(I’m reminded of Marx’s observations that technology was the true revolutionary principle, with “revolutionising the instruments of production” being able to destroy traditions by shifting their foundations faster than they can adapt.)

David Solway is a Canadian poet and that probably explains the title of a piece he wrote last year about what’s happening to the West, Among the Broken Columns of the Twilight Kingdom.

One of his main points is that we can’t just jump ship. From nation to nation perhaps, and even then it’s increasingly a fact that there is nowhere else to run.

Those who have eyes to see need only look to behold a political estate whose complete ineptitude is eclipsed only by its endemic venality, an expert class that earns its prerogatives by being wrong about mainly everything, a caste of remote, self-interested, and profoundly ignorant government bureaucrats, a media apparat that has offered what is left of its tattered soul to a remunerating master and a prevailing orthodoxy, an intellectual clerisy that has sold its cultural integrity to the allurements of power and privilege, a medical profession that has colluded with a corrupt viral industry, and a majority public indifferent to the disaster that awaits it.

A critique that can apply to almost every Western nation, with only small shades of difference; for example, NZ is not as corrupt as the USA, judging by our Police actually arresting the Minister of Justice.

But all this stems from a broken philosophy of civilisation:

When one surveys the current culture of the West, one can only conclude that it flows from the broken mind of man, that is, Western man. For we are now, with few exceptions, a broken people, and our culture reflects the fractured symmetry of what we once felt as a reasonably cohesive and unified way of being in the world, a mode of largely unformulated understandings experienced as normal.

The sense of the normal has now become unnatural — destabilized, confused, incoherent, bizarre, even grotesque. This is why our future as a nation and, in a greater supervening perspective, as a civilization has grown increasingly precarious.

And that brokenness could be come permanent if the cracks are not healed in the following generations, and as bad as things are now, that’s where they could really unwind.

Rod Dreher has thirty years as a journalist behind him and three best-selling books to his name, including The Benedict Option, which was basically a guide to how Christians might be able to jump ship inside our societies by forming groups that try to disconnect as far as possible, something the Amish have already done. Without referring to that book he provides further reasons for its objectives in his article, Forgetting How To Be A Civilization, which sees what Solway has, and includes non-religious people in that mix:

Everything about Christian civilization, in terms of its model of family and sexuality, has been turned upside down by the Sexual Revolution. Philip Rieff, a nonbelieving Jew, saw this as far back as 1966. We have created what Rieff called an “anti-culture” — a culture that has chosen to become one incapable of sustaining itself. That is why our civilization is dying.
…
I’ve just finished Louise Perry’s must-read book The Case Against The Sexual Revolution. Perry is not (apparently) a religious believer, or even a conservative. She’s rather an English feminist who sizes up the Sexual Revolution and concludes that it has been a disaster for women and children. Perry comes to the same conclusions that many Christians do, but she does so not based on religious revelation or Scriptural instruction, but rather through a pitiless appraisal of sociological facts and human desires.

The dying may soon become literal given our birth rates and the multiple reasons for that, including these:

Teenagers are told that whatever they desire must be good, and normal. It is forbidden to forbid. This rule has serious social consequences. As difficult as it is to form and to maintain a family — remember, I am going through a divorce after 25 years of marriage — it can only really be done at a mass level if society shares a binding belief that doing so is not only good, but is a greater good than rival goods.

Think about it: young people only have a certain number of years to get their acts together, pair off, and start to produce the next generation. We have created a society that lies to them about this. Our society is so given over to radical individualism that it pretends that all familial arrangements are equally good, and that to say otherwise marks you as some sort of bigot.

It’s easy to lose a decade in forming a family and contrary to another popular modern belief, it doesn’t get easier in your thirties.

All this traces to a bitter truth that Dreher has to acknowledge:

I often cite in this space something that a Polish high school teacher told me in 2019, trying to help me understand why Christianity is dying among the young in that solidly Catholic nation: because there are no institutions — not family, not Church, and certainly not the state — more powerful in shaping the moral imaginations of the young than social media, especially TikTok.

A lot of conservative families, despite their faith and values, are going to watch their children fall into arrangements like this “throuple”:

Which then produce the astounding statistics about Gen-Z that he quotes from a recent survey of university students in the USA:

One data point that jumps out is that 23% of students at elite schools identify as LGBT including 38% at liberal arts colleges.

