The Downfall of the West
The must-read column for today is here:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/01/musings-on-immigration-part-i.html
This is one of the most insightful columns on the immigrant disaster in Europe I have yet seen, and it offers an explanation on two points otherwise inexplicable to me:
First, the appeal of Islam was made clear to me. I don’t know if this is the reason, but it certainly is reasonable, if you take my meaning:
Indeed, one explanation for the spread of radical Islam to the young is that it has an appeal to children who are otherwise tightly controlled by their parents. They find that they can embrace the religion and use it to shame their parents who are not practicing Muslims.
Second, I thought the inexplicable behavior of all European powers after the Second World War incomprehensible. The explanation offered here is again reasonable, fitting in with ordinary human motives and fears. (1) Europe had lost faith in herself and (2) Europe feared that, even if America won the Soviet-NATO atomic wars so often predicted in postwar science fiction, she would be obliterated. America could win, but Europe would be destroyed.
The Second World War did immense physical and psychological damage to Europe. Physically, the continent lay in ruins; France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway had been invaded and occupied, Germany had been crushed and then split in two, Britain had escaped occupation, but had exhausted itself trying to win the war. Psychologically, the continent’s self-confidence had been destroyed. Nationalism and militarism had been thoroughly discredited. Worse, perhaps, Europe was no longer a power in the world. Power had passed firmly to the USA and the USSR.
Emphasis mine. We Americans have never lived in, and can hardly imagine, living in a nation that is not dedicated to an ideal.
We have no idea what it is like to live in a land that stands for nothing, means nothing, and has no future. Small wonder Science Fiction is dominated by the Americans and, to a lesser extent, by the Japanese. In Britain, science fiction has long grown pale on the tall shadow of Michael Moorcock and his New Wave, that is, socially relevant, bitter, and unappealing futurism. The Michael Palin movie BRAZIL is of this same spirit, if not of the same camp.
The grim and boring Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials has the same social message, even though it is fantasy, not science fiction: since there is no God, hope is for chumps, therefore stay in school and be kind to people in small things.
In Europe, there are no great things to do or to defend.
America stands for something: the bold and daring experiment in human liberty, for liberty is a condition to which Man is not by nature or temperament suited. Slavery is much more comfortable and better fitted to the passions and predispositions of the human race.
European nations in the Middle Ages stood for an equally bold experiment seen nowhere else on Earth: a secular order guided by but not ruled by a spiritual order, that is local kings with circumscribed powers ruling over classes. Slavery was abolished, and the gladiatorial games, and divorce. The classes were not equal, but each man had rights not to be overstepped. A serf was not equal to a noble, but he could not be evicted from his land, for example. And the Church was universal and international even at a time before nations properly so called existed.
Again, between the Reformation and the French Revolution another bold experiment was tried: the civil and the spiritual power would be held (in Protestant nations) or dominated (in Catholic) by the secular authority, whose role was sacred. Nations were to have their own language and culture. National pride as a concept was born.
The French Revolution with its universal aspirations, and likewise the Russian Revolution, were utter failures in the attempt to remove the spiritual element from civic life in Europe.
The ideal of sacred kingship was dead by the time of World War One, as were hopes for a peaceful secular world order based on mutual self interest.
National Socialism, a sort of hybrid form of the French and Russian ideas, attempted to place race and national fervor as a substitute religion, but by its nature Nazism cannot coexist peacefully with other nation-states for the same reason Islam cannot: it is a religion of conquest.
The bizarre and inhuman reaction of European leaders to the rape, groping, and harassment of their womenfolk at the hands of Islam, namely, to turn water hoses on the Europeans, and to cover up the crime and defend the barbarian, is incomprehensible, unless regarded as he behavior of men who are spiritually dead, broken, and without pride.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
