarism; “The effort, conscious or unconscious, to become less civilised than you are, either in general or in some special way, and, so far as in you lies, to promote a similar change in others”… [T]he function of de-civilisation is not merely to promote ideas opposed to civilisation, but to make men and women into human beings with a totally different set of emotional and visceral responses to atrociousness.”
It is a familiar saw that culture is being progressively “dumbed down”, to use the jargon of the media. But culture is not one homogeneous thing, it is not a monolith. The tragedy of culture is not that it is being cretinised, it is that the Western elites are pushing the aspects of it that are.
We often hear of “Western culture”, and ‘Western values’ but it is hard to make a case for culture or values meaning what they meant even 50 years ago. Western culture now is not Bach, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Plato and Picasso, it is celebrities, pop stars, people on the television and the internet. It is types of fast-food and footwear, the bastardisation of speech patterns, mobile telephones. It is also female genital mutilation, Muslim grooming gangs, and a black tendency to lateness and stabbing other black people. Forget culture. She already left the party.
We will return to the socio-academic dysfunction leading us inexorably to our present intellectual and social tumult, but first we must spend some time luxuriating in 14th-century Tuscan Italy with the lady we came in with, philosophy. What might have caused the Renaissance itself in intellectual terms? We will examine one theory.
Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture of the former?
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began charts the life of a Florentine humanist, Poggio Bracciolini, who in the second decade of the 15th century rediscovered the philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) by the first-century BC Roman writer and poet Lucretius. This find by Poggio, book-hunter and 15th-century apostolic secretary to the Pope – eight Popes, as a matter of fact, during his long life – Greenblatt believes to be such a momentous discovery as to have effectively started the Renaissance. This is, of course, one theory among many, but it puts the link between Renaissance Italy and the Classical world into focus.
In Lucretius’ revolutionary work, a shower of atoms, no one touching any other in their rain-like descent, is the primal state of the universe until one atom – in an erratic movement known as the clinamen (also inclinatio or declinatio) – swerves and collides with others, setting off a chain reaction which leads to the formation of everything that is.
Lucretius had bequeathed posterity a dangerously heretical, atomistic, deity-free book, seen as arch-paganism by the ascendant religion of Christianity that followed it. So, we have the possibility that the Renaissance was born, at least incidentally, from dissident literature. Even the clinamen, the atom which swerves and collides and causes motion and being, is a symbol of the role of intellectual samizdat in Europe.
Certainly, the Renaissance was a riposte to the Christian church, with its centuries-old distrust of philosophical speculation. Today, philosophy faces a different religion. Islam’s problem is not, as is often suggested, that it hasn’t had a Reformation. It’s actually had several. It is that it hasn’t had a Renaissance, nor is one even remotely feasible in the dar al Islam, as we shall see in Chapter 5. And, whether or not it was Lucretius’ famous cosmological poem that induced this rebirth, a 15th-century great reset, the Renaissance was certainly attended by an influx of books, a cultural medium which dictated and maintained an entire cultural upheaval. Philosophy and her train led the procession of intellectual achievement, and the library was her palace.
Nowadays, the attack on literature is approaching the levels of the Catholic Church, with the new Left’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books which may no longer be read and those that must be altered. This “making dangerous” of books is reminiscent of certain horror stories, where the fatal action is begun with a discovery of “certain forbidden books.” We think of H P Lovecraft and his famed Necronomicon, written by “the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazrad.” Books are a very human phenomenon, and all human phenomena have the potential to be dangerous. Now we will turn to one of the greatest of humanists, and a book which could be said to be the philosophical emblem of the Renaissance.
[N]othing is dearer to philosophers than the truth: nothing more foul than falsehood and deceit. Whereby it comes to pass that there are fewer philosophers than you have perhaps believed.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
One of the Renaissance’s leading philosophers was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, for whom Shakespeare almost certainly named Miranda in The Tempest. As with many Renaissance sages read from today’s perspective, his Oration on the Dignity of Man is steeped in mysticism, even occultism. But Pico himself was forthright in his demand in the work that philosophy get its house in order and shed some of the preoccupations he found decidedly un-Christian:
“Wherefore, O Christian philosopher, send away into perpetual banishment beyond the Caspian mountains, such like foolish chattering of Astrology, and its daughters Geomancy, Hydromancy, Pyromancy, Necromancy, Soothsaying, and many other such dotages with what other vulgarly resembles them and do not attribute to his creatures the glory of the omnipotent Lord God. Now let us see what Nature the philosophers inquired after.”
