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The commentary’s pretty good, too - reminiscent of what we used have here on a regular basis. Now - not so much.

Dig it. I miss the good ol' days, too. These were 200+ of some of the most insightful things I've read on FR in a long time.

Question for you: your stuff on the will to power I found quite compelling, and I think your argument for the vacuum left behind by the decline of the church is fairly water-tight, but I wonder what you think of the "will to power," if you will, of the earlier church?

And I'm not really trying to present an argument, but bring up a topic of conversation, to wit: though the Christian church was singular in the foundation of western morality (good & evil), there's no doubt that a great deal of violence was also done in the name of the church . . . often Christian on Christian violence. Because I'm part Acadian, I'm thinking, of course, of the diaspora in which protestant New Englanders used religion as an excuse to commit a version of genocide (albeit a "light" version of genocide, if there is such a thing) on the Acadians because, nominally, they were Catholic; although what they really had in mind was controlling the land that was then the breadbasket of North America.

Seems to me the "will to power" can exist in any institutional schema designed to govern, direct, or control the mind and the body of man, even in such a noble and august institution of a church. And while we conservatives are quick to point out the flaws of the institutions we look upon with a jaundiced eye - and rightly so, of course - we have to be careful to be fair across the board.

In any event, just a thought. Thanks again for the excellent piece, and the very best to you and yours.

Thanks for the well-considered response. You've raised a pertinent question: given that the desire for power, to rule over others, seems to be one of our human failings, what makes modern times any different in that respect than, say medieval times? Or the Dark Ages? Or the heyday of ancient Rome?

Part of the answer lies here: Don't Converge the Streams. The essence of the idea is that modern times saw the convergence of some uniquely toxic ideas and memes. Taken together, that convergence gave those who who are driven by the will to power the environment (in all respects), the ideas and the means to embark on the road to slaughter, ruin and atrocity - and I say that it is slaughter, ruin and atrocity for its own sake - beyond anything the world had seen. And, it continues unabated to this day. Somewhere, everywhere.

That's only part of the answer. Power's tough for some to resist. The power to harm others without consequence is more intoxicating than any drug to a particularly evil subset of humanity. The are other convergent factors that have combined to make modernity, for all of our technology and vaunted sophistication, one of the most barbaric episodes in human history. Consider Quigley's Pakistani-Peruvian Axis in the light of those convergent factors. I'm exploring another 'axis' - what I'm calling for now, the Scandinavian-Slavic axis. Loosely rendered, the Scandinavian-Slavic axis is composed of he following elements. First, the two-class warrior culture of the Vikings, who dominated far more of the post-Roman world than most people realize. The Vikings eventually came to conquer and to dominate the pastoral Slavs with their two-class (conqueror and conquered) militaristic culture. The combined nascent culture greatly admired and were dazzled by the power and the relative prosperity of the extant Byzantine culture, who in turn got their notions of totalitarianism from the old Roman Empire.

Byzantine Christianity also took a very different path with respect to its outlook - amounting to a Platonic view of Man and his place in the universe vs the more Aristotelian view.

The upshot is that the Western Christian outlook - so eloquently summarized by Quigley - never took hold in that part of the world. The outlook that eventually developed was totalitarian in the sense that the state essentially owned its subjects, nihilist in the sense that the world was viewed as an un-knowable and corrupt place and that death was the only respite from an evil existence, and that the core essence of Teutonic tribalism in all of its arrogance, savagery and lack of regard for human life never went away - it merely submerged itself in Teutonic sensibility until it was awakened by the monsters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beaten into submission in WW II, it still exists today.

Also recall that the Byzantine Empire eventually fell to one just as cruel and sadistic in its outlook (if not more so) - Islam.

That severing of the Byzantine connection left us with what I’m calling the Scandinavian-Slavic axis. It’s funny, isn't it, what happens to your outlook when you start looking at human history in terms of culture and ideas AND events rather than the conventional “one damn thing after another” event-only approach. Because “one damn thing after another” - a series of empty correlations - is all one can come up with absent an acknowledgement of the roles of culture and outlook - as embodied by those two great currents of human culture, custom and outlook.

Against those currents, we here in America stand very much alone.