March 17 2008

Materialism and The Demise Of The West

If the life of the Western man is to be more than a lengthy series of empty exercises as we await death, then we must resolve to undertake a pilgrimage, as in Bunyan’s tale of travail and overcoming. It is an inward journey, followed by an outward one, but a journey of years and not of miles. For any serious work to begin, there must be a stock-taking of aims, of resources, and of cost. This is the meaning of Christ’s words when he admonishes his disciples, “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” He is speaking of the cost of discipleship, certainly, but also of the “cost” of faith, or those sacrifices that are a necessary but insufficient condition of the gift of faith. No serious work, that is work with an aim, is done without cost, and much of the misery and neurosis of the modern milieu is the protracted outworking of the systematic denial of this metaphysical truth. In the acquisition of truth, there is always real cost. This is the tower the price of which a man must reckon before the work is undertaken. It is the sole end of life, and there is no other. All the regular and normal forms of offices and institutions exist to support this end and are only shown to be legitimate to this extent. But why speak of work? Is not this age a golden era of blessing? Can anyone deny the wonders that man has wrought and think of work to be done? But there are those who do not view the present age as one of unalloyed blessing.
There are men and women, perhaps a not insignificant number of them, who look upon the present stage and shudder -who do not look upon the Western industrial ‘miracle’ with favor, for off in the darkened wings of the stage that has been prepared for their enjoyment, they see the trompe l’oeil backdrops and painted props, and the cast milling about, and think, ‘I am at a theater, and what I am witnessing is not life.’ We will call these doubters ‘aspiring humans.’ They are believers in a life beyond the gay theater of ‘prosperity’, proselytes of former things, before the curtain was raised on the present comedy. We spoke above of work and of cost because to these doubters, there is a work of reclamation that the West requires, if it is to regain its full humanity –the humanity it relinquished to materialism during the ages subsequent to late antiquity. The claim of the superiority of the West may only go so far as the empty boast of material dominion. Certainly the vainglory of believing that it has merited the commitment of God’s oracles to its keeping cannot be maintained by serious men. It is enough to love the West without indulging the self-delusion that is the primary obstacle to her redemption. Often in discourse we hear the West referred to as “Christendom”. In some instances the term is employed in a nostalgic manner, while in others it is used as a designation of a living and viable cultural-ethnic entity. This latter is a mistaken usage; though the reasons it is made use of are often praiseworthy, in the main they amount to no more than a hopeful sentimentality.  To speak of “Christendom” is to speak not of a place but of an era, and one that lamentably belongs to the ancient past. One of the developments we will examine most assiduously is the manner in which the demise of Christendom was brought about, and the means by which we were transported unawares into this “happy age”.
One of the many false claims of Western superiority is the claim of material plenty. While we will not go so far as other critics in the underscoring of this error of estimation, it is to be said that this unquestioned material superiority is not the only factor in the relative estimation of civilizations. The West’s material domination has come at a great cost, and that cost is its genuine humanity. The international clamor for the blessings of America are, from a certain perspective, not the signs of a beacon of hope, but rather the unmistakable evidence of the decay of spiritual values worldwide, the pervasive influence of American values, and the triumph of an unthinking materialism. Anticipating the likely objection, even by sober minds not sufficiently detached from the pervasive suggestions of those who have an intense interest in maintaining the current state of affairs, we do not claim that the West is a civilization without merits. Certain strident critics of America and the West in general have taken this course of thinking to extreme conclusions, because they, as leftists and Marxists, begin from false, that is, materialist, premises. If materialism is the gnawing in the West’s vitals, Marxism is not, and can never be its physician. But the victory over Marxism gained in recent decades is not a victory over materialism, and indeed, it is an irony of history –and a sign of the success of the industry of persuasion- that the supposed antagonists of the cold war were, in reality, armed camps of the same sovereign order, rival factions and not genuine enemies. The fact of the left’s dogged attachment to Marxism, in its various formulations, is proof of its moral and intellectual bankruptcy as it attempts to critique the materialism of the so-called right. What is to be noted here is that the false dichotomy that is maintained between the modern right and left is a species of the mental control exercised by powerful interests toward the preservation of the current order of things.
Certainly the West possesses merits that can and ought to be claimed for it, but such merits as it has lie in the vestiges of a former order, and in the character of a people altogether too credulous, too quick to believe fairy tales. It will certainly be objected by men who call themselves “patriots” that the West is the birthplace of certain liberal and “progressive” conceptions, such as the “freedom” we hear well spoken of in academic and other forms of discourse. But this freedom, to the regulated and traditional mind, appears as mere anarchy and license –the menace of a body liberated from mind and from true conscience, a monstrosity overcome by inner forces it has neither the will nor the inclination to rule, as in Mary Shelley’s prescient fable of the consequences of man’s, and particularly Western man’s, hubris. The liberty to wreck the immemorial and human order of life, and to imperil millennia of spiritual development, the fruits of a society devoted to holy living, and this for the achievement of the infra-human ends of industry, must be looked upon with disgust by the normal man. One of the freedoms the West has enjoyed is the freedom of political and economic domination. Its will to empire is an historical truism that is beyond dispute. From the brute empires of Britain and Russia, to the de facto, if not de jure, empire of the United States, the tale is quite repetitive. In this it is not alone, as the East has also possessed this character sporadically, from dynastic China to the Mongol conquests to Imperial Japan. But what distinguishes Western Empire is its sheer scale as well as its economic/material totality. There is a will to dominion in the Western man that is alternately both a blessing and a curse. To be sure, economic and material benefits are not always to be lightly dismissed. Nevertheless, the typical ends to which such efforts are directed -those of extreme levels of comfort or of idleness, the mental and spiritual domination of masses of men by diabolic force and regimentation, among other similar ends- must cause question to arise as to its value. The benefits of the suffering and misery of millions being relieved through medicine and sanitation is noteworthy. But was industrialization and regimentation of life the only means by which these ends could and can be achieved? We must ask ourselves what is given in exchange for these benefits, and more principally, the manner in which they are brought about. This is a question that is crying out for an answer as the West seethes and lurches toward ends that are genuinely horrifying to any not under the powerful spell of mass suggestion.