The Decline of the West

Part One - The Paradox of Liberalism

“The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

― T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

In a week when Tony Blair announced the end of the supremacy of the West it is timely to consider what the nature of this decline might mean, beyond mere political power, and the means and will to dictate which nations shall be ruined in the name of progress, of freedom and democracy.

What do I mean when I talk of ‘decline’? I will examine the following aspects in three parts:

• The paradox of Liberalism

• The Great Retreat

• The nature of Empire in collapse

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The debasement of words - words such as ‘Freedom’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Woman’ - is indicative of a deeper, far longer trend of spiritual degradation. It bespeaks of the impoverishment of the human soul under a system of ideas which promised so much - only to deliver its opposites. Largely sprung from the Enlightenment, Liberalism heralded freedom, liberty, the removal of restraint, the rule of reason. Where it ends is where we are – in a chaos of distortion, barbarism and lies.

This is the story of the decline of the soul of man, seen through the theme of the thing which has moved him to defend what is great and to right the wrongs done to him. It is the story of a fall, from the aspiration to justice and to magnanimity to attention seeking. We no longer strive to be great souled, but to cry a great howl. The story of the thymotic impulse is the story of how we departed history for histrionics.

It will treat Homer to Fukuyama, taking in Plato, Aristotle, and some minor Greek thinkers on the way to the present moment, where the most analogous art to depict political life is also the most degenerate. This is the reason we will mention a play by Jean Genet, a primus inter pares of perverts, whose disgusting writings secure a place of merit inasmuch as they are the only sufficiently rotten stories to come close to the truth of our national leadership. I shall draw some comparisons to the fall of the Soviet Union, which may help to illustrate both similarity and difference to the collapse of this most recently departed empire and that of ours, whose pillars crumble around us today.

'Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Sam Brinton ‘kink enthusiast’ (They/Them) - animal roleplay, apparently. Also Richard ‘Rachel’ Levine, professional woman and US Secretary of State for Health.

The Paraphilia of Power

There was a play called the Balcony, written by celebrated degenerate Jean Genet, whose argument reduced all authority to a sordid performance. In the case of Genet, a man whose identity was defined by his crimes and his disordered sexuality, this naturally distilled the power process to a sexual fetish, a perverse erotic form of role play. The action takes place in a bordello, amidst a revolution. The clients dress up as a bishop, as a general, as the chief justice.

This is a repugnant spectacle of complete immorality. That is the reason it is relevant. It gives the decent human being an understanding of how politics is done today.

The Balcony is a portrait of corrupted filth, of venal perverts driven by base urges to enact their own fantasies – which become real. It is a performance that produces reality. Our politics is the same – an image factory populated by reflections vying for the spotlight. We live in an age of distorted surfaces, of government by parody. This is the reason that if we, like Hamlet, wish

‘to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature’

then we must turn to the distortions of such a man as Genet - because a degenerate life can only be reflected by a degenerate art. This may seem severe or even glib - yet we will examine the case for such a charge in the following paragraphs.

The Paradox of Liberalism

Liberalism is not the system of ideas propounded by, say, John Stuart Mill. It certainly springs from that tradition, but in the practical sense is that system of politics and policies which arose around the fall of the Soviet Union.

The end of this empire was significant for the world in many ways. Simply, it ended the West/East divide in geopolitics. The disappearance of the Soviet Union required a rethinking of the politics and practices of the West. Finally, the collapse of this empire, though initially peaceful, has led to the outbreak of violent border disputes ever since the early 1990s. Such skirmishes are normal for at least a generation following the end of any empire.

The Soviet Union’s collapse provided for a rethinking of the politics of the West. There was no longer a competitor for the Western way of life, which declared victory and claimed itself the endpoint of historical controversy, with the famous claim of ‘democracy plus VCRs’ being the apex of human aspiration.

The settlement which arose from the dust of the Soviet Union was not one which delivered on the promises of a ‘peace dividend’. In fact, warfare would accelerate with the ascendant new ideology of neoliberalism. If Liberal democracy was the best -and final - state of human affairs, then it follows that it must (and should) be aggressively promoted throughout the world. Hence the idea that war is an instrument of civilisation.

This is the notion of Liberal Interventionism in a nutshell: that it is better to obliterate otherwise successful nations in order to facilitate elections over who shall rule the ruins.

Here is the first major paradox of Liberalism: it claims to be the supreme champion of liberty, stability, of human rights - whilst its export model is the hammer of nations.

The Liberal West prefers massive aerial bombing campaigns. Serbia for 77 days, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan - and of course Vietnam - demonstrate the reliance on air power whose increasing automation provides for a sanitising distance between victor and victim.

Bombing civilians is justified by the aim, which is to bring a Liberal Utopia to bear upon the survivors.

The second paradox of Liberalism is related to the first, and is another which demonstrates both degradation (of principle) and decline (of practice). It is the legal aspects of the Liberal settlement, being a hyperindividualist and consumer-based identity presented as the pinnacle of human emancipation.

The promotion of absolute personal freedom has produced its opposite. In a process which continues to accelerate - at the same pace as the acceleration of extreme individualism - the laws required to protect the increasingly specialised and sensitive identity groups come at the expense of the liberties of the majority. The freedom to be who you please is the freedom to tell others to shut up about it. The freedom to identify as oppressed allows you to take liberties with everyone else. Liberalism has made a crying wolf a good career move, and has therewith undermined the vital civic values of integrity, sincerity, self reliance and honesty.

The second paradox of Liberalism means that the freedoms of the extremist are subtracted from those of the normal. It is a tyranny of minorities, which incentivises membership in some grievance faction whilst it encourages the escalation of claims of oppression to garner advantage and reward. Liberalism promotes inequality before the law and favours people for reasons other than competence and ability. This practical unwisdom is not a recipe for stability.

The third paradox of Liberalism compounds the first two. It is the attempt to replace things with names, in order to make them conform to the Liberal ideology. As any ideology passes its perihelion it must make some effort to conceal the lengthening shadows cast by its cherished monuments. The simplest means of doing so is to insist that darkness is light, that black is white. That men are women. The paradox of Liberalism in the moral and epistemic fields is that it makes necessary a complete inversion of reality to preserve its consistency. I have written elsewhere about moral inversion.

This state is the promotion of vice as virtue, informed by a nihilistic fervour. Intense moral outrage is felt over some replaceable issue or other, with no wider moral context. Liberalism has celebrated the removal of moral frameworks, traditional and custom, and despises the Christianity which it seeks to continue - without Christ. This is the void in which Liberalism asserts its values - shrill, histrionic, a spectacle like fireworks in the night. It is all show and no substance. Nothing remains in the morning but litter. The third paradox of Liberalism is that meaning has been reduced to the freedom to agree, and that morality is a mere display. Gaudy, obscene, with no relation to the inconvenient facts - it is a philosophy of a vanity so intense that it refuses to look into the mirror.

Part Two is coming soon.