Last week's column was about the Collapse of capitalism. This collapse (which some believe is approaching) would entail "an American crisis, a world crisis and a global upheaval." When a social system fails it is bound to take a few countries with it. If capitalism collapses the great republic can hardly expect to survive. In a book titled The Gingerbread Race (suppressed by its publishers in London) the Russian-born writer Andrei Navrozov explained that he "saw in civilization not only the bourgeois morals and mores of a West shorn of its aristocratic antecedents, but the future itself, a West rolling into the maw of totalitarian militarization beyond the horizon, a progress which its culture, solipsistic and geocentered, was not realistic enough to view in a wider context and hence powerless to stop or even to retard." Navrozov's brief against the West was simple: "Pacified by mediocrity, civilization loses the culture it needs in order to survive...." The West is not only defenseless against the philistinism of television or the "music industry." A hollowed-out culture is militarily (as well as economically) defenseless to the bargain. In other words, James Bond is fiction but Kim Philby was fact. "The truth is," wrote Navrozov, "that the optimist does not want to fight because all is well in his garden, and always will be in this best of all possible worlds, while the pessimist does not want to fight because everything is for the best elsewhere, while in his garden everything is going to seed anyway."
The edifice of our civilization has been crumbling for several decades. On the surface one sees prosperity in the form of new cars and trucks, shiny buildings, good roads and busy stores. But underneath there is a rotten, futureless, disordered thing, mediated by intellectual imbecilities. As of this writing there is no armed rebellion, no world war to mark our place. All is relatively quiet in the West, for the work of maggots is not measured in decibels. And even if it were, popular music drowns all thinking in a sea of noise.
In his book, Technopoly, Neil Postman wrote of the breakdown of civilized order in terms of "information running amok." He explained that our "information immune system is inoperable." We suffer from "a form of cultural AIDS" which means "Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome." Under an increasingly technocratic social order, "there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence." Postman further added, "Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern to which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves." In this context I am reminded of the words of the Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote: "Everything that conspires in me to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and, therefore, to destroy itself. Every individual who conspires among a people to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people." The culture of the West has collapsed under a tidal wave of entertainment and economic calculation. Our universities are no longer centers of culture, since culture is no longer respected or - as Postman says, "coherent." According to Christopher Lasch, "culture is a way of life backed up by the will to condemn and punish those who defy its commandments." When the will to condemn is gone, order is gone. And without order there is no safety, and no means of defense. In the words of Edmund Burke, what follows is a "world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow."
For many decades the leading universities have entertained subversive doctrines. Publishing houses, newspapers and magazines have advanced new ideas of social order (from socialism and feminism to multiculturalism). Through a gradual and subtle process, the foundations of a great civilization have been undermined. "Nihilism stands at the door," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1886. "The end of Christianity - at the hands of its own morality." It is a process later detailed by James Burnham's Suicide of the West in terms of "guilt encysted on the liberal ideology." According to Burnham, "the group, nation or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself." Burnham further explained: "When the Western liberal's feeling of guilt and his associated feeling of moral vulnerability before the sorrows and demands of the wretched become obsessive, he often develops a generalized hatred of Western civilization and of his own country as a part of the West." An empty mind is a dangerous vessel. The thing that replaces culture is "ideology" - a cheap and easy substitute. In cuisine there is fast food, in political culture there is Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh.
Rebellions begin in the heart and mind. Social order isn't an outward thing, but an inward thing. In his book, Behemoth, Thomas Hobbes described the causes of the English Civil War. Despite the appearance of an ordered monarchy, and despite the apathy of the common people, an intellectual shift heralded a bloody upheaval. "The seducers were of divers sorts," Hobbes explained. "One sort were ministers." He added that "there were an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so educated, as that in their youth having read the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths ... in which books the popular government was extolled by the glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny; they became thereby in love with their forms of government."
Fast forward to the early 21st century. The popular rage of the 1960s was not Cicero or Livy, but Marxist epigones and drugged-up semi-musical anarchists. The French and Russian revolutions attempted to eradicate the existing order, setting up a new one in its place. The Sixties Revolution was no different. In his book, Enemies of the Permanent Things, Russell Kirk noticed that "since the French Revolution, 'order' has been an unpopular word. Order implies leadership, discipline, self-restraint, duty; and the doctrinaire ideological pamphleteers, from Tom Paine onward, have been hostile to these concepts. Emancipation from all restraints, inner and outer, has been the desire of the more extreme liberals of modern times." Anarchy offers a direct route to tyranny. Those, like Marx and Lenin, who preached world revolution, prayed that the anarchy of capitalism's collapse would lead the way to a new socialist order. As Antonio Gramsci explained in his Prison Notebooks: "Marx is the creator of a Weltanschauung." According to Gramsci: "Marx initiates intellectually an historical epoch which will last in all probability for centuries, that is, until the disappearance of political society and the coming of regulated society."
The collapse of the old order paves the way to a new order. And the champions of this new order don't care if the nations are impoverished or millions perish.
