Prejudice

In the classical world the question of whether virtue can be taught, or is rather acquired by interior inclination and moral development, was the subject of intense debate by the best Grecian and Roman philosophers. None ever succeeded, however, in agreeing an answer. Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority Since the second half of the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have seemed to believe that they have answered the question definitively and to their own satisfaction. Virtue, they have decided, can indeed be taught, and liberal democratic education is doing it, in public and private schools and universities alike throughout the western world.

A well-known writer in the 1930s – I think John Dos Passos – compared Southern California to the lower-left corner of a board that has been tipped in that direction and into which everything in the rest of the country that is not nailed down slides. In the 21st century the mental, cultural and ideological equivalent of that geographic locality is a venerable and once mighty institution, the national Democratic party, whose name is synonymous with it. Throughout the 20th century, the party maintained a strong and consistent identity which accurately and effectively represented its constituency – an alliance that included the working classes, the labor unions, the small farmers, black people, the public educational establishment, colleges and universities, the arts and bohemia.

A month or two ago, Rod Liddle had the audacity to write in The Spectator that the besetting problem of modern civilization is the middle class, while implying that something ought to done about it. Reading the article, I was reminded of an entry made by Harold Nicolson in his diary early in 1939 where he observes, à propos the homogenization of the modern world, “Even revolution is becoming bourgeois.

Like Agatha Christie’s “rescuer from the sea," Greta Thunberg swept upon Gaza to save the starving, the homeless, the bombed – and the bombing – from destruction at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces, only to be intercepted by one of the IDF’s boats and offered a bottle of water and a sandwich wrapped in plastic (which looked not at all like an item from a Jewish delicatessen). La Thunberg later characterized the incident as a kidnapping. Following that, she was presumably (as promised by the Israeli Defense Minister) compelled to view footage of the events of October 7, 2023, before being loaded on to a CO2-dispersing passenger jet and flown to France, en route to her native Sweden. She explained that to remain longer in Israel would have been to discredit her cause.

I first heard the slogan “Everything is political” from a left-wing reporter for Wyoming’s statewide newspaper in the mid-1980s, at least a decade before I became acquainted with the work of the revolutionary Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, deviser of the strategy known as the “long march through the institutions” of the West. While the right clearly has no choice but to fight fire with fire in the struggle against its ideological and political adversaries, the fact remains that the left has substantially won the battle by having helped to transform a slogan into present reality. The idea of everything as politics, and politics as everything, is ideology in its purest form.

Laramie, Wyoming In 1988 Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of history had been reached in the form of liberal democratic capitalism, the ne plus ultra of human civilization. Three decades later it seems more likely that the direction of history will be theological, as the world comes reluctantly to recognize that science, democracy, capitalism and technology are insufficient to the achievement of human happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment.

Considering the way history has been going for the past quarter of a century, it seems not merely Panglossian but naive and sentimental to the point of bad taste to find grounds for historical optimism now. Nevertheless, positive facts ought to be recognized as well as negative, and without embarrassment. The world appears to have entered upon a new era when the author of a leader in the London Sunday Telegraph is comfortable writing: “Europe has many things to its credit — and the reconstruction of Notre-Dame stands in notable contrast to our own inability even to decide what to do with the Houses of Parliament. But if we are to retain global relevance and restore economic dynamism, it seems increasingly clear that we have more to learn from America.

It seems likely that on Election Day the country entered fully upon the new political era that commenced with the fateful presidential election of 2016. Donald Trump spent the last four years in the howling political wilderness, savagely set upon by every species of Big Beast — legal, financial and political — but from which he emerged as a survivor — physically, mentally and morally intact to achieve what is acknowledged to be the greatest political comeback in American history. Donald J. Trump is, without a doubt, the most remarkable American politician to hold office since 1945. Whether or not he is a genuinely great man as well is a question that only the next four years can answer.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason, published in 1905. The philosopher’s aphorism, somewhat hackneyed after nearly a century and a quarter, and always true only in a limited way, assumes that men are capable of directing history to a certain end, while diverting it from other ones. Santayana was a very wise man and certainly no ideologue. Nevertheless, his maxim shares something with ideological thinking. Both assume that men are collectively aware of the realities of the present time and their possibilities, capable of determining where they wish their societies to go in future and in what shape or form, and then — with varying degrees of success — guiding them there.

