Dear Ayaan Hirsi Ali…

The West isn’t being ‘subverted’ it’s just suffering from a particularly stupid bout of melancholy… but there is hope

Earlier this week Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a piece in The Free Press on how We Have All Been Subverted. In case you’ve forgotten, Ali was born in Somalia in the late 60s when the red pirates seized power and knows firsthand that freedom isn’t free: “In the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu”. Her family escaped the tyrannical Marxist regime but suffered greatly (her father was imprisoned), then later, fleeing an arranged marriage and in a search of “the kind of freedom my father had taught me about” she was granted asylum in the Netherlands at the age of 22. There and in America she established herself as a steadfast defender of Western values. Now, however, she thinks it’s all gone to hell, or more accurately, she thinks that the ‘Western values’ she holds so dear are being ‘subverted’. 

Ali’s read Yuri Bezmenov on ‘Psychological Warfare, Subversion, and the Control of Society’, and you should read him or watch his lecture too. In fact, Ali even includes one of Bezmenov’s charts in the article – perhaps to gently pique the interest of those who might be put off by the author’s unpronounceable name. Remember, we are living in dark times. The state of education in the West is such that “Tchaikovsky” can no longer be used as a rugby line-out call at Oxford. Oxford hasn’t cancelled Tchaikovsky, it’s just that the players can’t figure out whether his name, or rather ‘the word’, begins with a ‘T’ or an ‘S’ so don’t know where the ball is going to go if the captain uses it as a call.

Bezmenov was a KBG agent who defected to the West around the time Ali was born, and in 1983 he gave a much-discussed lecture on ideological subversion, or how a government or political system is gradually undermined from within. He was explaining how the Soviet apparatus worked to the Americans (to G. Edward Griffin interestingly enough) but we can use his model to understand how the West is being subverted now, or so Ali contends.

Bezmenov’s chart tells us that there are four key stages of ‘subversion’: “Demoralisation”, “destabilisation”, “crisis”, and finally “normalisation”. Ali tells us that the West is thoroughly demoralised, or undergoing a process of demoralisation at least, which is when institutions such as religion, education, media, and culture are targeted and “in each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited”. “Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself” and Ali notes the tearing down of statues and the “cynical and self-selective truth telling Americans encounter in most classrooms”: Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Columbus killed millions. This will all be disturbingly familiar enough to readers, and we could add the ‘decolonisation’ movement here, dissected brilliantly in Doug Stokes’s book Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of West and recently reviewed by me here, and Ali does go into decolonisation later in her piece. 

We learn that the process of demoralisation takes between 10 and 30 years, as this is apparently the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation, and Ali seems happy enough with this time frame. Indeed, it fits well enough with the ‘Long March Through the Institutions' line that people are fond of trotting out these days, and it also fits with the suspicion that the rot set in with postmodernism – that the neo-Marxists kicked off by politicising or weaponizing postmodernism’s epistemology, or lack thereof.

But the problem with thinking like this, and indeed the problem with using a neat four stage ‘strategy’ to explain why the West is in such a terrible state, is that it assumes that things were ‘better’ or at least staid before the devilish subverters came along. It assumes that there was something to ‘subvert’ in the first place.

For Ali there was certainly ‘something’ in the Netherlands of 1992 – the place she found refuge after fleeing an arranged marriage. There was also certainly something in her renunciation of Islam in favour of good Western values, above all freedom of speech. But stories like these—stories from people who have lived under horrible anti-democratic regimes, and who can perhaps better appreciate the principles of the West that Ali writes “have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history” than those who grew up knowing nothing but those freedoms—these stories, I’m sorry to say, just don’t really do it for me. Or more precisely, they do not galvanise me in the way that they should, in the way that they aim to.

Ali’s article is intelligent, well written, and most importantly, intellectually honest. She recounts the Buddhist parable of the elephant and the blind men and writes that although her perception is that we are a society subverted “in a systematic and totalising way”. She concedes that “As one of those blind men […]surely I, too, am encountering only part of the elephant”. She ends her article urging all of us “blind seekers to come together. To restore what we have lost will be the work of our lifetimes. Can there be a more important project?”

