It is not an easy thing to do [Lord knows I've tried to fashion such a quip to have handy in conversations with people who refuse to see how dire our Cultural situation is], but Richard Fernandez has done it: To an ever-greater degree the “free man” of the West is an unarmed, frightened, policed and browbeaten cipher whose first reaction to any crisis is to ‘shelter in place’.
That’s a head shot, a bullseye.
Some have speculated that The West is merely experiencing what every civilization in the past has: exhaustion. These prognosticators believe that societies eventually get tired of defending their customs and traditions and sink into an Apathy.
While the widespread miasma of Apathy is hanging over The West, I don’t see it as being the result of a general fatigue.
As Jean Raspail wrote in his 1985 Introduction to a new edition of The Camp Of The Saints:
For the West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us….
We began losing our Souls when we began the slow process, now realized on a widespread scale, of rejecting the Presence of God in the World. Without His guiding hand, we find ourselves adrift.
The Will to struggle to first create and then preserve and maintain Freedom and Ordered Liberty was fueled by a belief Those who struggle thus purely based on Utilitarian beliefs — ‘this is in my rational [non-Transcendent] self-interest’ — find that said beliefs will only carry them so far. At some point they will weary of the fight and will not have the Love of God to fall back on for succor and sustinence.
The Utilitarians will reason that the potential rewards to be gained are no longer worth the enormous effort, the severe challenge to their mental and physical health, to carry-on with The Stuggle. They will coldly [because the absence of God brings a deep and wet chill to the Soul] calculate there is no longer any utility is waging War against the Forces Of Evil that seek eternally to enslave them in one way or another, or in all ways. To put it simply: the Utilitarians have nothing to fall back on as a reserve, whereas those who are filled with the presence of God are forever charged with the energy to serve Him and His purposes.
God has granted us Free Will. It is from this Grant, in an effort to preserve that glorious gift, that our ancestors fought and died to create the conditions where Freedom and Ordered Liberty exist. They were animated by the fact that, in doing so, they were carrying out God’s Will that His people should be Free.
The Founders charged us, their Posterity, will maintaining what they had done and they expected us to march into that battle with the symbol of The One True God on our shields. But we, in an arrogance worthy of the Snake in The Garden Of Eden, thought we didn’t need to be clothed in the armor of The Holy Spirit when we faced-off against the forces, both external and internal, that sought to make us slaves to Evil.
And here we are, now, in The West: apathetic and weak-souled. Perfect targets for the chains of Slavery. Easy prey for those who would be Slavemasters.
While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other….
-—John Adams, 11 October 1798