The last presidential election was one in which the term “popular front” took on new meaning owing to the Covid pandemic and a political contest that would have proved anomalous at any point — given the state of an opposition party badly compromised by the aging, uninspired, uninspiring and unpopular political hacks at the top of the party hierarchy and its radicalization over the previous four years by “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Seeking a “moderate” Democrat with a better chance at defeating the incumbent Republican president, the Democratic Party settled finally and with loud cries of relief on the most confirmed hack in its roster of ranking hacks — one whom, moreover, even the rank and file understood to be mentally and physically infirm — as its safest bet.

The three of us sat on folding chairs around the table where Dick had the microphone plugged into a tape recorder and directed toward the high-altitude evergreen forest and the sheer granitic bowl behind and above it. On the table also were three magnum revolvers and three blue enamelware cups of red wine. “I don’t expect anything the first night,” Dick McCuistion said. “Let’s forget about a watch, shall we?” The sound was the familiar half-human howl, beginning with a whoop, sustaining itself on the exhalation, and lasting three and a half minutes by my watch. It was a cry such as a man — a nine-foot-tall one — could produce; a headvoice bonded to a deep chest tone.

It was a law of classical political philosophy that democratic polities devolve inevitably into tyrannical ones. This law is being validated in the twenty-first century, as liberal democracy creates societies antithetical to both liberalism and democracy by shaping citizens of a character for which neither was designed nor developed. In a parallel development over the past decade or so in Europe and the United States, liberals and democrats view their response to the problem as “reaction,” pure and simple, against the sort of thing they have been fighting since 1789. Only it is not reaction; it is apparently something new in history.

In his introduction to Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote: “you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not.” While what he says about driving, walking and crawling is true enough, my late friend Ed neglected to mention the alternative — and best — way to see and experience the Mountain West. That is on horseback, the optimal mode from the point of view of observational perspective as well as speed of travel.

For the left, the world has always been, and always will be, a scandal. In this American election year, it has not escaped their anger and disgust that of the two presumed candidates for a second residential lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the incumbent is eighty-one years of age, while his challenger is seventy-eight. Yet that societies should be governed by their elders was taken for granted through all of human history down to very recent times. This was owing not to their experience alone, but to the fact that premodern people lived substantially in the past, recognizing that it — as Faulkner said — “is never dead, it’s not even past.

Journalists have never been noted for originality in their choice of metaphor, so readers must be wearied by now of hearing that the world is on fire. Skeptics will observe that the flames have been more or less constant for well over a century, as the major powers and their allies, satellites and acolytes maneuver to establish, or reestablish, global power or hegemony. In fact, the present crisis extends well beyond the collapse of the international order that prevailed since 1945. The situation is actually far more complicated, the world today being infused with a generalized and simmering anger that extends beyond the great powers to include middling and minor ones everywhere, their societies and their various elements.

In an era that claims to value the authentic, the direct and the natural, the word "processed" has negative connotations, as in “processed” food. Nevertheless, it describes exactly how perhaps nine-tenths of the human race — including, I imagine, the lost Indian tribes of the Amazonian wilderness — experience reality these days, which is to say processed through electronic media, social media and the oxymoronic smartphone.

It has it been widely noted that, as Western culture generally has grown steadily more materialistic in its values and interests (as if it were ever anything else, ungenerous critics might suggest) over the past half-century, it has become simultaneously more abstracted in its mental habits and orientation? Chesterton described a paradox as truth standing on its head to draw attention to itself. In this instance, we have an obvious example. But it’s a good question how this particular one came to be. Ancient Greece was an intensely intellectual world of ideas that were firmly grounded in empirical reality and in observed and confirmable truth.

No better measure of the degree to which a society has become politicized exists than the content of its public educational curricula and the character of its popular culture.

In The Revolt of the Masses — first published in 1930 — José Ortega y Gasset proposed that the most important fact in the public life of Europe was “the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilization.” What Ortega did not live to witness is the ease with which the mass becomes a mob, or an aggregation of many and various mobs, by mental or emotional contagion similar to that of disease. This fact was left for the generations alive today to experience in the fulness of its reality.

The Western world, once so firmly grounded in Christianity and its Gospels, dogma and teachings, retains in the twenty-first century virtually nothing of them, the almost sole exception being the notion of sin and thus of guilt — not the Christian concept of them, but rather the modern liberal one. To begin with, the liberal idea of sin is collective; it is also highly selective, being limited to the West in general and the Caucasian race in particular. And it is obsessive, as much so as was the Christian version among the Calvinists of Geneva, or the neurotic anticommunism prevalent among the more single-minded and hysterical outliers on the American right during the 1940s and 1950s.