Month: June 2020

 

Slabs of irregular stained concrete, exposed metal framing on windows, and stacked geometries connected by sterile stairwells declining as much as elevating,  metastatically dominate the classic gabled tower, roofline and arches of the near by buildings in Lyon, France.  I suspect no citizen of Lyon was likely asked their opinion as to whether their vision of their city would be elevated by such a structure.  They were likely passive supplicants in an elite drive to “modernize” the society.  This brutal building, purposefully juxtaposed to obscure a classicist past with a post humanist future, was ironically constructed as a place of learning, a secondary school of education.  What it teaches us instead is how far we have lost our way in understanding the elements of our own humanity that would call out for reserving a place for learning at all.  The derision and displacement of the past is not an invention of our current societal strife as expressed through the seemingly disjointed and random nature of the current vandalizing and destruction of our monuments to the past.  It is part of a deep, primordial need to self-destruct rather than accept the challenges required by nature to evolve.  If anything, the self destructive drive appears to be gaining real traction.

Destruction of monuments is nothing new in human history.  Each succeeding regime has looked to replace the symbols of past glory with those of their own.  The Roman destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Visigoths’ looting of the Roman Forum, the Islamic conquest of Byzantium, the Spanish seizures of the American Indigenous Empires all resulted in replacement of older venerations with newer versions extolling the superiority of the conqueror’s virtues to that which preceded. Though birthed in violence, the new regimes often assumed  the virtues of the previous regime in that in doing so, the extent of the success was magnified and evolved.  The Romans took their architecture, philosophy and religion from the Greeks, and eventually from the monotheistic Jews.  The Visigoths and their descendants the Franks absorbed the Roman Empire and through the Roman’s recent conversion to Christianity, converted themselves and made their conquest  Holy Roman.  The Ottomans converted the Hagia Sophia to a mosque.  The Americans took from the defeated British Empire its rule of law and its legislative  structure.    Statues were toppled, but they were replaced like phoenixes out of the ashes with other statues and monuments  glorifying a  reverence of a more evolved and complete version of the ancient virtues-  heroism, prudence, courage, justice, and beauty.

With the French Revolution something broke.  A nihilism took over, not previously seen with such enthusiasm.  The reign of terror sought to eliminate the past without building upon it.  A year zero was declared and  prior history was to be rejected and erased.  The Cult of Reason threw out the acknowledgement of a Greater Being to emulate or aspire. Claiming a mandate of individual rights, the mob empowered justice soon became authoritarian and turned upon its own, treating other thought as heretical and the solution the guillotine of thousands.  It so consumed its own rationality for existence it became the prey for a usurper who could project competence and discipline, Napoleon Bonaparte.  The birth of Nihilism found root however, projecting in the 19th century through Nietzsche, Engels, and Marx.  The rejection of thousands of years of evolved human thought.  Virtues were a sign of weakness – the only beliefs acceptable were those that projected a truth that removed individual exceptionalism, an supported an intense drive for the collective and equality of outcome. The twentieth century brought the massive attempt at realization of such brutalistic themes in the flowering of Communism, Fascism, and the devastation of two world wide conflagrations consuming several hundred million lives.  A herculean effort was required to stop the destructive darkness,  but what appeared to be defeat in 1989 was only a brief respite.  The core need to destroy ancient virtues and thereby eliminate individuality has flamed in the suicidal nihilism of the Islamic terrorist, the drive toward globalist domination of elite authoritarians in promoting the climate apocalypse, and the recent need to decapitate the past through the un-education of a generation of youth by injecting  emotional “truth” and seeking the elimination of rational truth – the difference between the sexes, the sanctity of life, the pursuit of happiness through meritocratic accomplishment.

“You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.”
― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

The nihilists feel it is 1792 again, and the time is ripe for victory.  They are no longer happy with forcing the rest of society to accept a brutal building, destroying the beauty and the clarity of the surrounding architecture.  They won’t be satisfied with a grievance culture that brutally ignores the cataclysmic  statistics of ruined lives that are associated with their policies glorifying  grievance.  They are no longer satiated with screaming down rational conversation and attempts to solve problems through enlightenment.

They are again hungry for the brutal clarity of “truth” that is the guillotine.  They are practicing first on the statues.

 

Civilizations inevitably have a rise, a golden age, and a fall.  The most famous documented in literature is the story of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, as Odoacer of the Goths determined to remove the last vestiges of the seats of power of the empire from its thousand year presence in the capital Rome.  Odoacer did not have to achieve a massive battle conquest; the empire’s rulers had fundamentally run out of people willing to die trying to defend its reason for being,   A vast core set of shared societal principles that had led to the dominance, greatness, and expanse of the empire over hundreds of years, and immunity to periods of unstable and incompetent leaders,  had eroded to a point of imperceptibility.   Citizens living among great citadels and shrines to the past had no residual perspective of how they came to be, or why they should be maintained.  It simply took a gentle but concerted push to turn the whole rotten edifice over.  We are left only with the fragile ruins and the distant echoes of what stood before the civilization grew tired of itself.

