Epitaph for a Dying Culture
The
Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended
up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to
be worse than its diseases. Think 338 B.C., A.D. 476, 1453, or 1939.
The coordinated effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the
U.S. Supreme Court required the systematic refutation of the entire
notion of Western jurisprudence by senators and much of the American
legal establishment. And there was no hesitation in doing just that on
the part of Senate Democrats, the #MeToo movement, and the press. And I
write this at a moment in which conservatives and Republicans still
control the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the U.S.
Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court and the
presidency—a reminder that
culture so often is far more powerful than
politics.
So, here we were to be left with a new legal and cultural standard in
adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western
standard quite befitting for our new relativist age:
- The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
- Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
- The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
- Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
- Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as
valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated
only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps
“their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
- Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and
therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that
the action in the accusation took place.
- Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades
prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any
moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will
destroy lives.
- Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
- Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes;
individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All
accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or
innocence trump those of individual cases.
- The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.
Our cultural traditions are being insidiously rewritten in
this new
Dark Age. We know now that Euripides’s Phaedra should have been
believed, as a female accuser of rape. Perhaps university presses can
either reissue properly corrected editions or ban the
Hippolytus entirely. No doubt we will ban Racine’s
Phèdre as well. Harper Lee’s Tom Robinson deserved his fate because his female accuser should have been believed—and perhaps
To Kill a Mockingbird should
be rewritten as well. In our time, we have finally and only now
belatedly realized that Tawana Brawley’s voice was stifled.
History as Melodrama
In an iconoclastic age, when statues are toppled, and when street names
at Stanford University are renamed (but, mysteriously, not the
politically incorrect name Stanford itself), the past is captive to the
present. Realities are erased according to current ideological agendas.
Our pastime is to blame those of the technologically backward and
impoverished past. In most cases, they accomplished things that our
present generation lacks the courage and resilience to do—whether
navigating the Atlantic in a leaky boat without accurate navigation,
homesteading on the prairie in an age without machines or modern
medicine, or flying a B-17 without fighter escort over 1943 Germany. Is
it our envy of their courage or own self-hatred for our manifest
inferiority that forces us to judge figures of the past in our modern
courts on the basis of their purported race, class, and gender crimes?
So, history has become melodrama, not tragedy. Figures of the past
who were human and not perfect, and who prove, according to today’s
value systems, not good progressives are thus deserving of historical
annihilation. The affluence and leisure of the present create the luxury
of such pampered intellectual indulgence in a way the existential
crises of Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II did not.
In our own age, the disproven but still legendary tales of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” the Duke Lacrosse fantasies, the
Rolling Stone
folktales, or Lena Dunham’s fictive memoir won out and became fact,
inasmuch as such lies were not real lies given their service to
progressive aims. And that is where we are now headed—the world of the
Athenian popular court, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the
Star Chamber, the cycles of the French Revolution—except that in all
those cases, reason and sanity eventually returned. Perhaps not now.
We
are entering a new Dark Ages.
If we to look to the universities for truth and courage we find
increasingly medieval darkness, wherein matters of alleged sexual
harassment there is no due process for the accused.
Free speech on campus vanishes if minority views are dubbed “hate” speech or declared merely “hurtful.”
There is little diversity of opinion and even less tolerance of any
dissent from majority dogma. Obsequiousness so often is redefined as
courage; real courage condemned as a crime against the people. Campus
segregation becomes desirable, if privileged by “safe spaces.”
Censorship is sensitivity and justified by “trigger warnings.” The
apparent absence of bias becomes proof of bias if dubbed a
“micro-aggression.” Racial discrimination in admissions affirms
liberality.
The sensuality, personal indulgence, and even recklessness of the 1960s still continue, but become criminal, if
post facto,
one party finds his or her immoderation unfulfilling or in retrospect
embarrassing. Woodstock is now married to the Victorian parlor, the
common denominator for our self-absorbed generation seems to be to enjoy
the refuge of shame and honor when gratification proves not gratifying.
Welcome to the Progressive Church
If we look to the media, there is an overarching dogma that governs the
veracity of all other “truths.” “Fake News” is a misnomer, given that
the general force of prejudicial media coverage is not just falsity, but
the effort to substantiate progressive agendas.
The embryo of modern journalism is either progressive graduate
schools or past progressive political campaigns and service, and so the
media is an extension of the progressive movement. The trivial to the
substantial are all invented to advance narratives, whether a greedy
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s supposedly ordering self-indulgent $50,000
drapes or Mark Judge purportedly recalling, and thus
de facto corroborating, Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations.
If we look to our brave, new technologies—social media, the Internet,
the linked world of instant communication devices—they prove entirely
missionary and ideological. Their reason to be is accelerating social
and cultural change—albeit with the assumption that their the masters
who run these technologies assume that their own privilege and vast
wealth have insulated themselves from any unwelcomed ramifications
following from their own ideology and advocacy.