That was Pico’s audited requirement for the Renaissance. By the time the Industrial Revolution had changed the focus of the West, there would be a far more severe streamlining of philosophy than simply dissuading it from dabbling in arcana. We see the analogues now in CRT, transgenderism, social justice, and the other chimerical gewgaws of the post-modern.
Pico’s Oration contains a memorable scene which presages existentialism. God is addressing Adam:
“We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.”
This has ominous foreshadowings of self-elective gender, but essentially to be human is to be free, after the long centuries of serfdom to the church (although, as noted, Pico was a Christian, albeit one of a different breed). Philosophy is back, and Pico’s estimation of the philosopher is everything now vanished:
“[I]f… you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth.”
The philosopher has usurped God’s position in the great chain of being. Man has become godlike via the delivery system of philosophy. These were heady days for philosophy. What else could Pico’s free man become?
If the best life was the life of the mind detached from worldly desire, then the vita contemplativa was no longer a dereliction of civic duty.
Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy
The term “Renaissance man” entered consciousness. The polymath, the rounded figure able to perform the various arts and disciplines expected of an intelligent and capable gentleman, is beautifully described by Nietzsche’s acquaintance Jakob Burckhardt:
“[T]hen arose the all-sided man – l’uomo universale – who belonged to Italy alone. Men there were of encyclopaedic knowledge in many countries during the Middle Ages, for this knowledge was confined within narrow limits; and even in the twelfth century there were universal artists, but the problems of architecture were comparatively simple and uniform, and in sculpture and painting the matter was of more importance than the form. But in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, we find artists who in every branch created new and perfect works, and who also made the greatest impression as men.”
They made “the greatest impression as men.” Can we say that today’s men make any impression at all, let alone the “greatest”? The cultural world of the Renaissance and today’s tawdry, nihilistic casino could hardly differ more at first glimpse. In fact, the whole concept of “manhood” is being erased in today’s West (including Burckhardt’s beloved Italy), not simply in its chivalric or athletic sense, but in its human sense, as the social de-engineers of the Denaissance repair to what Victor von Frankenstein called his “filthy charnel house of creation” to change men forever. The Renaissance welcomed a present and future world with a library stocked from the past. To the new social scientists, Frankenstein’s descendants, the past is worthless, tiresome, white and therefore oppressive, and the future is at hazard to such an extent it is perhaps best not thought of, merely distracted from. There is only an eternal present, as in childhood, and time to surpass man not by creating l’uomo universale, but rather in creating another type of man. Welcome to the laboratory.
Where the Renaissance was a response to a weakening church, the Denaissance is a response to a weakening epistemology. The Church mandated adherence to certain beliefs which it was compulsory not necessarily to hold but at the very least to affirm on pain of death. It’s the X-Box version of Pascal’s wager. The Denaissance features exactly the same protocol, the death being confined, for the present, to one’s career.
Why is Denaissance preferable to Renaissance? It is inconceivable that with the combined technocratic force of the West, governments could not run their nations and blocs along lines which would improve the greater good. Instead, there is a self-willed element to the decline of the West and its attendant destruction of that civilisation’s culture whose gestalt is Denaissance. The Renaissance was similarly self-willed, but for the intellectually appropriate and not for either the masses nor the culturally bland bourgeoisie. And while the Renaissance was triggered by a rediscovery of the classical world, so the Denaissance is concomitantly coming to pass by censoring that same world. On a related subject, let us see what Zuckerberg has to say about classical literature.
How has it come about that so many people have adopted this strange attitude of hostility to civilisation?
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents
But it’s not Mark Zuckerberg, Lord of the Algorithms. He has a sister, Donna, and she wrote a book, being something of a classicist. It is entitled Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. With a doctorate in Classics, Ms. Zuckerberg is very much on her appropriate territory but, like all woke academics, she is less concerned with the glory of the Classical world, and more preoccupied with the colour and gender of the writers who produced it. She is also a good Puritan, Goody Zuckerberg, concerned about who might be reading this filth:
“The Alt. Right is hungry to learn more about the ancient world. It believes that the classics are integral to education. It is utterly convinced that classical antiquity is relevant to the world we live in today, a comfort to classicists who have spent decades worrying that the field may be sliding into irrelevance in the eyes of the public.”
