And when the fight was over
We spent what they had made
But
In the bottom of our hearts
We felt the final cut
Those born around the early 1920s, “the greatest generation”, lived through what’s very likely the single most prosperous period throughout all of human history. This, incidentally, almost perfectly tracks the intensified exploitation of easily accessible fossil fuels, never to return, which enabled this incredible increase in productivity and complexity we’ve taken for granted as the inevitable march of Progress.
Possibilities must have seemed endless. The myth of the new world merging with narratives of redemptive futurism, taking tangible form in the near-elimination of want, the suppression of disease through antibiotics and increasing standards of living, and the ascendant, spectacular new media to constantly reaffirm the miracles of a brave new world.
To my grandmother, “the modern” was something almost sacred, a supreme good against which most things must be measured. It meant the end of tuberculosis that killed her youngest brother at the age of 20. The end of the destitution that forced so many of her parents’ generation to emigrate. Leviathan pulling the peasant’s plow.
I’d almost say that modernity had a religious significance to her, but not quite. She was a skeptic, and not of the paradoxically pious sort, although I think she made her peace with God towards the end of her life. Amid all the inevitable fascination, she harbored one or two cynical doubts about the promises of this mesmerizing machine that came to light once in a while.
Nonetheless, I don’t think she ever suspected we would end up here. And so soon. This New Rome was supposed to last for another thousand years, not degenerate into soft tyrannies, slowly suffocating a culture almost devoid of meaning, entirely emptied of virtue and fortitude.
The violent trajectory of Faustian civilization ending up in little more than a whimper.
And what was it all for? This awesome failure. This beautiful defeat. Do I feel we owe them a debt? Maybe.
To be sure, they didn’t really build all those lost futures of yesterday with their unique ingenuity, with their blood and toil. My grandparents’ generation happened to be the recipient of a windfall.
But they had a hope, this innocent and robust hope, for something greater. For something good and enduring that I feel we somehow failed to live up to. A trust of which we did not properly take heed.
In a sense, they lived and died for this dream. They paid their dues with the intention that all of their efforts would bear fruit in our lives. And it was much virtue in this. There was courage here.
And even if I heartily disagree with the entire edifice of the progressivist mythology, even if I think we must rightly laugh at its many distortions, we must also reverence the spirit behind it. We must acknowledge that which was good and honourable in it, and I doubt that many of us do.
I don’t think things could have played out otherwise. I’m not a historical determinist, but immense and slow-moving processes together with material constraints render the general character of the near future almost immutable.
Still, an increasingly totalitarian, anti-human social order where democracy is abolished, science thoroughly corrupted, and the class divide resembles iron age theocracies strikes me as… Inimical to the spirit of the Western post-war dream. To the entire enlightenment impetus of the modern project. And misguided as it might have been, I still think it behooves us, especially those of us in the oppositional movement, to respect its better intentions. That which was good in it.
In the end, I think it’s preferable that we don’t entirely burn our bridges to that intellectual and cultural heritage, but rather make peace with the better hopes of our forebears.
And sitting here, almost smugly watching the world burn, I’m quite far from living up to them. Somehow, I haven’t earned the right to condemn even the excesses of this horrible machine. Not when there’s just so much more I could have done.
I’m not able to build anything remotely akin to what this generation was capable of. None of us are.
And even so, we’re going to have find that in ourselves somehow.
Edit: added from my comment below
Even heroism for the wrong cause must be cherished as such, and what I think is key to forming our identity and worldview as we forge ahead, is precisely this affirmation of the spirit and resolve for which victory or defeat is truly irrelevant.
Debord noted in an aside almost, that contemporary society has done away with six of the seven deadly sins. And this runs parallel, I think, to my suggestion that motives no longer exist. Avarice is gone because nearly all wealth has been transferred to the top 1%. Gluttony because it’s now OK to be obese, and anyway, the processed food industry has more or less made it impossible not to be fat. Lust is long gone. In its place is the cold simulation of porn, or just celibacy. Anger, well, alright, maybe there is still anger. To some degree. Pride is gone. There is nothing to feel proud of. And that leaves ENVY.
(John Steppling, “Nunc stans, or the Empty Future”).
In almost every sense, the modern project has failed. Spectacularly and gloriously so, but it nonetheless failed. But out in the midst of this catastrophe, to really learn from it and rebuild, I think we need to discern the beauty, rediscover the resolve and the indomitable strength that guided those human lives whose stories make up this sublime tragedy.
That was basically my point with the entire text above.
"I believed in God before I believed in Heaven. And even now, even if – let's make an impossible supposition – His voice, unmistakably His, said to me, ‘They have misled you. I can do nothing of that sort for you. My long struggle with the blind forces is nearly over. I die, children. The story is ending,’ would that be a moment for changing sides? Would not you and I take the Viking way: ‘The Giants and Trolls win. Let us die on the right side, with Father Odin.’" (C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm).
Defeatism? Yeah, it's really not that simple.
Ours is an age of great pessimism, and with good reason. The last decades have not been kind. Yet I suspect this is at least as much historically contingent as materially determined. Ehrlich's predictions have not born out; we always underestimate our own ingenuity, and project the limitations of current capabilities into the future. Those limitations seem all the more inescapable when technological innovation seems to have stalled. But how much of this is necessary, and how much a result of deliberate policy by Malthusian oligarchs who have seized the wealth of society? The great decoupling of productivity and wages in 1971 was not a result of resource limitations. How many scientific discoveries were not made, due to institutional science being diverted into grant applications, biased towards refinement of existing theories, tied up in pursuit of dead end technologies by careerists for whom publishing papers rather than solving hard problems is the salient goal? How many technologies have been stillborn, strangled in the crib by monopolists eager to protect their market positions?
We see this great stagnation, and it becomes the source of our great depression, spiritual as much as economic. As with clinical depression, in its depths we assume it will last forever.
That's why I wrote this:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/2043
There were revolutions, meaningful, and reactions. There was the rise of the Wehrmacht and its spectacular defeat. Following from this there was aristocracy in retreat to the extent that we all experienced what was made by that retreat: the expansive middle class.
The aristocracy had to retire for awhile the full vision of its ambitions and regroup. Over the decades since it certainly has regrouped. Its current form though stinks of the lowest quality of an already degenerate breed anyone’s ever seen. it pretends, sort of, to be something else, but just look at it. Look at Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, and the thousands of other utterly incompetent random stooges elevated to such positions these days. Has anyone seen a single coherent thought about anything formulated by any of them or any of them in combination?
One doubt in your piece. You say, ‘never to return”. This the day after Sy Hersch’s report on US Navy divers blowing up Nordstream 1 and 2. There was no shortage of fossil fuel flowing through 1 nor twice as much slated through 2. And no shortage of such energy anywhere on earth the aforementioned degenerates are not sabotaging supply.
And why are they doing it?
Easy. Look at them. Listen.
Why did Hitler’s army invade Russia in 1941.
Why are Nazi grandchildren on an anti-Russia crusade today?
The outcome will be worse this time. Because they’re stupider now. Quoting from The Big Lebowski:
“Nihilists. Wow. Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism. At least it was an ethos”.
Something else. At least you can say that the Germans 80 years ago had plausible belief they’d succeed (in destroying Russia). No they didn’t, but the failure was legitimately surprising.
TODAY these incompetents are picking a fight without any of the necessary preparations, and without any of the requisite means to prepare even if they thought to do so.