By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, October 26, 2015
Sometimes a culture disappears with a whimper, not a
bang. Institutions age and are ignored, and the complacent public insidiously
lowers its expectations of state performance.
Infrastructure, the rule of law, and civility erode — and
yet people are not sure why and how their own changing (and pathological)
individual behavior is leading to the collective deterioration that they
deplore.
There is still a “West” in the sense of the physical
entities of North America, Europe, many of the former British dominions, and
parts of Westernized Asia. The infrastructure of our cities and states looks
about as it did in the recent past. But is it the West as we once knew it — a
unique civilization predicated on free expression, human rights,
self-criticism, vibrant free markets, and the rule of law?
Or, instead, is the West reduced to a wealthy but unfree
leisure zone, driven on autopilot by computerized affluence, technological
determinism, and a growing equality-of-result, omnipotent state?
Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great
southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at
the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an
influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West
drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that
discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most
present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much
less defend — their own institutions.
No one claims that such mass immigration into Europe is
legal. No one wonders what happened to the fossilized idea of legal
immigration, much less the legal immigrant who went through what has now been
rendered the pretense of bureaucratic application for legal entry into Europe.
Germany, which lectures others on law, is lawless.
In theory, Westerners have the power to stop the mostly
young males from the Middle East from swarming their borders, but in fact they
apparently lack the will. Or is it worse than that? Without confidence in their
own values, much less pride in their accomplishments, are they assuaging the
guilt over their privilege by symbolic acts of undermining the foundations of
their own culture? Certainly, Germany, which insists on European Union laws of
finance applying to its fellow European nation Greece, has no compunction about
destroying, for its own particular purposes, the Union’s immigration statutes
as they apply to Middle Easterners.
The same is true in the United States. Millions of
foreign nationals from Latin America, and Mexico in particular, simply have
crossed the border without even the pretense of legality. They assume Americans
not only won’t enforce their own laws, but also will find ways to demonize any
who suggest that they should. If there is now no such thing as an “illegal
alien,” what in theory prevents anyone from arriving from anywhere at any time
and making claims on the American state?
Again, the irony is not just that millions of Mexican
nationals want into the U.S., but that, ostensibly, no one in Mexico or even
the United States knows why that is so (certainly not the National Council of
La Raza [“the Race”]) — much less wonders whether Mexico might learn from the
U.S. about ways to make a nation’s own people become content enough to stay in
their homeland. Only in the West does a migrant fault his host for insufficient
hospitality while exempting his homeland, which drove him out.
Sanctuary cities illustrate how progressive doctrine can
by itself nullify the rule of law. In the new West, breaking statutes is backed
or ignored by the state if it is branded with race, class, or gender advocacy.
By that I mean that if a solitary U.S. citizen seeks to leave and then reenter
America without a passport, he will likely be either arrested or turned back,
whereas if an illegal alien manages to cross our border, he is unlikely to be
sent back as long as he has claims on victimhood of the type that are
sanctioned by the Western liberal state.
Do we really enjoy free speech in the West any more? If
you think we do, try to use vocabulary that is precise and not pejorative, but
does not serve the current engine of social advocacy — terms such as “Islamic
terrorist,” “illegal alien,” or “transvestite.” I doubt that a writer for a
major newspaper or a politician could use those terms, which were common
currency just four or five years ago, without incurring, privately or publicly,
the sort of censure that we might associate with the thought police of the
former Soviet Union.
It is becoming almost impossible in the West to navigate
the contours of totalitarian mind control. Satirists can create cartoons
mocking Christ, but not Mohammed. If a teen brings a suspicious-looking device
of wires and gadgetry to school, he will be suspended — unless he can advance
by his religious or ethnic background some claim on victimization.
