On the Proposal That the Culture Is Not Collapsing, It Is Gone | Part 5

Despite all we have to say about the collapse of our culture, despite our growing inclination to agree with those chronicling this event –

As our cultural degradation appears to be approaching terminal velocity, a number of Christians have awakened, somewhat belatedly, and have started to protest by saying things like, “Hey, what’s going on?”

Douglas Wilson, “Christian Nationalism and an Education that Suits,” Educator in Residence (4 January 2023)

– we seem oddly disinclined to reach the conclusion of observers like Peter Hitchens, who writes that

with gathering speed and completeness, a total revolution in thought and morals is taking hold of Western societies.

Peter Hitchens, “You Know It’s Over When Even Barbie Surrenders To the Woke Revolution,” Daily Mail.com (7 August 2021) 

We delight in Hitchens’s stirring language but do not take it seriously, i.e., literally.

Talking here about a revolution “taking hold” Hitchens is softening the message delivered by his justly mournful column in The Mail on Sunday, which is that the revolution has happened. It is done; it has succeeded. But when Hitchens tells us that “our society is in ruins” we think this a cue to protect the statues.

Our society … is in ruins. What is there to protect? ‘Is in ruins’ is not a verbal exclamation point; it is a quiet metaphorical picture of visible reality. The thing that we have called a culture, a society shaped by that culture as once it was, is in pieces on the ground.

Our society is in ruins because politicians of all major parties ruined it. They attacked stable family life. They allowed the … BBC to wage a war against patriotism, religion, and morality. They encouraged private debt. They removed wise controls on the twin curses of alcohol and gambling. They excused crime and let it rage and failed to prevent the spread of dangerous illegal drugs. They neutralised the police and courts. They destroyed manufacturing industry. They flung open our borders. They started stupid wars. They ruined the schools. They postponed the reckoning by borrowing and borrowing and hoping something would turn up…. It has taken much effort to bring one of the greatest civilisations in human history to this state, but here we are. 

Peter Hitchens, “If Liz Truss Was the Answer, Whatever Was the Question?”, The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail.com (22 October 2022)

That is change in almost every department of life and does not even touch on the ideas and mental constructs that are needed to pull off this feat.

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As the opportunity arises I will consider the evidence for this claim – I will amplify and illustrate the evidence that Hitchens has just laid out. It is evidence that the revolution is, in fact, accomplished. Yet however close some of us come to that conclusion we never actually reach it (at present we are still “approaching terminal velocity,” still getting there “with gathering speed and completeness”) – and this reticence is fairly to be expected when we have not got so far as to ask what an accomplished revolution might be.

It is a further part of my hypothesis to suggest, however, that the dizzying things we now see “taking hold” belong to the denouement. The blackened fruit of the new culture is beginning to drop. Entire orchards we never saw being planted, though they were planted right in front of us, have matured and the garish produce, flaunting colours not found in nature, is laid out for consumption. Jason Morgan, author at The Imaginative Conservative, writes,

these past several years, we Americans have been living in an accelerating anti-cultural vortex.

Jason Morgan, “Now Is The Best Time To Be Southern,” The Abbeville Blog (10 March 2021)

What is this phenomenon that Morgan is describing? It is not, I suggest, a force whirling against our culture and threatening to destroy it; it is the necessary anti-culture that has replaced it, now come into its own.

When the civic means of genuine life painstakingly developed by our ancestors are systematically replaced – and that is just what culture is: shared ways and institutions conceived to further life and curtail non-life – that replacement will be, by definition, an anti-culture. (Remove what is conducive to life, you get conditions conducive to non-life. Remove what inhibits illness and, voilà, a path is cleared for that very illness.) The “vortex” is the mad anti-life that the replacement culture has begun to cast off, at a frantic pace, and there is more to come.

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To repeat the general hypothesis I am advancing here, it is that our culture was demolished by despisers and replaced with their culture, but an addition to this is needed, which is that this demolition would have been quite impossible unless we had agreed to assist in it – unless we believed it possible to do without the things we let go. Indeed we found it possible; in fact we found it easy, as ease had been a bullet-point in the advertising. 

But however much our culture disappeared, we did not notice. It was hard for us to notice that it was disappearing in the midst of so much else that was disappearing in a riot of departure that we were cheering on, intoxicated by the new habits and behaviour handed us by modernization. It might be said that the cultural revolution remained entirely invisible to us simply because we did not see our time – on account of some proclivity in us – as an era of cultural collapse.

It may even be quite normal, assuming there is a norm in the way cultures are successfully destroyed, that the society losing its culture cannot see this happening while it is happening – and, for the very same reason, does not even notice when the demolition is accomplished.

In events – and especially, I think you might agree, in what we call historical events – the open and obvious can be quite hidden. ‘Obvious’ does not mean understood, but retains its etymological sense, which is that a thing is ‘standing in front of us’. Why not, without our seeing it?

What is happening in our faces, openly, can be hard to recognize on account of something in people. In our case this was a delusional conviction of supremacy.

We were convinced that the country was our country, the Western world our world – that we were in charge, so much in control that we could well afford to make marginal concessions to the ‘agnostics’ not yet aboard the project, to open the door to them. The same blindness ensured that we entirely misread these people, as adolescents starved of a proper take on life (our own). But if these neighbours held the wrong view of life they were not credally starved, as the thinkers of the modern West had for centuries been in hot production of an alternative understanding of the world meant to replace ours. These friends and neighbours were people who had contrary beliefs quite as firmly grounded as ours. Indeed, a great many of them had taken pains to learn the arguments (of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau), while the upholders of tradition had done no reading at all.

Another knot we must undo is found here, in the belief that a thing is ‘established enough to live by’ only when it is established by our standards, in our way – only our beliefs are grounded, every other position is simply a hash of wish fulfilment. In our own neighbourhoods and even in our own homes we thought (rather like the cliché imperialist before the benighted colonial) that these unsettled malcontents would outgrow their disaffection and come around to the superior way.

Blindness even to massive upheavals can be imposed by a state of the soul.

Part 6 coming on 5 January