It is fine and it is good that an interest is taken in your field, provided you let the right ones in or, rather, not the Right ones. She continues:
“Classics, supported by the worst men on the internet, could experience a renaissance and be propelled to a position of ultimate prestige among the humanities during the Trump administration, as it was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Classics made great again.”
If only that were the case. What passes for literature today resembles the recycled air on an aeroplane, whereby you can breathe, but you are breathing recycled farts and body odour, sanitized to make them at least breathable. Without the example of the classical world, the Denaissance has lowered if not removed the ability of people to engage with great art and culture, and in its place they have introduced a terrible nihilistic longing for nothingness, for numbness and televisual anaesthesia. Television is the great leveller, the new social matrix, a shadow profession where you clock in and you clock out, every day in accordance with the same routine, then talk to your friends about the programmes you saw next morning at work.
Whatever happened to culture, and who was responsible?
Western values are an even tighter, water-soaked knot to untie. What has undone them, however, is somewhat easier to understand. You just have to turn on the TV.
Everybody’s sitting round watching television.
The Clash, London’s Burning
In a letter to The Times of London in 1950, the correspondent states that he has spent time in both the USA and Great Britain, and notes that the UK was following the US in its adoption of the habit of watching television:
“I have just returned from a visit to the United States, where television has become an habitual form of entertainment in many more households than here. I find only anxiety and apprehension about the social effects of this pastime and especially about its effect (mentally, morally, and physically) upon small children… The fears expressed by my American friends were not such as could be allayed by the provision of only superior and harmless programs. They were concerned with the television habit, whatever the programs might be.” [Italics added]
The correspondent might be granted some awareness of transatlantic culture and its cross-pollination, as well as power of expression, he having been T. S. Eliot.
But it is not merely the television habit – and its younger and more precocious sibling, the internet – which undermines the ability of nominally adult people to think for themselves. It is an invisible bond between citizens formed not from anything worthwhile, mature or virtuous, but a frivolity born from a moving montage of cretinous and vacuous televisual images which unite the fish-mouthed watchers in an empty sensory Freemasonry. Debord writes:
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
The dissemination of televisual images is the most powerful mode of communication. The TV, with the internet as an accelerant, can spray images around the world instantaneously. In Tudor England, traitors’ heads were displayed on pikestaffs outside the Tower of London for the passers-by to see. In Mexico, bodies of cartel victims are hung up for the locals to ponder. In the British public sector, an employee who misgenders someone and loses their job is hung out in the media for the world to judge, and the medium is televisual. An image need not move to have power. A screenshot of a tweet is sufficient to make heads roll. The difference between Tudor London, Tijuana, and the Western public sector is merely one of degree. Pour encourager les autres.
Television is a confidence trick. The tendency of modern televisual culture is to keep the audience in a state of ignorance while simultaneously causing them to believe they are informed and educated. Television is a passive medium to participate in which you need merely watch. The book is an active medium to participate in which you must work, use your memory, use your rational abilities to follow what you are reading. Reading is a gymnasium for the mind, television a cemetery. It is no surprise to see the complete absence of any meaningful philosophy on modern television. This was not always the case.
I got a TV eye on you.
Iggy Pop and The Stooges, TV Eye
In the 1970s, before the internet, before the so-called yet undeniable “dumbing down” of culture that would pupate into “woke”, and in a British age which still retained some vestigial respect for genuine intellectuality, an Englishman called Bryan Magee was the philosophical equivalent of the last man standing. His two main series, Radio 3’s Men of Ideas in 1971 and (BBC) television’s 1978 television series Conversations with Philosophers were extraordinary then and unthinkable now. The accompanying books remain an excellent introduction to Western philosophy.
