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.