The Desolate March of the Twenty-first Century

J.M.W. Turner. The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire

1,411 words

The twenty-first century is nearly a quarter done, and things don’t look so good. It may be time to pause and contemplate the remarkable socially and morally transformative effects of three powerful, intermingling forces that have come into ascendancy. They are the pernicious legacy of the left’s “progressive” ideology, one that relentlessly progresses toward ever more explicit manifestations of deviance and degeneracy.

The first is personalism, a proto-modern psychology outfitted with a “humanist” argot that urges the unlimited pursuit and enlargement of the subjective self, liberated from the confines of repressive, traditional institutions. Being “liberated” from insidious, heretofore surreptitious, forms of oppression, of course, has been the driving aspiration of every anti-traditionalist, anti-institutional movement from the last hundred and fifty years. Communism, achieved by killing evil capitalists, was supposed to liberate the workers from the domination and exploitation of their employers, and make them happy. Feminism, achieved by promulgating the selfishness and worthlessness of men, promised women liberation from paternalism and the demands and expectations of their fathers, brothers and sons, and would make them fulfilled. Anti-racism, campaigning against white hatred and white supremacy, seeks to abolish the inequality between the races and make the world fair. Transgenderism has arrived on the world’s stage claiming it is possible to escape the confines of human biology, resisted only by troglodytes who are opposed to “science.”

The mentality of personalism, as it is now entrenched in Western modes of self-reflection and self-consciousness and abetted by that state propaganda organs, leads to a relentless assault on the reality of the human condition. Which helps to explain why life-long grifting and senility (as in Joe Biden) and sorority-girl vacuity plus affirmative action (as in Kamala Harris) are no obstacles for elevation to the nation’s highest offices.

Second is the ascendence of the therapeutic model of behavior that employs a conspicuously feminized perspective and approach to the management and control of human conduct. Think of it this way as you imagine how best to deal with the “problem people” in any society: mom is the doctor, nurse, counselor, focused on helping the (problem person) patient get better. Dad is the policeman, judge and warden, focused on punishing the (problem person) wrong doer – deterring and/or reforming him – in order to make society more orderly and safer. No one can object to some combination of both approaches. But Mom now is calling the shots, and Dad has become a house boy.

Feminized therapy, reflexively resisting “judgement” and “disapproval” (translated as “hate”), seeks to nurture and speak reassuringly to that subjective self. Mother-therapist identifies the forces that impede the innocent self’s growth and development and mobilizes her instinctive fury in protest. The subjective self has been made ill by those moral inhibitions imposed by institutions, beginning with the family, well, to be precise, beginning with … Dad.

Therapy employs the technology of self-liberation that proceeds with the recognition (“consciousness raising”) that these moral inhibitions, disguised as essential human elements for making the institutions function well, are actually designed to serve the interests of those who run the institutions. With the raising of consciousness comes the recognition that the institutions themselves are merely disguised structures of power and thus lack legitimacy. The liberated, subjective self is one that has broken free from the norms, rules, customs that govern whatever institution in which it has been imprisoned.

The triumph of the therapeutic model of the self in the twenty-first century and how it perceives its relationship to social groups and institutions that give structure and continuity to social life help explain the utter political chaos into which the left has plunged the country. No social group, no institution has been untouched by it. One established norm after another has been trashed. Every limitation or constraint has been denounced a barrier to be broken through. Those who resist, object or criticize are denounced as being mobilized by hatred and atavistic impulses.

The third of these intermingling forces is amusement. The demolition of social boundaries and liberation of the subjective self to pursue … whatever, has produced a social atomization that puts the subjective self adrift, in search of something to give the passing hours, months and years meaning. Amusement, once a respite from the demands of work and social obligations, is now a full-time pursuit for many Americans, passively filling their hours with Netflix, Hulu, the NFL, the NBA, and video games. Politics has been reduced to entertainment by the propaganda-purveying “news” corporations (CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc.) to distract Americans from the predation and corruption of the ruling class. With the amount of time spent with the vast array of amusement choices, the entertainment industry rivals the entire educational establishment in its power to shape the perceptions of those who submit their lives to its dominion.

In contemplating the unfolding of the twenty-first century one has to be impressed with the persistent, devilish play of the ironic in human events. History has always been a perversely ironic affair because the imperfection of human beings unexpectedly manifest themselves so often in ways that mock the pretences of enlightened.

Edward Gibbon, perhaps the greatest of the English historians, over two hundred years ago brilliantly described the decadence of an earlier great civilization: the Roman empire. Human beings, when they come to be measured against the goodness and greatness of their Gods, can only be regarded as feeble, deluded creatures. Here is Gibbon in one of his bitterest, most ironic musings at the beginning of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from Heaven arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

Gibbon pits the theologian against the historian. These two classes of theorists represented for him two perennial philosophical archetypes for interpreting or understanding the deep complexities of the human condition. Theology, understood in this context, is a theoretical dreaming, the corruption of the Christian faith by metaphysics and superstition. The “theologian” comprehends (or invents) and dwells upon the possibilities of perfection—hence perhaps the delusion-based pleasure of believing that man can achieve something approximating divinity and escape his limitations.

Gibbon’s theologian has transmogrified itself in the twentieth-first century into the most grotesque and dangerous of all creatures, the ideologue. The ideologue, the man of total revolution, of liberation, bursting at his seams, seeking to recreate society and make himself whatever he can imagine himself to be. The modern ideologue like Gibbon’s medieval theologian, is in rebellion against the reality of human nature.

The historian by contrast is a moral pathologist — a moral philosopher, actually — grounded in the knowledge of the constraining realities of human nature. He probes reluctantly, with a “melancholy duty,” into the many human aspirations that seem to descend into folly. He measures the expressed aspirations against the actual accomplishments. In these investigations, he often discovers the processes of degradation. The historian in a way has the worst of it since what he must return to, again and again, is the stark, unavoidable reality of human arrogance, folly, and corruption.

History, therefore, must often become a mocking and deeply melancholy scene. The irony of history, therefore, is all too often cruel and wildly perverse. In the narratives of success and failure, history captures painfully the disparity between the reaches of human aspirations and the reality of their achievement, grotesque applications of the law of unintended consequence—efficiency experts who produce less work, social reformers who make people’s lives even more miserable than imagined, spiritual leaders who degrade their followers below the level of beasts, utopias that turn into hells. History manages to highlight the dominance of human pride and arrogance. Nowhere, I would suggest, does this observation strike with more force and vivacity than in the contemplation of the events as they unfold in the twenty-first century. Never has there been a time in which we have collectively possessed such immense bodies of knowledge and so much material capacity to advance it. Never before have the technologies been so powerful and so rich with potential, and the aspirations so ambitious and full of confidence. Yet with all of this, the ironic lesson is the danger of losing sight of our own limitations, and with that vital loss of moral understanding, we find ourselves on a desolate march.