But as a fellow ‘blind seeker’, as someone who is on Ali’s side, I made it to the first stage of ‘subversion’ (and I should note that I was familiar with Bezmenov before reading’s Ali’s article) ‘demoralisation’ and all that occurred to me were all the ways I could counter her contention that the ‘systemic discrediting of ‘the old ways of thinking, the old heroes’ that has occurred in the West, is some somehow akin or even similar to USSR subversion of African countries. Further, I was puzzled by her identification of the ‘three forces’ that are ‘doing the subverting’. According to Ali, these are 1. The American Marxists, 2. The radical Islamists, and 3. the Chinese Communist Party. They are all apparently supported and advanced by an ever-present Putin with ‘his own’ uncharacterised ‘subversion agenda’. Are these really the ‘forces’ that are ‘doing the subverting’? I think not, or I think her approach misses the mark… by a mile. ‘Running before walking’ also crossed my mind...

But I will be serious, and I will be fair. So, when Ali writes that there is a ‘systemic discrediting of the old ways of thinking, of the old heroes’ I largely agree. There is certainly something like this going on. But I part ways with Ali in that I see this as a perfectly understandable state, albeit a lamentable one, that the West just happens to be in at the moment, and one that it probably would have gotten itself into without the help of the Marxists, the Islamists, the Chinese Communist Party, and the apparently malevolent, omniscient, Putin.

Rather than thinking of Western society as ‘in decline’ and grasping (blindly?) for the return to some sort of golden age, I think we should look at what the West really ‘is’ or rather, what is eternal about the West and in particular about the ‘Western mind’?

For me the key characteristic of what I am loosely calling the ‘Western mind’ is its scepticism, and since the Enlightenment, the related problem of ‘reason’. This is far too often neglected or glossed over, and I think a deeper consideration of the Western mind in its sceptical mode can go some way to explaining how we have come to find ourselves not subject to some ‘systemic subversion’ as Ali argues, but in a rather familiar melancholic state.

Hume and scepticism as a Western ‘disposition’

One way of rejecting Ali’s ‘systemic subversion’ line and the ‘demoralisation’ stage would be to argue that the ‘old heroes’ of the West died long ago, so to admit defeat, and in a sense, this is true (Nietzsche said God is dead long ago, etc.). But what is more important—and crucially, what many seem to forget—is that the ‘old heroes’ were never really that big of a deal in the first place. Or rather, they were always taken with a grain of salt. This is distinctively Western, and it is true even of the Old World. 

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume described the Western sceptical mind of which we are heirs, in a sort of paranoid crisis mode in his Treatise of Human Nature. When sitting down to philosophise, Hume found himself “first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy” fancing himself “some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate.” This was more than just the isolation of a scholar or a pedant, the latter of which Hume was of course notably not. He goes on to explain that his state was brought about because he had: “expos'd myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians” and found that:

 When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho’ such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasonings. 

Hume found that while scepticism qua philosophical inquiry is not only unavoidable—it is irrefutable—relief can be found in respite, and as soon as one ‘leaves one’s study’ the ‘clouds’ are ‘dispelled’:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

This is not a ‘cure’ for scepticism and the melancholy it provokes, rather it is the realisation that one should sometimes ‘take a beat’. Hume observes that this radical scepticism has an influence on the mind, but not a constant one. Scepticism as a trait or disposition, and so as durable, which I argue is key a feature of the ‘Western mind’, appears later, in Hume’s Dialogues, when he considers pyrrhonism and the stoics, writing:

For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it; while it remains in its full force and vigour. We need only ask such a sceptic, What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches? He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer. A COPERNICAN or PTOLEMAIC, who supports each his different system of astronomy, may hope to produce a conviction, which will remain constant and durable, with his audience. A STOIC or EPICUREAN displays principles, which may not only be durable, but which have an effect on conduct and behaviour. But a PYRRHONIAN cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: Or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. 

