A Westerner's Apology - 8. E Unus Pluribum
The end of this blog's beginning discusses what may be the beginning of the West's end
Over the last seven articles I have examined the West as I know it, from what is generally acknowledged as the end of its beginning to what I have more and more come to think of as the beginning of its end. By way of necessity, this examination has been at times perfunctory, doubtless riddled with errors and unintended omissions, and indelibly coloured by my own predilections and prejudices.
I have outlined a great many ways in which the West has failed as an enterprise to nurture human flourishing, touching upon many points which the West’s most ardent opponents often cite as justification for their opposition — slavery, war, religious fanaticism, antisemitism, and colonial exploitation of most of the world’s population and natural resources, to name but a few.
And yet, for all that, the West is nevertheless worth appreciating.
Human nature does not really change, at least not on the scale of recorded history. All of that history, every reed papyrus or goatskin scroll or sheaf of parchment paper, is a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of deprivation, depravity, debauchery, and disaster. The fact that the West recently conquered much of the globe is an exigency of history, as are the facts that Europeans are light-skinned or the religion underpinning the Western canon is male-dominated.
Western colonial powers did not invent racism, or homophobia, or sexism, or slavery, or empire, or really any of the myriad social ills which have plagued virtually all human societies for at least as long as humans have settled. If things had gone a little bit differently, the Age of Exploration and its attendant globalisation could well have been driven by Chinese or Indian or African peoples, or perhaps even the original Americans, and the world that we inhabit now would almost certainly not have been freed of the ills that the West supposedly imposed upon us all.
But the West did provide itself the blueprint for mitigating, if not fully eliminating, many of these ills. Somehow, in the midst of conquering much of the world, accidentally and not-so-accidentally disrupting most of the rest of humanity, and using much of its plundered wealth on pointless internal wars, a few up-jumped apes on a collection of rather miniscule peninsulas hanging off of western Asia came up with the idea that human beings do not have to live as slaves — that each of us has rights granted by the felicity of our birth, rights which may only be stolen by brute force or perfidious coercion, or else moderated by collective compromise.
The social and philosophical and physical technology which led to the abstraction and diminution of tyrannical power was realised here, in the minds and by the hands of men (and at least a few women) whose nations depopulated and then repopulated much of the Americas, put almost the entirety of Africa under the lash, and dominated vast swathes of Asia for hundreds of years. Some of the very same people whose ideas were foundational to the establishment of “white supremacy” as a post-hoc explanation for this course of events also formulated the notions that each man had the same claim to freedom and the same obligations to his fellow citizens under the law, and that the law and the state existed to enhance the lives of its citizenry, rather than the other way around.
That it took until the second half of the last century — a century which had its own share of crimes against humanity on every corner of the world — for most of the West to more-or-less make good on those promises and to extend them to virtually every person under the suzerainty of Western nations does not diminish how miraculous it was that the promise was made in the first place.
Civilisation is something like ten thousand years old, and for virtually all of that time, nearly every human being who was not a hunter-gatherer lived at the command of someone else. Even the men (or, very occasionally, women) ostensibly in command of everyone were bound to the systems that had put them in charge in the first place, always one failed harvest or military defeat or palace coup away from being replaced by someone more capable or ruthless or ambitious. This general description fits all civilisations for which we have evidence, from Africa to China and across the Americas and the Pacific islands; every one of them had brutal hierarchies, coerced extraction of labour, wars over territory and resources and slaves; each of them were dirty, disease-ridden dystopias where the privileged few who had the luxury of leisure had to use that leisure very carefully, lest their leisure be ended by the headsman’s axe.
Yes, even the few matriarchies for which we have any evidence at all fit this general description. They varied in a few particulars of social organisation, but they were none of them Utopias compared to what we have built.
The West was thus hardly unique in its appetite for rapine, hypocrisy, cruelty, environmental degradation, genocide, and senseless destruction. Through a combination of factors largely beyond its control, the West developed an unprecedented capacity for all of these things just a bit more quickly than its contemporary civilisations, and Western peoples wielded that increased capacity as leverage for internal and external competition to great and terrible effect. This competition eventually led to Spanish explorers in Cascadia, British settlers in New Zealand, French scientists in the Southern Ocean, and American astronauts on the Moon.
Though we must also admit that it is all well and good to point to counterfactuals; it is impossible to prove that, say, the Aztecs would have made at least as many mistakes and committed at least as many crimes against humanity as the British-Franco-Iberian colonial powers who wound up dominating the majority of the globe for about three hundred years —the principle of “you broke it, you bought it” must have some moral weight, even when spied through the prism of an entire civilisation. And it is undeniable that Western civilisation was built upon a mountain of corpses, its lifeblood extracted from hundreds of millions of people outside and inside of Europe alike.
