parades his people down an avenue of ruin with the flamboyant insouciance of a homecoming prank. We totter and sway to the flat trumpets of bandcamp cadets. If only greed or sloth or some other deadly sin were the prime cause (at least then we could give the old excuse that our natures made the downfall inevitable), rather than effects of the sheer incompetence of good will lacking experience. Familiar enough with history’s seismology that the more perceptive among us can feel a spike coming, we are relegated to watching leaders try to beat their drums in sync with the masses, who stomp their feet with increasing randomness.
Society’s Rickety Scaffolding
Civilized man admires an unhinged instinct, appreciation fizzing into obsession as his sophistication advances towards effeteness. His last course of action, as admirable as it is foolish, would seem that of Tennyson’s Ulysses, setting out for adventure with the misguided conviction not to yield and the hope of regaining a strength forever lost. Sailing past the sunset for proof of life, he lands in a tropical Eden and discovers his elemental self.
Hoping to lubricate butchery and enslavement with wonder, he ensures that the manner of his arrival will be sufficiently grandiose for the tribal men to take him as a god. But the civilized man is surprised to find many of the rural inhabitants of Papua New Guinea wearing t-shirts, looking at him only with mild curiosity instead of the awe he needed. To regain at least a mirage of his former strength, he tries to exploit their primitive prejudices by brandishing modern gadgets. They laugh, pulling out rusty, outdated models of the same tools given to them by previous explorers. No matter, he realizes. In the end, strength doesn’t lie in technology or perceptions of godhood, but in a state of health. By spreading infection among the natives he can dwindle their population enough to make conquest all the easier. So he coughs on them. Their faces take on a look of disgust, but though they take offense they stand unaffected. They are immune to his cold; they have already adopted the worst of Western man’s diseases and made them their own.
Without the possibility of conquest, the civilized man has nothing to offer but diplomacy. Before leaving for home he makes a blood pact with the tribal chief and contracts a rare brain disease.
Defeated, he heads back to his private jet and pours himself a drink. The primitives are gone from the earth. Modernity has extended its reach over everything. Soon these virile semi-barbarians will gain the resources they need to overrun him. Then they too will become like him, urbane and enervated. Even in their current state the gap was too narrow to seem magnificent by comparison.
The white man’s burden had been lifted. There was no one left to civilize.
More Than Geographically Isolated
Lacking a ruined continent like the Europeans, Americans cannot take refuge under grand columns and sigh with Doric docility, grooving tattoos of past glories into our flesh columns. But neither can we live in a perpetual present like the Greeks, the example of that prior society still too heavy on our memory to invent a series of heroic epics culminating in our presence. To say nothing of the Chinese, for whom one’s own individual existence is just another flower on the garland, the continuation of a living antiquity.
So we are relegated to live in the space of the recent past—the limbo between a golden age and raw life, the lost and the sweaty. Mythologizing what little figures and episodes we have of our history, but with too much evidence to believe the stories about cherry trees and liberation from tyranny (the penny-yoke of a sugar tax), our near-present is a slush of folklore and irony, each interpenetrating the other in turn.
The Greeks, looking back to an age of Gods, aspired to divine deeds but only realized the best that humanity could accomplish. We, with portraits of great men on our walls, aspire to money-changing and can’t manage to turn enough dollars into food stamps.
If we had never broken away from the British we could still claim the Bard as ours. Instead he is just another verbal concession. Having survived the infancy of self-determination, we do nothing but gaze out across the Atlantic as we die from neglect in toddlerhood, pronouncing our first and last word with nervous hunger. But “Mama” is more interested in her sisters than us.
Constitutional Checks
Life having become so common, one is surprised to find it valued more than ever. But human rights, too, are Malthusian. Liberty is the new war, access to the pursuit of happiness the new potato famine.
“The Rights of Men”: by the power of an abstract principle, to be indifferent to the realm of ideas—unalienability of umbecility; free of the caprices of feudal lords, to obey the whims of the stock market; to choose one’s devourers, to submit education to ambition, to inherit the genetic mutations of parents and let children set standards of taste, to bestow a written history to every subculture and erect a world literature on a sea of endangered dialects, to substitute talent for self-expression, to consume oneself into a coffin. In the end a boorish civil society balances itself out: those with a short-term cultural memory receive justice in Alzheimer’s. Natural law, bestowing political freedom through immutable ethical principles, introduces the determinism of drives, giving people the opportunity to pursue their annihilation at the most rapid rate possible without even consciously choosing it—the only genuine dignity one has in life.
Idioms Spewing Idiots
The world makes anglicisms with the same profusion that it once made latinisms and gallicisms, but with none of the enthusiasm, none of the connotations of borrowed refinement. Dumbed-down oral behavior engulfs all objects of expression and infects foreign cultures in a pestilence of sensual neologisms. Every historic district becomes an erogenous zone as abstract terms gain a new sense of possession. Archaisms, once spoken with such delicacy for fear that the tongue would grate against the palate and flaw pronunciation with a faint but devastating detail, are rendered inefficient by the cheaper production value of monosyllables. The gauge of imperial corruption is not moral degeneration within the mother nation, but the exportation of its depravity to the provinces via word of mouth. Conversations, devoid of the grace and wit of the French, cut out the chiffon cake—for we are now even lacking in substance-as-triviality—and lay the most important emphasis on the smooth transition from beginning to ending. The salutation inaugurating every colloquy foreshadows its parting phrase and becomes a metaphor for weariness.
Noose as Lasso
Age of God: 1607–1776
Age of Heroes: 1776–1945
Age of Men: 1945–Present
***
In America’s Age of God, poor men of piety carved tracts of land from a forest of native corpses and sacrificed its own population to the starving time—divine justice needs scapegoats and martyrs.
Provident Periwigs of the Founding Fathers: as Athena disguised Odysseus in the form of an old beggar, so did the Lord impart an aspect of divinity to an epoch of bad hair days. Men of genius and valor powdered their heads before their muskets so the combined eruptions would be heard worldwide.
In an Age of Men that covers stupidity with hair growth formulas and puts a safety lock on spray bottles, the triumphs from the Age of Heroes seem superhuman. An industrialized army unable to capture a few primitives hiding in caves lacks the honesty to explain this earlier success without recourse to heavenly aid. But total victories give way to endless stalemates because God abandons a people only after virtue leaves them. Technology dissolves moral force through impersonation.
The way back to virtue? A mountain of scapegoats and martyrs that surpasses the Hindu Kush.
Commentary on The Discourses, II.31
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