So that there might be order in the polity, Plato constantly argued, there must first be order in the individual soul. Restraint and askesis play essential roles in the orderliness of the soul – hence also in civic arrangements. Restraint acknowledges the sacredness of persons and property and askesis honors the wisdom not to flaunt affluence – not because one is not entitled to it either as the fruits of personal productivity or as inheritance, but because it is anthropologically foolhardy to do so. Ours is an age of fantastically inflated, pathologically ostentatious economies; quite without cosmic calamities it is also an age rapidly losing its historical memory and even its literacy. There is a voluntary relinquishment of intellectual and moral rigors for the sake of paltry divertissement. Too many modern people see in their electronic conveniences, in their false freedom from anxiety and care, what the guardians of Mycenae must have seen in their Cyclopean walls and defensive ditches: untouchable superiority and immunity from annoyance.This is the understanding that underscored the wisdom of America's founders; this is also the understanding that so many of us have cast aside in favor of our toys and amusements. I have said that God will not save that upon which so many of us have turned our backs. There is a price to be paid forthat, and it will consume the innocwent abd guilty alike.
The author of this essay points out that all civilizations fail in the end. Some through conquest, but for many it was simple exhaustion and IGNORance of the values that once invigorated them. We have no special dispensation.
This author uses an impressive vocabulary and a scholarly approach to tell us wht many of us are now coming to realize: Something Wicked This Way Comes. And it is not the old Soviet barbarian, the Islamic homicidal bomber or the Chinese cultural hegemonist - rather, it is the collapse of our own Western civilization chiefly due to our own weakness. It may not yet be too late to turn the tide, but the issue at stake is so much larger than perhaps any of us realize. This essay is a jaw-dropper, for it is a crucial pieceof the puzzle slotting into place.
I agree completely. Say what one will about the Soviet communist, the Islamic fundie, the Han supremacist -- at least they still believe in something. Here in the West, all we believe in is our own nerve endings.
Cheerful Monday morning civilizational collapse bump.