And yet, in spite of the unending moral emergency that is recorded history in general and the last few centuries in particular, I am certain that the West has brought more good than harm to the human race, at least since we decided to stop walking large animals to death. And I am quite uncertain that what comes after the West will finally be Utopia at long, long last.
If the West is indeed to be replaced, its replacement is quite likely to be a civilisation much more typical to those which came before it, or those alternatives which currently exist. In other words, such a thing would very likely be a reversion to the mean of the human condition as it has been over the course of the last ten thousand years, rather than a progression to something better.
Given the nearly unrelenting progress of the last three hundred years, this is difficult for most Westerners to intuit; we are used to next year being at least as good as this one in most respects, and to the world of our children being undeniably better than those of our parents. But this trend is fragile, and recent, and it will not continue under its own power. If enough Westerners become convinced that the West is not worth having, we shall lose it, and we will get to experience a reversion to the mean on a scale we have not experienced since the fall of the Roman Empire.
It is perhaps a cosmic irony that the very freedoms which found purchase in the West have led inexorably to so much criticism of Western civilisation; only when one is free to express the true lay of their thoughts can someone openly criticise the way their society is run, or to point out the gap between a society’s promises and its reality. Freedom, after all, means nothing if it does not mean being able to tell the truth as you see it without fear of reprisal.
And when one sees that the very civilisation into which they were born did so many horrific and repugnant things in the name of one’s own inheritance, there is a moral instinct to recoil in disgust — to reject the poisoned chalice, to spit up the wine and tarnish the gold and to spend the rest of one’s life repenting for the sins of one’s forefathers. Virtually all of the many crimes committed across every continent in the last three hundred years was done in our name, by men and women who felt not only justified but compelled to reshape the world into a safer and more plentiful one for their descendants. And, it must be reiterated, in spite of the terrible moral costs incurred, these ambitions have largely been fulfilled.
Why are we the inheritors of this terrible legacy? What can we do to purge ourselves of the stains of so much blood and so many tears shed to secure our own good fortune? These questions naturally arise to anyone with a superficial grasp of our history, and they cause within us an instinct to recoil in horror and abjure the inheritance our ancestors fought so tenaciously to provide us.
Not very long ago, these questions would have been answered — as all moral questions in the West were answered — by some broad appeal to Christianity. Until the Enlightenment, as previously discussed, when Christianity began to disappear as the common moral framework of Western philosophers and we began, fitfully, to throw off our theological chains.
Friedrich Nietzsche noted, about a hundred and fifty years ago, that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed Him.” Nietzsche made this pronouncement with a certain wry skepticism and, perhaps, a hint of dismay — similar to John Lennon’s oft-misunderstood lament, nearly a century later, that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus now”. Both men were wrong, but not far off; in Nietzsche’s time the God of Abraham as revered in the West was not yet dead, but He was certainly dying, and by the time Lennon made his statement, some of the only people whom it actually offended were literal members of the Ku Klux Klan. It should also be noted that Nietzsche accompanied his pronouncement with a prediction that God would take about two hundred years to rot away — which, this far on, seems remarkably prescient.
In this, the Year of Our Lord 2022, God the father of Jesus has recently been laid to rest beneath the rock upon which His church was so laboriously built. God’s last gasp of true relevance in public life came nearly twenty years ago in the United States, when that country’s most incompetent president rode a final wave of religious conservatism to a second term in office. It is perhaps ironic that this, Christianity’s last authentic gasp in Western politics, enabled a gang of incompetent criminals to squander the moral and economic power of the United States to such a degree that the West itself may well have been mortally wounded as a consequence.
Since then, for nearly a generation, Christianity has all but disappeared from Western politics, culture, and society. Oh, there are plenty of Christians still around, to be sure — and a few even endorsed the Republican president in 2016, who would have won without their support and who did not govern even for a day in their name. It is also true that the Supreme Court justices he was able to appoint tipped the balance to overturn Roe v. Wade, the fifty-year-old decision which effectively legalised abortion in the United States, which was the culmination of a Christian Republican strategy set in motion pretty much on the day Roe was decided.
