Everyone is talking about the current existential danger to Western civilisation. Everyone is only partly right.
Our civilisation is indeed under threat, but this doesn’t come from any axis of evil, whichever countries are supposed to make it up. Great civilisations don’t succumb to physical threats from outsiders. They only ever collapse under the weight of their own metaphysical folly, with outsiders sometimes providing the last straw.
Metaphysics doesn’t have to spring from faith in any confessional sense. It does, however, have to be correct, for a faulty metaphysical premise invariably undermines practical outcomes. In fact, it’s practical results that can as often as not either vindicate the metaphysics or disprove it.
The proof of the metaphysical pudding is in the empirical eating. Conversely, if we look deeply enough, we’ll realise that the most spectacular practical errors mankind ever makes all come from a metaphysical blunder that then triggers off a chain reaction of folly. Our present situation is no exception.
In his Essay on Metaphysics R.G. Collingwood (d. 1943) ascribes the fall of the Roman Empire to this cause. A clash between an increasingly monotheistic philosophy and an obstinately polytheistic people deprived the Romans of their spiritual backbone. They began to question the certitudes on which their society was based, and before too long they were no longer sure what those certitudes were.
The Romans no longer understood their own society. They no longer knew what role they themselves had to play in their community, or what role their community played in the general scheme of things.
Mired in confusion, they resorted to decadence. Misguided in their overall direction, they got lost in a warren of blind alleys. They tried to probe every which way, but there was no way out – they were running in place.
Fatigue set in. Step by step, the stuffing went out of their previously taut muscles, and they fell prey to barbarian attacks. Such is the aetiology of the senility and erosion of will to which historians usually, and correctly, attribute the demise of Rome.
Collingwood concludes (in The Principles of Art): “Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilisation are no longer on the whole convinced that the form of life which it tries to realise is worth realising, nothing can save it.”
Parallels with our own situation cry out to be made, and many writers have responded to that cry. Like Rome, we too are reaping the poisoned harvest of metaphysical folly. It is the grave error we made in having jettisoned the sound theocentric metaphysics on which Western civilisation was built in the first place.
In its stead we have put forth the anthropocentric metaphysics that began with Renaissance humanism, developed through the Reformation and Enlightenment, and culminated in the manic-depressive relativism of post-modernity. Moving man from the periphery of God’s world to the centre of his own, this hubristic elevation of self to a God-like status destroyed the precarious metaphysical balance on which the West rested – with likely consequences similar to those suffered by the Romans.
We too are no longer certain of our fundamental convictions. We too have replaced stern resolve with decadence. We too have lost the will to defend ourselves against even a theoretically weaker enemy.
The major difference so far is that we haven’t yet had this point hammered home by a barbarian onslaught. But few are the optimists who maintain that such a development is improbable. Even fewer are the realists who point out that the barbarians have already attacked and won. Except that in our case the vandals came from inside, not outside, our city walls.
Our culture has lost structure and therefore order. Entropy reigns, and any teleological sense of direction has fallen by the wayside. We have lost the ability to think in straight lines, which is to say we’ve lost the ability to think. A typical Westerner may well conclude that the shortest distance between two points is a hamster wheel.
Metaphysical decline has been long in the making, but its forward motion has had an accelerator built in. Thanks to the technological advances of which modernity is so proud, what used to take centuries may now take years or even months.
Like an old man who looks back on his life and can’t pinpoint the exact time when he did become old, we try to take stock of our ertswhile certitudes, only to find they are no longer there.
We notice, for example, that our democracy is no longer democratic, our supposedly free speech is no longer free, our culture is no longer cultured, our justice is no longer just, and we start pointing a finger at all sorts of culprits.
Blaming anyone other than ourselves comes easily to us, and our accusing finger first jerks eastwards to indict any melange of barbarians clad in camouflaged animal skins and armed with nuclear spears. The few oddballs capable of thinking critically may realise that our problems are really internal. But they don’t look far enough back, nor deeply enough inside.
Their bogeymen may be deemed to be lurking on the left or the right of politics, in schools or government offices, even in sports arenas (whatever use they are put to). But they are looking at the physical symptoms of a metaphysical malaise – and the like can only ever be treated with the like.
That’s where one can easily lose hope. The tired clichés, along the lines of toothpaste that can’t be squeezed back into the tube, begin to sound tangibly germane to our situation. One can legitimately fear that, barring a global catastrophe, our tattered metaphysical fibre can never be sewn back together.
And if the parenthetical phrase about a global catastrophe indeed points to the only possible solution, then we face an awful dilemma whose horns are ready to nail us to the wall.
On the one hand, we are desperate to regain our erstwhile metaphysical strength. Yet on the other hand, we find ourselves unable to wish for what we might have identified as the only possible restorative remedy: a universal cataclysm sweeping away millions or billions of lives.
And now, by all means do let’s talk about our voting intentions at the next elections. The box we tick will make all the difference, won’t it?
Totally correct: rot always comes from within. I’d also add that the fall of all major civilisations was usually preceded by sexual perversions and aberrations – from Sodom and Gomorrah to Greece with its pederasty to Romans with their samesex and heterosexual orgies. With modern-day liberals imposing the LGBT agenda on the western society, they preciptate the imminent fall.
“the anthropocentric metaphysics that began with Renaissance humanism, developed through the Reformation and Enlightenment, and culminated in the manic-depressive relativism of post-modernity. ”
And combined with the industrial Age and modern science [an understanding of germ theory for instance] it was thought that with enough application of money, technology and education all the traditional problems that caused misery for thousands of years could be eradicated. “You shall be as gods”.
All this talk of societal collapse is a morbid fantasy. I think some people on the political fringe underestimate the modern state’s ability to absorb immigrants, new information, even cataclysms.
Take for example, the USA’s ‘disastrous’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. By rights that should have but an end to America as a global player, yet here she is, with her fingers in every geopolitical pie.
As far as Britain is concerned; 5 long years of Labour majority rule is what will restore a sense of balance. Small ‘c’ conservatives need to abandon this ludicrous idea that the Labour Party is some doomsday cult, and finally acknowledge the fact that the vast majority of their countrymen do not share their sensibilities.
The absurdity of British conservatism can be neatly illustrated by the 2011 referendum regarding the abandonment of First Past The Post in favour of proportional representation. There is a good chance that the latter system would have given genuine conservatives a louder voice in the halls of power, but was rejected by those same people on the grounds that to make such a ‘radical’ change would be an insult to the holy ghost of conservatism.
Why bring metaphysics into it? If we desert God, God deserts us. Our problem is not so much metaphysical as personal. We are not so much philosophers who have got our syllogisms muddled as adulterers who deserve to be divorced. See the Old Testament, passim.
I see no hope but in prayer.
Looking back at prior civilizations might make analysis easier. Future historians might put an end date of the 17th or 18th century on what we consider our civilization. Certainly there is very little high art or architecture being created these days, tying the current period to that of the Romanesque, Gothic, or Baroque periods. Western civilization might carry on in the political form, but in nothing else. We have not yet seen an attack from an outside culture. Perhaps the Muslims pose an existential threat, but only time will tell. We might be more resilient than the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, due to the fact that most people – including would-be attackers – just don’t care any longer, as long as they can shop and aren’t being openly exterminated. And there are few lions left to which Christians can be thrown.