Now, a similarly engaged and intellectual overview of Western philosophy would never make it past the storyboard. Programming is now decided purely by focus group rather than educative value, and must both keep to a strict narrative and keep various cultural lobbyists and pressure groups at bay. The BBC is really Pravda with better suits. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was set up in 1922 by Lord Reith with the remit, by Royal charter, to “educate, inform, and entertain.” It is now the propaganda arm of the British deep state. And yet still, unquestioningly, the people continue the habitual practice of watching what the poet Oliver St. John Gogarty called “the bloody illuminated coal-scuttle in the corner.”
Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (a book which has assumed a Koranic centrality for dissidents and has an invasive television as a main theme), that the only hope lies with the proles. But Orwell’s proles only had Victory gin, mawkish pop songs, and fear of the Party to distract them. They weren’t benumbed by Netflix, blitzed on Oxycontin, and commanded by advertisements to hate their own skin colour. What today’s proles are likely or even able to do has been severely compromised by the power of corporate visual entertainment encouraged by the both the state and the deep state, and aided and abetted by the media. And the foremost of these anaesthetics, as a habit if not necessarily as a strict format, is a cultural enemy to be feared. A change in culture can be positive or negative, and we would do well not to ignore – for reasons of propriety – one of the greatest changes in Western life and culture of the last half century, and a yardstick against which to rule the extent of the Denaissance. Western culture has changed, and not to its advantage.
Glenn Singleton is one of the people in charge of solving the problem of racial disparity, ie, convincing us that black children misbehaving in school is really a problem of white perception. Not black behaviour.
Colin Flaherty, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry
We are often told that blacks learn “in a different way” to whites. This is one of a raft of excuses blacks are fed which also allows them to criticise whites. Whatever that way is, philosophy certainly doesn’t suit it. Also, as noted, Western philosophy is an exclusively white affair, which means automatic disqualification from the black academic experience. One of Jared Taylor’s correspondent’s, in his vox pop collection Face to Face with Race, gives a flavour of the easy get-out clause blacks have when it comes to philosophy:
“I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes and Locke was ‘Dey all white! Where da black philosophers a’?’ I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth-century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: ‘Dat racis!'”
An old American saw, probably barely whispered now, is that a degree teaches you all about black people while guaranteeing you an income sufficient to live far away from them, and one stratagem by which philosophy is gradually stifled is the engineered alteration of what we might call the “recipient class”, or the student body, to include more blacks. This gives a fertile field for the indoctrinators. William H. Bork quotes Mary Lefkowitz as stating that “Black students are taught myth as history.” And so blacks are added to the enemies of philosophy not by virtue of rational counter-argument, but more ex cathedra splutterings made by their white liberal handlers. Bork continues:
“The damage done by Afrocentric myths includes increased racial resentment. In order to make their claims – Socrates and Cleopatra were black, Greek philosophy was pilfered from the blacks of Egypt – even minimally plausible, it is necessary for the Afrocentrists to explain why the supposed debt of Greece, and hence of Western civilization, to the blacks of ancient Egypt is not widely known. The answer they offer is that whites not only stole their civilization from Egypt but have engaged in a massive cover-up ever since to maintain white supremacy. Blacks who believe that are naturally hostile to whites.”
And this hostility embraces formerly white intellectual structures, such as the university. For the post-modernes, although they would not grasp the workings of the syllogism, have one of their own:
Philosophy is a white phenomenon.
All white phenomena are racist.
Therefore, philosophy is racist.
Michael Polignano writes, in the essay collection Taking Our Own Side, concerning his alma mater, Emory University. One might imagine an intellectually healthy freshman eager for the truth, or at least the ability to search for it. From this point of view, Emory was something of a disappointment for the young Polignano:
“Emory was teaching lies: the lie of racial equality; the lie that the differences between the races and the sexes are not based in nature, but are mere social constructs which can be changed with sufficient coercion and brainwashing; the lie that multiculturalism leads to utopia not oblivion; the lie that the White race is a cancer on the planet rather than its fairest, most creative species.”
Black students and their self-hating white imperial guard can never rest easy as long as someone white, somewhere, might be enjoying Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or The Nigger of the Narcissus. Today’s wobbly-lipped students resemble the Puritans, frightened lest someone, somewhere is dancing. Instead, this intolerant herd of simpletons will not and cannot feel safe in their learning environments if there is the remotest possibility that a fellow student is gaining intellectual sustenance from the oppressive tomes of dead white men.