In major news accounts, the identification of race and
ethnic background of a criminal suspect is often predicated on liberal notions
of social engineering. Recent graduates of journalism schools must have learned
during their time there that identification by race of a white criminal
suspect, but not commensurately of a suspect of color, is a social obligation,
a way of avoiding a “micro-aggression,” the latest Orwellian exercise in
creating a new word in hopes of inventing a new reality. Marchers with Black
Lives Matter banners chant, “Dead Cops!” and also call for them to be roasted,
even as to quote what they are saying is deemed racist. As the president of the
United States lends his support to Black Lives Matter, a violent crime wave
hits his upscale Capitol Hill neighbors, as young inner-city predators go on a
rampage against the yuppie liberals living there. Liberal residents call it a
“reign of terror,” yet they win as much attention from the president as does
the slaughter each weekend in Chicago.
In a San Francisco middle school, recent democratic
elections for student officers were massaged into nothingness, since the
outcome did not result in the preferred architecture of diversity. Note that
the female white principal who nullified the election should not, by her own
logic and the theory of proportional representation, be principal of a school
where her own race is in the minority. Bureaucratic apparatchiks, apparently
aware that careers are enhanced or destroyed by the degree of adherence to diversity
and political correctness, have become genteel fascists, somewhere in between
those of the Soviet Union and those whom Orwell described in 1984.
When Hollywood puts out a movie called Truth, we know, also in good 1984 fashion, that it should be called Lies — a story of how the supposed noble
end of electing a liberal president justifies all the sordid means necessary to
achieve it, including amateurish forgery. The probable Democratic nominee for
president of the United States just hours after the Benghazi attack announced
in private to concerned parties that it was an al-Qaeda terrorist operation,
while she was telling the world that it was a spontaneous riot in reaction to
an illiberal video, confirming the Obama campaign’s old talking point that
al-Qaeda was “on the run” and thus incapable of doing what it had just done.
Truth? Lies? There are no such things — just operative and inoperative
narratives. Ask the video maker who went to jail for his short movie, or the
families of the dead Americans who were assured that it was not al-Qaeda that
had killed their loved ones.
In the same mode, today’s campus is a cross between
premodern Victorianism and something postmodern out of Clockwork Orange. Never have so many undergraduates hooked up for impersonal,
crass, and callous sex, often fueled by alcohol and drugs, and never have the
rules of such ad hoc intercourse been so formalized.
If universities really believe that they have and should
have the power of stopping males from engaging in improper sexual congress that
results in post-coitus unhappy parties, it would be much simpler to go back to
the 1950s paradigm of segregating dorms by gender, banning alcohol from campus,
viewing possession of illegal drugs as grounds for expulsion, and formulating
new rules of treating women during sexual unions according to past formality
and manners. A sober and drug-free male who picks up the tab, opens doors for
women, watches his language around the opposite sex, and allows a woman some
privilege in entering a building might be more receptive to asking formal
(written?) consent at each ascending step of love-making, the apparent
objective of the new campus sexual codes.
The one constant in the more recent manifestations of the
slipping away of the West is the emergence of a new privileged, mostly white
progressive class of plutocrat. A Google exec, an Al Gore, a university
president, a diversity czar, a Goldman Sachs progressive, a Clinton Initiative
apparatchik, a pajama-boy techie — none of them ever expects the ramifications
of his ideology to hit home. They assume that they have the power and influence
not only to change the mentalities of the caricatured middle class, but in the
process to enjoy their own privilege without either guilt or risk. Opposing
charter schools usually means your children are in private schools, just as
championing open borders reflects one’s own gated community, just as promoting
affirmative action in the abstract suggests recourse to a countervailing
old-boy network to gain admissions, internships, and jobs for one’s own
offspring. Our progressive elites resemble the opportunists of the French
Revolution, who rode the crest of popular revolt — hoping that their calls for
enforced egalitarianism and fraternity by any means necessary allowed their
ample privilege to be exempt from the disorder they had incited.
The Obama administration did not create an anti-Western
Western world (indeed, if Obama didn’t exist we would have to invent him), it
simply summarized the recent pathologies of late Western life, codified them,
and made them institutional, as in “workplace violence,” “white Hispanic,”
“micro-aggression,” “sanctuary city,” and the rest of the lexicon of
misrepresentation.
In the new West, freedom is inequality, liberty selfishness,
and tribalism unity.
That is all ye need to know.
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