Yet it is notable that everyone involved in actually overturning the decision had to downplay the influence of Christianity in their thinking, and though the Republicans would still love nothing more than to institute a Christian corporatist theocracy they could loot at will, they may well come to regret ever getting what they wished for with Roe’s ouster. In any case, that one parochial court case — as consequential as it will be for women in Republican-controlled areas of the United States — is not a harbinger of the impending reimposition of Christian theocracy in that country, much less the West in general.
Christianity itself is a spent force, likely never to be restored. It has now largely retreated to the hinterlands, much like the pagan traditions it displaced as it swept over Europe so long ago. One day, perhaps sooner than one might think, the last Christian will die and it will truly become a relic of history.
Like the Romans of old, we have become disillusioned with the stories our ancestors told themselves to make sense of the world they had inherited; those explanations no longer suffice to provide us with a template for living, no longer give satisfactory answers to the questions most of us face about why we were born and how we should live and what might await us once we die. The Romans faced a similar crisis of meaning, a malaise and a moral paralysis in the face of barbarian invasions and geopolitical rivalry and economic catastrophe for which their traditional gods had no succour left to lend.
Christianity arose, in part, as a sort of religious acid which burnt away and subsumed the Roman pantheon once that pantheon had proven itself to be an impotent sham. In so doing, Christianity provided answers to the Roman people; it gave their lives a new structure and meaning that helped those people survive the calamities that swept away the western half of their empire. It is worth recalling that the eastern half lived on as a Christian state for another thousand years, until the city whose namesake officially adopted Christianity as the state religion was conquered by the rival Turks, as we have previously discussed. That city today still bears a Turkish name, with very few Christians remaining as relics of a long-bygone age.
Recall also that, once Christianity was finished burning through the Roman state, it went on to displace and then replace essentially every indigenous European culture, regardless of whether those peoples had ever even heard of Rome.
The West as it currently exists bears more than a passing resemblance to the Roman Empire in the generation or two before it was Christianised. There is a spiritual malaise of a populace that has largely become unmoored from the grounding moral philosophy and worldview that had anchored and guided the actions of our ancestors since time immemorial; our institutions have proven time and again to be corrupt, short-sighted, reactionary, and feeble; the territory itself is bifurcated, with the richer and more powerful half mustering less and less enthusiasm for protecting the poorer and weaker half from the misadventures, mistakes, and simple bad luck that have befallen it in the last few decades.
And, much like late pre-Christian Rome, the West has a new religion beginning to burn its way through our institutions and recasting our innate desire for meaning upon a new moral foundation. Despite Freddie deBoer’s valiant efforts, this religion’s proponents have ultimately rejected every label that has been suggested to name their movement, seemingly in an attempt to gaslight the world into thinking a thing does not exist if it lacks an endonym. This is nonsense, of course, a consequence of the movement’s fixation on linguistic determinism — a belief that language has the power to fundamentally reshape reality, rather than merely to describe it and perhaps influence its perception.
I shall call the movement wokeness and its adherents woke, both because this has become its most-common shorthand among the religion’s critics (and among those critics’ critics) and because it authentically reflects the fundamentalist nature of the movement.
The terminology comes proximately from a subculture of African Americans, members of which exhorted one another to “get woke” and “stay woke” to the wide-ranging (dare I say systemic) racism black people experience in the United States; more distantly, it comes from awakening oneself in a religious sense, as reflected by the many Christian revivals in the United States which we remember as The Great Awakening and its sequels.
Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with evangelical Christianity of the North American variety cannot help but notice striking similarities between the fiery certainty of a soldier of Christ who speaks of the Second Coming and the passion in a young person’s eyes when they insist that the world will end (and right soon!) if we do not save it by demolishing capitalism, or that the only way to end past racism is to institute corrective racial discrimination, or that countless children will kill themselves if we do not give them immediate access to chemical castration agents to treat a psychosocial condition, or any of a number of claims comparable in their reason to the insistence that Jesus was the only begotten Son of God and that one must recite a sincere faith in Him in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
The zeal is much the same, and even many of the particular messages are remarkably compatible. Though it formed the bedrock of Western social organisation and philosophy for nearly a thousand years, Christian doctrine contains a great deal of disdain for the temporal world and those unlucky enough not to have been exposed to the Good News. That early Christians were a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire likely has more than a little bearing on the origins of this doctrine, but even today there are a number of Christian cults whose members insist that they are “in the world, but not of the world”, and who see it as their mission to fundamentally rearchitect society in their own cult’s image even as they hold themselves apart from that same society.