So everything from Facebook and Twitter censorship to politically
recalibrating the order of Google searches serves
the larger collective
“good.” Even ancient ideas of wealth and poverty fade before our current
ideology. If riches are used for social change, even if cynically and
for careerist and self-interested reasons, then how they were obtained
or otherwise used is irrelevant; if not, then they are proof of greed in
their acquisition. Multibillionaire George Soros might be a wanted
felon in France or have attempted to break the Bank of England and
thereby ruin small depositors. But his wealth is welcomed because he
invests a small percentage of it in progressive causes and thereby
purchases his own progressive insurance and protection. As did the
Catholic Church in the Dark Ages of yore, the Progressive Church now
sells indulgences.
If we look to consensual government for hope, we see instead the
courts and the permanent administrative class more often as the new
governance. Their directives are to obstruct or overturn residual
popular forces of tradition and custom, whether that consists of
overriding bothersome federal immigration law, or advancing states’
rights ideas of nullification such as “sanctuary cities.”
Few Escape Routes Left
In
this growing Dark Age, nothing is as it was. We have only faint
memories of what was normal just decades ago. Professional sports become
vehicles for promulgating progressive versions of social justice.
Athletic excellence is increasingly adjudicated on the basis of
ideology, despite the dark lessons of totalitarian societies that have
done just that in the past.
Hollywood has run out of ideas, reduced either to making pale
imitations of classic films or flat psychodramas about courageous,
perpetually 30-something social justice warriors. Late-night comedy,
indeed all comedy, has disappeared and turned into a boring
regurgitation of progressive themes or safe situational
banality—reminiscent of the decline of Old Comedy of Aristophanes to the
psychodramas of Hellenistic New Comedy. Even left-wing comedians such
as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin could not now exist.
In science,
we are back to the age of silencing Galileo. Dare suggest
that human efforts to address purported man-caused global warming are
not cost-effective, and one’s academic career, his funding and status
are imperiled. Suggest that research shows not all the accusations of
sexual harassment of females are to be believed without corroborating
evidence, and one is damned as a retrograde sexist if not a closet
assaulter himself. Imply that the greatest health crisis facing black
youth is the violence on the streets of a Baltimore or Chicago, and one
is a supporter of police misconduct. Hint that our sex is almost always
innate and biologically determined and not usually socially constructed,
and one becomes a “-phobe” of some sort.
Language is in service to the state and progressive agendas, either
by the creation of new words or refining old ones. “Homosexual” and
“transvestism” are not any longer clinical vocabulary, but slurs.
“White” is not descriptive so much as pejorative. “Liberty” and
“freedom” are synonymous with selfishness, if not conspiracy. To join
“overseas contingency operations” to thwart “man-caused disasters” and
“workplace violence” could mean almost anything and thus, by design,
they mean nothing.
The result is that, in lieu of pushback, to escape
the new Dark Age,
tens of millions of Americans are increasingly dropping out in search of
some sort of physical or mental monastery, an escape, a refuge from a
vindictive state and from those who crafted and are invested in it.
Millions no longer watch the Emmys or Grammys or any sort of
entertainment awards event. They do not go to the movies or even watch
new Hollywood releases on their computers or televisions.
Popular music is skipped on the expectation that it is not just
vulgar and foul, but incoherently politicalized. They more and more pass
on professional sports, neither watching nor attending what has become
condemnatory rituals or lectures on social justice from pampered
multimillionaire athletes.
At work, they keep their thoughts to themselves and nod assent to received pieties.
Courtship resembles a careful script in which a wrong word, an
unartful advance can spell career destruction. To be safe, would-be
couples inquire firsthand about their respective politics and
traditions. The amoral marketplace, in
Brave New World fashion, answers with promises of inanimate and mechanical sex partners.
All scour their past—in fear that something 20, 30, or 50 years prior
might resurface, immediately become mythologized and thus weaponized to
destroy them, especially should they have achieved status, public
recognition, affluence, or influence. One’s personal privacy is kept
hidden, not just in disgust with our generation’s therapeutic maladies
in which others pour out their emotions and fragilities in lieu of an
idea, but because any disclosure is expected later to be used against
oneself.
An idea of retirement is not merely a house by the lake or a cottage
on the coast to die in peace, but now a mental refuge in which we are at
last free from 24/7 sermonizing and worry over thought crimes, both in
person and electronically—a world in which a sermonizer on a computer
screen or in a television set does not lecture us for perceived
shortcomings without acknowledgment that he is more likely than not to
also fail to meet his own standards of morality.
In other words,
America is resembling the medieval Balkans, where
spent traditionalists fled to the mountaintops, abandoned the plains of a
dying culture to the new zealots who stormed in under the pretense of
civilization.
