Decline of the West: Part Deux, or is it Trois?

CAUTION: SOME OF THIS MATERIAL MAY BE CONDUCIVE TO DROWSINESS

It's a commonplace nowadays to admit that the Enlightenment goal of secular humanism has largely supplanted Christianity as the wellspring of current Western Civilization. The NBC Evening News tonight spurred me to some boring comments on the consequences of the departure of Christian spirituality.

On the NBC news, a two-minute piece on the new torrent of immigration over the last five years ended with a "lifelong resident" of Whiting, Indiana commenting on the 25% immigrant population in her town: "We all have to live with one another." This is a slight deviation from the old complaint "Why can't we all just get along with one another." Five minutes later, the answer came in an interview with a "former" radical London Islamic cleric [still a cleric, but not radical?] who answered a question: "As for martyrdom in Islam, there is no reason for compromise. It is the bedrock of our religion." Martyrdom, of course, is a euphemism for killing infidels and getting killed in the process.

So the multiculturalism of "kumbayeh, lord, kumbayeh" has taken two generations to morph into allowing a bunch of bearded maniacs holding a knife, or scimitar, at the throats of innocent air travellers who happen to travel the day Al Qaeda blows up another airliner, to portray their murder cult as "martyrdom" on national TV, without a rejoinder from the oh, so sensitive NBC interlocutor. Ironies abound as Jill Carroll, an unreconstructed kumbayeh girl, begged to be shot rather than have her head cut off!

The cultural/political insanity of protecting the privacy rights of terrorists trying to mount an operation in the United States---mustn't listen to those NSA transcripts or even wiretap the terrorists lest a judge disagree[as some clown/judge in Detroit did today]---simply boggles the mind. There is a definite death-wish ruling the left spectrum of political thinking in the United States, and Europe as well. As usual, Nietzsche is the best guide:

According to Nietzsche, modern scientific and technological progress is accelerating political and social democratization by a flattening of spiritual perception and a homogenizing of experience. The European is undergoing a steady decline in vitality and creativity, or what N calls the will to power, as a consequence of which he is slipping deeper into nihilism, or the condition that obtains when all standpoints are regarded as being of equal validity, with the consequent devaluation of each.

This devaluation is misunderstood as a sign of progress: of egalitarianism and fair play. In face, "morality is today in Europe the morality of the herd-animal." Progress, viewed spiritually, is mediocrity, or progress toward spiritual death. At the same time, the decadence of society is accompanied by a kind of loss of illusions, and this has a paradoxically favorable potentiality for the would-be revolutionary. "There are signs that the European of the 19th century is less ashamed of his instincts; he has taken a good step toward admitting his unconditioned naturalness, i.e., his immorality, without bitterness." Nachlass (3:615-617)

This is a very important text, which brings out very well how N plans to "dam up" the decay of his time in such a way as to accelerate the instant of destruction. To expand only one aspect of the total situation, immorality is on the one hand a result of relativism brought on by scientific progress and historical sophistication; on the other hand, it is the detachment from decadent values that is the necessary precondition for their destruction and the production of new values.

The fact is that when we threw out Christianity, we also threw out the bathwater of cultural identity. As a result, rootless deracinees of all persuasions wander around the western landscape wondering about their gender, sexual orientation, pursuit of happiness and search for the meaning of life and THE PRODUCTION OF NEW VALUES, as Nietzsche says.

Robert Kagan explains the conundrum from an overarching political perspective:

The United States, in short, solved the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government. But he also feared that the “state of universal peace” made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become "the most horrible despotism." How nations could achieve perpetual peace without destroying human freedom was a problem Kant could not solve. But for Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing security from outside, the United States has rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not need power to achieve peace and they do not need power to preserve it.

The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the “German problem,” allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the “strategic culture” that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous

Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of "moral consciousness," it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.

The French, ironically as is their wont, used to speak disdainfully of "ceux qui porte la parapluie" with regard to the American nuclear umbrella that prevented Paris from again being overrun [the word "bistro" derives from the Russian word for "quick"] as it was in 1815 by the Russian hordes from the steppes.

Rather than thanks, the Europeans now display their disdain for American mishandling aspects of its foreign policy, while unaccountably displaying no policy of their own except as reactions to situations. I guess what I'm getting at is that accountability is in short supply. Let's go back to old Friedrich N for a refresher "The European is undergoing a steady decline in vitality and creativity, or what N calls the will to power."

Europeans are now so lacking in vitality or creativity [which EU-Kulturkampf-crats confuse with aimless cultural eclecticism] that they are succumbing to slow suffocation by massive immigration, with Bantustans existing like metathesized cancer cells presently benign, but capable of turning malignant in a nano-flash.

Now the US is supposed to suspend wiretaps unless some over-lawyered judicial procedure is followed---just another potion to weaken resistance to a genuine threat.