A culture in free fall?

A reader sent this last week in response to the exchange about cultural disengagement:

I’ve often thought, when nearing despair about the culture, “they can’t win against reality.” But you can for a while: you can jump off a building. The fall is a thrill, but the landing is the crushing blow of reality. I see our culture as having jumped out a window. I’m standing at the window, and people are falling by shouting at me to join them, this is great. I don’t think so!

Perhaps the culture has reached a point of no return where it might be best to let it crash. Although with liberalism (and as long as you stick with liberalism), the point of no return is inevitable no matter where you are in the cycle, so there’s no point EVER in dealing with liberalism on liberalism’s terms. Those whom the gods seek to destroy they first make mad. I see a madness around me.

P.S. I’ve been homeschooling my children, and we don’t watch TV (we do have videos), and we don’t get news from TV or newspaper, but from the internet.

The reader’s thoughts exactly parallel a thought that used to run through my mind for years, especially in the late ’90s. I had the image that America was like a man who had jumped out of a window, but who, because he hadn’t yet hit the ground, and because he had some horizontal momentum from his leap, imagined that he was moving forward rather than falling to his imminent death. I can’t explain why I haven’t had that image in more recent years. Part of it may be, as Yeats wrote, that “Things thought too long can be no longer thought.” Part of it may be the unreasoning hope that keeps springing up in me despite all evidence to the contrary, coming in part from the insight that liberalism is irrational and cannot survive, combined with the feeling that liberalism will die, or that we will wake up and renounce liberalism, before it destroys us utterly.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2005 04:07 PM | Send