The US has not known social and domestic peace since the start of the present decade, and it is unlikely that it will know it again for the foreseeable future. This is because it has ceased to be a country at all, assuming that nationhood implies fundamental unity, which America no longer has.
When novelist John Dos Passos wrote in the late 1930s, “All right, we are two countries,” the boundary he had in mind was economic, separating the rich from the poor. Today the obvious divide is political, between left and right. But what seems obvious is not always true, as in this case. The reason is not that all of life in the US has become politicized – though that is certainly true – but that Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum about war as an extension of politics is fast being superseded by the fact that western politics in the 21st century is itself becoming the equivalent of war, as in the state of Minnesota today, since for the contemporary left politics is meaningless in a world where the only boundary that exists is the boundary between oppressor and oppressed.
The three most obvious things in the world remain the existence of evil, of the Devil, and of human wickedness
This boundary can be erased only by violence and nihilism operating on behalf of formlessness and chaos which have no need of politics and politicians and, by definition, no place or even desire for them.
The deterioration that the US and western society as a whole are experiencing is something which, contrary to Ecclesiastes, is completely new under the sun as they succumb to self-loathing, self-contempt, and self-destruction, paradoxically (or so it might seem on first thought) with an insuperable smugness and conviction of their self-superiority as a moral civilization.
Previous nations and civilizations have decayed, weakened and been destroyed through their own decadence, or by foreign invasion, war abroad or domestic tyranny, but none that I can think of in the way that the US and western Europe are being deliberately wrecked by their governing elites inspired by their post-Christian consciences, which are actually false consciences.
What appears to be the fate of the West could never befall a civilization based on the Muslim, Hindu, Confucian or any other culture. Judaism taught the world about guilt in the form of rebellion against Yahweh, and Christianity about original sin, unlike their predecessor religions. As both became progressively secularized in the modern epoch, and many of their old doctrinal tenets withered and fell away, the old conviction of sin and guilt remained; neither of which however, in the new secular dispensation, offers a means of atonement. Except, it seems, one: civilizational self-sacrifice on the bloody altar of the world. But if post-Christian liberals are determined to sacrifice themselves to their guilty faux consciences, they have no moral (or any other) justification for sacrificing the rest of us along with them.
No doubt part of the tragedy of the West has to do with the fact that the death of the greatest and truest things is always the most spectacular, consequential and reverberative of deaths. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” T.S. Eliot asked. Christianity taught the highest truths and values, which many men and women have learned and took to heart. Having once learned them, they cannot unlearn them. But they can misconstrue, twist and misapply them wrongly and to the wrong ends. Among the things the Christian faith taught is the true meaning of human guilt and its origin in original sin, which is not western civilization, the white race, capitalism and the profit motive, let alone Christianity itself.
G.K. Chesterton’s maxim that the danger in rejecting Christian truth is not that men will believe in nothing, but rather that they will believe in anything, remains valid. Yet the greatest danger may be that they will believe in one thing, which is the exact opposite of the thing they once believed in. Leftism, like Christianity, has a deep, inborn and ineradicable sense of human guilt, but not of universal human guilt: only that of capitalists, Christians and western people, men especially. Worse, it offers the guilty no means of expiating their sinfulness except through self-hatred, self-destruction and self-delivery into the hands of vindictive disappropriators and tyrants, who will seize for themselves what was disappropriated and tyrannize, not the former oppressor class only, but the masses whom it allegedly held in chains.
The three most obvious things in the world remain, as they always have been, the existence of evil, of the Devil and of the fact of innate human wickedness. The first and third of these are as obvious to the left as they are to the rest of us – except as they are present in themselves. Thus it finds in the evil in others an excuse for appropriating to itself the universal powers that belong to God and God alone, whose existence it jealously denies. As for the second, the left conveniently replaces personal and individual guilt with the institutional and political sort.
When truly great civilizations have perished, whether by entropy or conquest, their destruction has generally prepared the way for some different or opposite thing that is truly terrible as well; one that, having recognized its unique opportunity, seizes it to usurp its predecessor’s place.
Today, the lights are going out all over the western world. Sir Edward Grey recognized the arrival of the Age of Darkness from his Whitehall office in London in 1914. That age has never lifted from us, despite the illusory appearance of its passing from time to time since then. How long before there are no lights left burning anywhere in the world? Perhaps not so very long.
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