The “decolonisation” of the Western canon, including philosophy, is intended to drive out white disciplines, texts and writers leaving a pure new academic prospect, as when the British were driven out of India. Of course, with white men off the syllabus, and to paraphrase a famous line from the film Jaws, we’re gonna need a smaller library.
And culture, as we have seen, is downstream of the universities. Nihilist anti-philosophy is in the ascendant and is specifically post-modern, in its wider sense. Whereas traditional white, Western philosophy, and research in general in any discipline, begins with investigation, correlation, analysis, comparison and other components of valid methodology intended to reach a conclusion, post-modern studies begin with the conclusion and then simply omit to iterate and reiterate the components of research required to confirm the initial pronouncement, edict or statement. This is like a mathematical answer presented without showing any workings, and is yet another analogue to religion. Many Medieval proofs of God’s existence did not begin with an examination of nature and thought which arrived at the indubitability of God’s being, but rather the other way around. Descartes’ ontological proof is a perfect example, albeit possibly present for reasons of political expedience rather than the search for truth. Non-existence is an imperfection, God can have no imperfections, therefore God exists. This is remarkably consistent with post-modern reasoning.
The white West would do well to understand just how pervasive black culture is, and education is not high on the list of priorities for the oppressed kin of cotton-pickers. Reparations first, then we might talk about allowing some of your folk back on the syllabus.
Finally, what I found most frequently amongst young scholars was that behind the arrogant disdain for philosophy there lay the evil after-effect of a philosopher…
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Civilization follows the pathway beaten flat by its academics, eventually, and the current self-willed Denaissance negates the Renaissance by deliberately closing down certain avenues of thought – in particular to gifted whites – and the disciplines that fund, promote and represent them. These include free thought, the apparatus of reasoning, white philosophy in general, and classical philosophy in particular.
The Denaissance we are now living through requires a suffocation of classical learning and, contrariwise to the Renaissance, it is intended for the masses not the elites. And those masses, kept in a field far from the frolicking of intellectual enquiry and the possibility of creating a coherent worldview at which they might have arrived themselves, are unlikely to go searching for Classical wisdom of their own volition, there is too much going on at home on television to venture out into the Arcadian, pre-lapsarian world of the pre-technological. What Derrida called “the death of the civilisation of the book” has bequeathed Debord’s society of the spectacle.
As noted, the rather anodyne concept of “dumbing down” has been in the cultural lexicon for some time. But a society whose members can access the greatest works in the history of thought via e-books, and pay nothing for it, is hardly dumbed down in any real sense. It has been presented with its choice of ignorance or the path to wisdom and has exercised its statutory consumer rights. And each time that choice is made, a small revolution has started, an insurrection against the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, wisdom, philosophy, a tiny rejection of the past which will have chaotic effects. Where will the Denaissance lead?
And where does the West go next? To make such a prediction, it is necessary to evaluate Western culture as it stands, and to compare that with what it has not merely lost but banished, erased, expelled. Perhaps all that philosophising really was just rich men in idle hour, and we need it no more than we need lace cuffs and perfumed wigs.
The Left have no wish for a utopia. They are purely given over to nihilism. They wish to despoil beauty and harmony, like Iago, like serial killers, like those whom Batman’s butler Alfred describes when he talks of men who “just want to watch the world burn.” And then will come, is already here, the time in which a curricular great replacement will operate at the university level, perfectly in line with the wider demographic great replacement taking place in the outside world. The white male philosophers will gradually drop from the syllabus like dead branches from a tree. In five years’ time you will go to “uni” and only be able to read a book of “philosophy” written by a fat African woman and concentrating mainly on the fascinating subject of slavery. The most you will get of white Western philosophy will be the occasional Seneca quote on your one-a-day calendar.
So, by this decolonising of the curriculum, the cotton fields and galley ships and domestic waiting staff of the Humanities are supposed to be re-indigenised, and all is well with the white man gone. The birth of cultured Western humanity in the Renaissance has been smothered in its crib, and the lamps lit by the Enlightenment are going out all across the West. Just as the Renaissance laid the ground for and was succeeded by the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, so too our current Denaissance is leading to a dark Enlightenment, an Age of Unreason.