Perhaps our modern American civilization is in the initial stages of a similar coming collapse.  The last four years in America have presaged our current anarchy in the streets with a pattern of anarchic actions of our elite institutions against the very foundational principles of a representative democracy based upon their singular hatred of the uncouth ‘barbarian” elected to lead the country and the archaic reactionary impulses  he felt he was elected to enact.  The President has bludgeoned the elites usual means of dominance they have built up over decades  organized around coordinated communication of  prescribed narratives, bureaucratic indifference to the affected, closing of diversity of thought in the educational academy, and the instillment of conflict of interests between societal groups to best leverage their subservience.   The President has proved a particularly difficult opponent in that he uses no accumulated intellectual principles to respond.  Admittedly proud of having written more books than he has read, President Trump instead relies on  animalistic instincts based upon visual cues and gut reaction he gains from the crowds of supporters that embrace him.  It has left him exposed to the highest level of outrage and hatred from those whose righteousness can not accept someone so impervious to their pressures.  The result has been an unceasing effort to destroy Trump and the dangerous contrarian voices he energizes.  The war to destroy has been from the first moment he showed political traction, and the combined power of all the elite institutions have worked to crush him.

Taking advantage of his naive understanding of politics, his opposition, the Clinton campaign,  worked with the entrenched bureaucracy to inject a narrative of treasonous actions into the political bloodstream.  Working with allies in the press and higher ups in the Obama administration,  a false and ludicrous narrative was built through opposition research to suggest a Russian influence in the Trump campaign that wasn’t there, and then married it through to a nefarious and coordinated  campaign by the Obama administration, emboldened by concocted fraudulent FISA court documents, to spy upon multiple Trump  campaign officials, including likely, the candidate himself.  This criminal action sought to undermine a democratic election, and failing that, evolved into a doubled down process attacking every facet of the Trump administration through a false collusion narrative corruptly supported by the FBI, sustained doggedly by an adversarial press, injected with steroids by a two year special prosecutor farce, and finally, when that failed,  a final move in for the kill through a “whistleblower” linking routine Trump loose talk to a crash  impeachment and attempted removal.  To their stunned surprise, the Kraken remained standing, and, given the bountiful economy, an even more formidable opponent for the next election.

Then came the economic gift from the gods of retribution, the Wuhan virus.  Powerless to stop the worldwide pandemic, Trump panicked under enormous pressure from elite ‘experts’  and closed down the economy to prevent spread.  Cratering the recovery of the most wide spread distribution of individual economic success in the past sixty years in the world’s largest economy, the actions simultaneously allowed opposition leaders to strengthen and fortify the damage by top down arbitrary and ruthlessly efficient lock downs.  Month after month the definition of ‘non-essential’ was expanded to assure devastating destruction of private enterprise and enhance opportunities for further government and elite dependence on basic survival.  When the societal stresses grew great, the brew was ripe for an eruption, and the powder keg went off with the Minneapolis police arrest and obscene killing of a black male, viewed by the whole nation.  The perfect storm of a presumptive hate crime and a massively restless population from the lockdown led to mass looting and destruction.  The police, being the very symbol of oppression and societal  racial sin evidenced  in the crime, were powerless to respond, and their large city democrat bosses took advantage in stoking the flames of hatred and unrest.  Soon a coordinated effort to allow anarchists to stoke the chaos, feed by unseen hands of guidance and financial means, swept across the country and world, subsuming the initial protests’ righteous clarity and purpose, and injected a darker and more sustained streak of premeditated societal breakdown and chaos.

Here we stand.  Were Trump to somehow achieve a miraculous escape from the trap set for him and win the coming election, one most assuredly is looking at a logarithmic expansion of the virulent and violent response to his very existence as President.  If the democrats  succeed in the sustained effort to destroy Trump and are rewarded for their four year criminal and unprecedented effort to eliminate an opponent, their reward will be achieved on the backs of radical elements that seek to destroy the foundations of the republic and replace it with their own authoritarian vision.  Either way,  the seeds of civilizational collapse are deeply planted in the fallows.

Societies inevitably require a certain set of shared values, and this society is increasingly seeing such shared values rent asunder. The majority of people who understood the history of the republic, the challenges it faced, and the triumphant overcoming of its flaws time and time again predicated upon the tenets of its founding as the ultimate unifier, are rapidly being replaced with generations who orient opinions on feelings and emotions, not rationally objective principle and truth.  Are there enough of us to pull it all back from the abyss?

The ancient Romans who cared about civilization are reaching across the mists of time to say, sustain, sustain, or soon become the past.