Furthermore, a great many Christians remain thoroughly convinced that theirs will be the final generation before the cleansing fire of Christ returns to the Earth and cleanses it with a holy fire to burn away our sins for good and all; the fact that every generation of Christians has been riven with such apocalyptic thinking does not seem to matter to each successive generation coming down the pipe. The current widespread alarmism over the ever-impending climatic apocalypse sounds eerily familiar to anyone decently-versed in this sort of Christian eschatology.
As Ryan Chapman discusses rather persuasively, wokeness is an idea that “escaped the lab” of liberal academia in the latter half of the 1900’s. The new religion has its roots in Marxism, is indeed a species of Marxism that applies structural analysis to social hierarchies alongside (but really mostly instead of) economic hierarchies. This may go some way to explaining how the most profitable corporations in the history of the world, ostensibly run by rational actors bound by the law to behave in those corporations’ fiduciary interests, are busy converting their employees to a religion whose founding ideas, taken seriously, often wind up with the owners of profitable corporations in chains at best and in shallow graves otherwise.
Wokeness has no singular canon, but it has many sects and unwritten rules which anyone in a modern office, academic department, or government office across the West has come to understand implicitly in the last few years. It posits that the West is a hellhole uniquely responsible for the evils of white supremacy, of sexism, of transphobia, of homophobia, of Islamophobia; that a worthy life is one spent always and only fighting these evils; that all expression in any context or venue must be constrained to that which does not cause offense to the self-appointed leaders of non-white people, of women, of trans individuals, of homosexuals, or of non-Christian religious communities; that anyone guilty of any perceived offense against any of these communities must be subjected to harassment from a mob which ideally results in the offender being shunned by family, friends, colleagues, and business partners; that global warming is an existential threat which can only be addressed once everyone agrees with all of the preceding, and if even a single human being fails to recite fealty to the movement, the world will deserve to burn.
Though few woke people will articulate it explicitly, their actions and the consequences of their stated beliefs demonstrate that they hold the rights of a collective as nearly always paramount over the rights of an individual. The only individuals whose rights trump a group’s rights are the self-appointed representatives of any group which can claim to be oppressed, and those representatives’ rights trump the group rights of any so-called oppressors. Wokeness insists that every situation can be perfectly characterised by a hierarchy of oppression, and that any action which does not flatten (or, in practice, invert) this hierarchy is by definition an oppressive action which should be opposed and, ideally, corrected with the force of the state.
In short, wokeness demands that the freedoms of expression, of association, of assembly, and of enterprise be always and forever compromised if anyone can convince enough people that these freedoms allow one group to oppress another (except when this oppression is of the corrective sort).
In this series we have seen what can happen when certain dangerous ideas get out of hand, when millions of people become convinced in the righteousness of a cause — whether that be the righteousness of God, or of republicanism, or of nationalism, or of Communism, or of ethnic supremacy, or what have you. Such ideas offer to explain the terrible predicament of humanity and promise both personal salvation and communal absolution in the face of that predicament. The appeal of these explanations and promises, and the desire of so many people to obtain them, are what makes the mass adoption of these sorts of ideas so dangerous in the first place.
When such an idea attains escape velocity, societies tend to devolve into orgies of violence in the pursuit of said idea, orgies which more often than not wind up devouring the most fanatical proponents of the idea along with millions of innocent people, until the society has bled itself to exhaustion and cannot muster any more blood to sacrifice upon that idea’s altar. It does not matter whether those proponents were convinced of the rightness and goodness of their cause; every single incidence of collective insanity we know of was sustained by such a belief.
The certitude of righteousness was behind the witch trials, the Inquisition, Maoist re-education and Soviet gulags, the grinding slums of the Industrial Revolution, the Nazis’ war of extermination in Eastern Europe, Manifest Destiny, the Aztec sun ritual, and so many, many more instances where the unshakeable belief in a cause’s justness caused people to overlook or even champion the death and immiseration of their fellow human beings as a means to an end.
It remains to be seen whether the cultural Marxism being adopted so readily by HR departments, entire academic disciplines, civil administrators, and broad cohorts of young people in so many different countries manages to solidify into a new foundation for Western Civilisation. If it does so, we shall find out whether it is a dangerous idea of the sort outlined above.
In the meantime, I find it worth reiterating that the world that Europe and its descendants have built is far from perfect, but it is far and away better than any of the alternatives for which we have evidence. It is worth repeating that freedoms of expression and assembly and association and enterprise matter; that the fundamental equality of all citizens before the law is paramount for any society which calls itself just; that our individual rights, legal fictions though they may be, are discarded at our great peril.
If we relinquish them, even for a cause we consider just, we may not be able to get them back.