The Fall of Western Snivelization
It is as though someone dropped our culture, what remains of it, into a fifty gallon drum of solvent, and then complained loudly when the whole thing wound up as a solution. That’s not the kind of solution I meant, complained the president.
For the time being, the trappings still look fine. We look around and
see cities, and concerts, and monuments, and mammon, and armies, and
news reports, all done with the very latest developments in CGI. With
these images flashing on the tall backdrop of a very deep stage, our
president walks out to the center, faces us, and proves himself to be a
very able platitudinarian.But nothing coheres any more, and the impressiveness is all surface. It is like discovering a shining body of water the size of the Pacific and then finding out it was ankle deep all the way across. To change the image somewhat abruptly, it is like that free couch left outside the fraternity at the beginning of summer — you can take it or leave it.
Scripture tells us that Christ is the one in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17
). Our secular society laughed. We scoffed. That is simply ridiculous, we said. We can hold it together without Him.And so, just a few generations after rejecting Him, where are we? As one fellow said in a similar context, everything is at sea except for the fleet.
We don’t need Jesus Christ to hold everything together. That’s what we said. We turned away from Him, and how has it gone with our bold new experiment? Without Jesus Christ, we no longer know the difference between boys and girls. Without Him, our college students need safe spaces for protection against tacky Halloween costumes. We no longer know that mothers should bear and suckle their children. We have turned age-old variations in the weather into an argument for massive increases of statist power. We can’t tell the difference between white people and black people anymore. Those appearances might just be a trick of self-identification, designed to get us to reveal our latent bigotries. If I say something awkward to that guy on the subway I might find myself remanded into counseling. We don’t even know what marriage is anymore, and if it had been within our reach we would already have been messing around with optional gravitation. Gravity is oppressive, not democratic at all.
Our sexual mores are turning into one vast pig rut. The art world is a gigantic taxpayer-supported guano collection. Our college faculties, training up the next generation in the way they should go, is a clamjamfry rabble, certified at least two grad degrees past their intelligence. As for the students, our elite college campuses are populated by lily boys of both sexes.
Our culture is a 62 Galaxie 500, one which has crested the Continental Divide, lost its brakes on the other side, is careening toward western Colorado, with the axles growing hot. Kind of like that.
And the progressives, the driving force behind all of this nonsense, hate being questioned about any of it for several reasons. First, it is easier to shout your opponents down than to answer the arguments. Shoot, it would be far easier if they could just have them arrested. You are not a climate denier by any chance, are you?
Second, the lack of answers forthcoming is not to say that their deep down space is occupied by a blissful and serene ignorance. No, down below the sternum of every man and every woman is the knowledge that nonsense remains nonsense, no matter how many people are yelling it. And so that means, at the bottom of everything, is massive, unrelenting, ever-present, always-restless, never-asleep guilt. Men without answers get angry in debates, and guilty men get even angrier in debates. That is why debates will soon be illegal.
In the meantime, establishment Christian leaders, who should be leading the resistance, are tuft-hunters, aching for the kind of respectability that only a disintegrating and leprous culture can bestow. And the Christian leaders who are part of a faithful remnant and who therefore show some fight are chastised by the others as troublemakers. Those Christian leaders soon get the treatment. Fight? Far better to labor quietly off grid on something that the progressives will have no trouble seizing whenever they decide to. Gives us something to do while we wait.
So what is the central problem? The difficulty is that we don’t want a fixed standard. Everything is coming unstuck because we cannot have the kind of certainty that we need in order to keep it from becoming unstuck. But in order to have that kind of certainty, we have discovered that we would simultaneously have to bring in the possibility of being wrong. And because we are a proud, haughty, and conceited people, we will not accept the very old-fashioned possibility of simply being wrong.
That would hurt our feelings, which we all know is now illegal.
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