It is nice to start the New Year with some expression of hope. Will this be a better year than last? Well, we can always dream, but all the indications are that it will be worse. The malign forces that are undermining Western society remain in the ascendant and are getting stronger.
Yet life is never without consolations, and it is an unusual privilege to witness the declining days of a dying civilisation. It doesn’t happen often in history. It is happening now, to us. Too pessimistic, you think? Well, consider the evidence.
Take the current pandemic of idiocy. We are in the grip of idiocy; you encounter it everywhere, from the ravings of climate lunatics about the world getting uninhabitably hot to the denials of biological reality by gender cranks, to the manufactured lies that pass as education, to the delusion that the senile President Biden is some sort of leader. No government or individual has the capacity to suffocate this nonsense.
How do we explain the slide from rationality to idiotic fantasy? Could it be that in the intellectual civil wars of the 1960s and after we have marginalised the intelligent elite who once guided our society? Certainly, “elite” has acquired a pejorative meaning, especially in education where it has been replaced with the pursuit of “equality of outcome”, for which, of course, it was necessary that standards be lowered. The dislike of “elitism” showed itself in all sorts of ways.
In Australia for instance no longer was it considered necessary to try to speak correct English. “Strine” and “Aussie English” were the new norm, promoted on the ABC and elsewhere with propaganda about one accent being as good as another and not being ashamed of the way we spoke. Simultaneously formality, which takes some effort to maintain, was progressively discarded everywhere, from Government House to what you wore to a restaurant.
Public institutions and utilities replaced their Latin mottos and coats of arms with infantile logos and meaningless utterances such as “bringing you world-class service”, the excellence boasted of being invariably in inverse proportion to the quality of the product supplied.
Across the Western world, the lowest common denominator—the tastes and preferences of “the common man” whose century it was said to be by an American vice-president—dethroned a striving for excellence. Indeed, the concept of excellence was abolished in favour of cultural relativity. There is no evidence that this state of affairs is changing for the better.
This world being an imperfect place, you can’t have the good without the bad. The descent of our society into, at best, mediocrity, is the result of democracy. Rule by the demos is cultural and intellectual as well as political. States where power is centralised on a ruling figure or class are those where cultural achievement is at its highest. If one accepts this unpalatable conclusion, then one must accept the corollary, that democracy, at least in the case of the West, has been a stage in civilisational decline. There seems no reason why the next stage shouldn’t be outright collapse.
Idiocy cannot reason. It argues by means of violence. In our unfortunate society mob rule has come to determine much of public policy. The mob de nos jours doesn’t always need to be visible in the streets smashing shop windows or glueing itself to the road, though its shrieking armies do emerge into the daylight from time to time.
It is usually to be found far more insidiously in action, crouched over its keyboards unleashing its opinions into that seething Babel of amplified ignorance that is social media. The sheer volume of the voice of the mob online outweighs the voice of expertise and experience, to the extent that that still exists anywhere. Politicians cower before it, and when they obey its dictates hysteria and unreason are at the helm of our society.
If inwardly our circumstances are not good, they are no better externally. The first necessary condition for a civilisation to flourish is peace and we can no longer count on that. We are losing the guarantor on whom we have relied for peace in the last eighty years. The United States, though it is still (not without misgivings) in NATO, and will share its nuclear expertise with Australia in AUKUS, is ceasing to be a hegemonic power. It is renouncing its commitment, imposed on it by events or its own ambition, to bring order to troubled lands, just as the British, whom we previously relied on, had to do.
The US will take care not to find itself again in an Iraq or a Vietnam or—as it recedes into history let us not forget it—Afghanistan, where the ignominious scuttling from the enemy decreed by President Biden showed that the concept of pax americana has crack’d from side to side, like the Lady of Shalott’s mirror. (That there is a certain sense of justice in this, since it was post-war American politicians who did so much to bring about the dismemberment of the British Empire, is no cause for comfort.)
Can any free country still count on the United States to defend it? We shall find out soon enough when communist China decides to “repatriate” Taiwan. And with not only China but so many other likely troublemakers—a nuclear Iran, Russia returning to its old role of aggressor (imagine the international outrage if Ukrainians were “people of colour”) and terrorists from a dozen countries—the peace which has enabled us to live a civilised life cannot last much longer. We are going the way of Nineveh and Tyre in Kipling’s “Recessional”.
Like the Roman empire, the decline of the United States has been caused mainly from within. The patriotic energy of the US and its past zeal for spreading democracy, even if mistakenly applied in many cases, have been cut away at their roots, tossed on the scrapheap as a manifestation of “white supremacy”. America has been hollowed out, the values and beliefs that have hitherto defined it scooped out of the body politic as you might scoop marrow from a bone.
This decay has not happened by accident. It has happened because schools and universities deliberately departed from their proper function and turned themselves into incubators of grievance politics and disseminators of Marxist and sub-Marxist dogma.
This began in the 1940s in academic humanities departments and seeped down into schools so that anyone who had had a secondary or tertiary education was at risk of being infected. It was not a conspiracy in the sense of plotters sitting round and planning to infiltrate themselves into key positions, not so much a programmed “long march through the institutions” with some sort of central command directing things.
It was more the result of an intellectual fashion. The Left became glamorous. No one with pretensions to being a thinking or “caring” individual would claim to be anything but a socialist. No opportunity was missed in academic and cultural circles to deride the capitalist system we live under as “exploitative” and unfair. Only those who were indifferent to being thought stupid and greedy could afford to be politically conservative.
The article concludes with these words:
Culture is a hallmark of civilisation. Our “culture” has become a pathetic joke. We have fouled the nest of true creativity by handing out public money to “creatives” who have to please no one but aesthetically illiterate bureaucrats. When was the last time you saw a painting or a play or a piece of architecture and thought “that is a product of genuine talent”? We have lost the criteria of excellence. We elevate the vulgar and trivial to the status of art and ascribe merit to the race or sex of the “artist” instead of to the artifact.
In 1849 Arthur Hugh Clough finished his poem “Say not the struggle nought availeth” with the comforting words, “But westward, look, the land is bright.” Not in our own time, I fear. All is dark in the West. If anyone thinks this conclusion unjustifiably gloomy I should be pleased to be shown where I am wrong. If anyone detects signs of hope I should be even more pleased to know what they are.
For the full article in pdf, please click here:
Christopher Akehurst lives in rural Victoria. He has contributed to Quadrant since the 1990s.
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