Given that the LBG portion of societies has held steady at between 2-4% for decades and on a global basis, this 23% figure has to be down to social contagion – unless you want to argue that heterosexual norms were capable of suppressing some 20% of humans for thousands of years – and that contagion has been boosted fantastically by the technology of cell phones, iPads and social media apps.

I’m reminded of Marx’s observations that technology was the true revolutionary principle, with “revolutionising the instruments of production” being able to destroy traditions by shifting their foundations faster than they could adapt.

Take that figure of 23% and feed it back into the formula for family creation in the 2020’s and 2030’s:

The Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman’s excellent postwar study Family And Civilization explains how the collapse of the stable family model is always a sign of civilizational collapse. He writes about how in the West, the early medieval church brought order to chaotic barbarian tribes by imposing a Christian model of family formation on them — and how that led to the kind of social stability in which people flourished.

Which was observed sixty years ago in African-American communities by the imminent Democrat politician, diplomat and academic Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who forecast to LBJ that all the welfare systems in the world would not help American Blacks if their families were destroyed, and that among the reasons for the destruction would be the welfare systems themselves. The results he predicted can now be observed in every inner city in the USA, along with the fact that immigrant groups of Asians and Blacks from Africa have done far better in education and economically as they create families and hold them together even in the face of adversity, and that American Whites are rapidly trending in the same directions of fatherless families. In 2008 none other than Barack Obama spoke out on this issue, but only once, after the supreme guilt-tripping grifter Jessie Jackson attacked him on the matter.

It’s also those modern, proudly secular “elites” that combine with all this to make it worse, and that however much conservatives might find it hard to accept the fact, these elites, flawed as they are, matter immensely:

It’s hugely significant that conservatives scarcely exist at the Ivies. As much as we like to make fun of Harvard, Yale, and the others for their crackpot wokery, the fact remains that those institutions produce the national elites. 

Networking is far, far more important than we like to think. It’s more important in terms of getting jobs, but it’s also more important as a general phenomenon for how power works. In terms of one’s career, for most people, it is more important who you meet at Harvard than what you learn there. 

Witness Eduardo Saverin meeting Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and ending up a billionaire as a result. And look at these results from that university survey:

Liberal arts colleges are the least politically diverse. Many have almost no conservatives, and thus very low viewpoint diversity. But they have high sexual diversity, at nearly 40 percent LGBT.

Ivy League schools [e.g. Harvard] average 10-15 percent conservative and 60-75 percent liberal. Across 150 leading schools, there are nearly 2.5 liberals for every conservative.

Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 55-23 margin on campus, and liberals outnumber conservatives 53-21. Elite students are thus two-thirds more Democratic and twice as liberal as the American population.

Which then feeds further into those networks of politics, academia, entertainment industries and every other business area, even sports. Which is how you get Awful Executives who actually despise their customers.

What to do in the face of all this? Well, obviously keeping a close eye on what your kids are exposed to, at school and elsewhere. Luckily my kids are just past all this and I confess that as much as I thought I was abreast of it and working through some of it with them, the truth is that I had no idea how bad it was. By some bloody miracle my kids were both aware of all this, even in its precursor forms a decade ago, even as they stood apart from it and saw the fucked up effects: etched in my mind is the day my daughter told me about how she’d refused a high-school friend’s request to take nude photos she could then send to a couple of prospective “boyfriends”.

And I also have a faith that things that are so screwed up must reach an endpoint from which things get better, although such endpoints can be terribly destructive. In that much I agree with Dreher, even though he has no specific answers and comes at it from a Christian perspective I cannot share.

But in truth, there is an unseen war going on around us in the United States, and all over the West, and it has been going on for some time. Our people are losing. I believe as a matter of faith that ultimately, we are going to win. But there will be a lot of suffering to go through on the way to that victory. And as a Christian, we have to realize that there can be no victory without suffering and sacrifice. Does that depress you? It shouldn’t. If you are hearing me rightly, it should cause you to redouble your efforts to deepen your roots in your faith, and in the practices of faith; to work hard to cultivate courage; and to earnestly seek out others who see the world as you do.