Apocalypse Any Day Now . . .

Even if you’ve seen it before, go out and rent Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto and look at it with fresh eyes. It is not simply a brilliant adventure story, it is also clearly intended as a parable for our times. The quotation from Will Durrant with which it is prefaced underlines this fact: ‘A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within!’

We are in the throes of the decline of western civilization. To get a sense of historical perspective the thing to study is the fall of the Roman Empire and the some six hundred years of war and chaos and terror that succeeded it. Of course to do this you want to study the traditional texts, which regard the whole period as a disaster, and not the new left-liberal historiography which sees the collapse and aftermath as not such a bad thing at all – something along the lines of ‘What the Barbarians Did for Us.’

Viewed from the traditional perspective (as Gibson seeks to view it) the reality of the current left-liberal agenda (a product primarily of an opportunistic coalition of militant feminism, the gay rights movement and a degenerate socialism) swims sharply into focus. Rather than a vibrant blueprint for a new society, it presents instead evidence of inexorable weakness and decay. Like those diseases that infect a weakened body, the left-liberal agenda and all its various –isms flourish simply because the dying civilization lacks the power of resistance.

Like ichneumon wasps that lay their eggs in the body of caterpillars, the left-liberals colonise the easy prey of a dying world. The novocaine they use to anaesthetise their host is ‘political correctness,’ under which people become self-censoring, afraid to say what they think, or even think what they think, lest they be accused of being sexist or racist or ageist or animalist or whatever.

There is an unprecedented pressure on people to conform to the now dominant view – one poured out on all sides from media and academia and various high-profile liberal opinion-formers. Nor does argument enter into it – venture a remark that offends against the liberal canon and the result is less likely to be debate, than a sudden shocked hiatus in the conversation and a hurried moving on.

There is a great deal of rage loose in the world – rage against banks and speculators and politicians. But the graph of social rage has been rising over a longer time-scale than that encompassing our current economic woes. We have had road-rage and trolley-rage and any number of other as yet unnamed rages in a world that for a long time has seemed increasingly on the verge of ‘going postal.’

It is my contention that this increase in inchoate rage is a natural reaction of people who sense, often without being able to put into words, the fact that the world – their world – the world of their intimate thoughts and associations and opinions – has been changing without their consent. People feel they are being manipulated, often without being able to understand the nature or purpose of that manipulation, or how to defend against it. And, deep down, they don’t like it.

More anon . . .