Genesis And Catastrophe

     As appropriate as the title of this piece is, I feel slightly guilty about it. It’s also the title of a brilliant Roald Dahl story. I shan’t tell you any more about that story; find it, read it, and reflect on the tragedy it foretells.

     The laws of cause and effect are inadequately understood even by most who make their livings probing them. That’s because two of them lie beneath all the others – the two that our “analysts” most dislike:

     It may be that of the truths exposed to human reason, those laws are the only ones that are universally hated.

     We are not good at seeing the secondary and tertiary consequences of our actions. The awareness that there will be such consequences frustrates us. Pondering them makes us hesitate. He who hesitates isn’t always lost, but he is frequently called “indecisive.” <contemptuous snort /> As if being quick to make major decisions were some sort of unconditional virtue. Yet that pejorative nudges a lot of people, including many who ought to know better, into moving in haste when they should sit still and think a little longer.

     Slowing things down has become a kind of sin. We’re supposed to be at top speed all the time. Faster! Faster! Faster! Get it done today! People are waiting!

     But slowing things down, giving ourselves more time to think, can be exactly what’s required to avert unforeseen, seriously unpleasant consequences. By corollary, those who urge you to ever greater speed don’t always have the best of intentions.

     This essay from American Tribune is worth extended contemplation. Many will dismiss its contentions without thinking seriously about them. Yet they are hardly novel, historically. Quoth Edmund Burke:

     Those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies some description must be uppermost. The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.

     And that penetrating analyst of demagoguery, Thomas Macaulay:

     The day will come when a multitude of people will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On the one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalism and usury and asking why anyone should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in want of necessaries. Which of the candidates is likely to be preferred by a workman? When Society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged Rome came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your country, by your own institutions.

     Of course, the flacksters and floggers of “equality” – more commonly today, “equity” – regard the above as the most execrable of sentiments. High-flown, sentiment-laden rhetoric, backed by insistent demands that we “do it now,” has propelled evil ideas to which the Tribune attributes a great many consequential evils. A brief taste:

     There are various ways that destruction of our civilization has become apparent. People no longer read, and are encouraged not to read the great books of the Western canon because they were written by “dead white men.” Pornography is omnipresent and entering even mundane aspects of life. Abortion and drug use are encouraged by popular culture. On and on it goes.
     But while the effects of the war on civilization are manifold, I think the avenues of attack and thus reasons for our degradation take four main avenues: the economic, social, religious and political ways in which the pre-August of 1914 world worked are under attack and the result is that we are now stuck in the abominable present.

     Please read the whole thing and think about it. I’ve spent decades studying the Great War and its sequelae, and with every passing year the tragedy of the thing appears to be more in its ideological consequences than in its brutality.

Then came surrender, then came the peace
Then revolution out of the east
Then came the crash, then came the tears
Then came the thirties, the nightmare years
Then came the same thing over again
Mad as the moon
That watches over the plain…

[Al Stewart, “Trains”]

     The blossoming of socialist politics and the underlying notion of universal egalitarianism that followed the Great War have shaped the decades since then. Socialism has demonstrably failed, and has largely been rejected by those who’ve suffered it. However, that belief that “we are all equal” has hung on, infecting virtually every other social, economic, and political conception that’s risen over the century behind us.

     We are not “all equal.” That’s demonstrated every day. Some are stronger. Some are smarter. Some are braver. Some – slam this one hard, Gentle Reader – are wiser. Nothing any man or nation can contrive will erase those differences. Any attempt to act as if they don’t exist brings calamity.

     But riding the coattails of “we are all equal” has come another noxious doctrine: “we should all have a say.” Once again, the tragedies that have issued from that notion are legion. Think “democratic socialism.” Think “stakeholder capitalism.” Think homeowners’ associations. Try not to shudder.

     “We should all have a say” in what? Should you “have a say” in what’s properly yours? No argument. In what belongs to others? Absolutely not! It would be clear to anyone of ordinary mentality if it were made personal to him: “Should your neighbors have a say over your personal property? Over what you can do with it, or to it? Over whether you may or must sell it, and to whom, and for how much?”

     Yet what do we think we’re doing when we vote?

     I could go on for an encyclopedia-size volume, but I’ll spare you. It appears that today will be a pleasantly warm and sunny day, and I plan to enjoy it away from all things digital. Please, read the article at American Tribune and think: How much of the lunacy we’re currently suffering could we have averted, had the values, norms, and standards that dominated the West before the Great War continued to prevail throughout the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries?

     Have a nice day.