Pyrrhonian scepticism is the most radical form of scepticism and is not sustainable by any human inquirer, but sceptics can learn from the stoics, who although posit an unattainable goal, are engaged in a similar philosophical ‘practice’ or ‘training’ and can teach the sceptic ‘diffidence’ or humbleness, by reminding him of the limits of human reason. (And I note that this also fits nicely with Hume on the Copernicans who are concerned with nature, or the natural world). He hints at how the sceptics might learn from the stoics here:

I allow of your comparison between the STOICS and SCEPTICS … . But you may observe, at the same time, that though the mind cannot, in Stoicism, support the highest flights of philosophy, yet even when it sinks lower, it still retains somewhat of its former disposition; and the effects of the Stoic's reasoning will appear in his conduct in common life, and through the whole tenor of his actions. The ancient schools, particularly that of ZENO, produced examples of virtue and constancy which seem astonishing to present times. […] In like manner, if a man has accustomed himself to sceptical considerations on the uncertainty and narrow limits of reason, he will not entirely forget them when he turns his reflection on other subjects; but in all his philosophical principles and reasoning, I dare not say, in his common conduct, he will be found different from those, who either never formed any opinions in the case, or have entertained sentiments more favourable to human reason. (Dialogues)

My reading of Hume, whereby we cannot be total sceptics, nor complete stoics, but should instead find in the limits of reason a certain humbleness or modesty, chimes with the early modern Christian Pyrrhonism expressed by Montaigne in some of his more serious moods:

No system discovered by Man has greater usefulness nor a greater appearance of truth [than Pyrrhonism] which shows us Man naked, empty, aware of his natural weakness, fit to accept outside help from on high … . [The Pyrrhonist] is no scoffer, he holds no doctrine contrary to established custom; he is humble, obedient, teachable, keen to learn … . He is a blank writing-tablet, made ready for the finger of God to carve such letters on him as he pleases. (Apology for Raymond Seybold)

Hume did not follow the Christian Pyrrhonists such as Bayle or Huet, or other sceptical philosophers like Descartes and Pascal and take the ‘leap of faith’ or any solid step towards Christianity. Montaigne probably didn’t either, although that is up for debate.

The Christians considered scepticism a good because it is modesty-inducing, and this opens us up to God. But is intellectual modesty a good regardless? That is, is it a good in and of itself? I think Hume thought so and expressed as much when he wrote in An Enquiry to Human Understanding that those “accustomed to sceptical consideration on the uncertainty and narrow limits of reason…the strange infirmities of human understanding” go forth with that “degree of doubt, and caution” but through practice and habit, or scepticism understood as a disposition, learn “modesty and reserve, which in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner”.

Ali and others who are calling for a revival of Enlightenment thinking with a side of cultural Christianity, or for a defense of ‘traditional Western values’, would, I think, find my reading of Hume satisfactory enough, and Hume himself and scepticism of this kind worth defending. I am sure Ali has written elsewhere on how scepticism is the handmaiden of empiricism, how it is essential for any pursuit of truth, friendly to freedom, and on the whole one of the West’s virtues. Others have acknowledged as much or similar and I don’t need to mention them here.

More important to mention is what I have noticed, and that is that if or when they defend Western scepticism, these commentators seem to forget, or gloss over, the fear and trembling at its very heart. They ignore Hume’s complaint that “every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasonings”—the complaint that the Western mind has never managed to, strictly speaking, ‘pray away’.

Christianity has always known this, of course, but considers this ‘failing’ (if it can be called that) far preferable to any alternate state of affairs. The obvious alternative is Marxism (for I do not think Islamism has ever been attractive to the Western mind) but I do not think we are facing that ideology at the moment. The spectre of Marx will probably always haunt Europe, but right now I think we are oddly enough in more of a Judeo-Christian frame of mind.

Western scepticism sick / woke as a melancholic ‘mood’

I will attempt to explain this using very general terms and use the word ‘woke’ or ‘wokeism’ because Ali’s contention that ‘we have all been subverted’ seems to fall within the scope of that capacious descriptor.

So, one of the reasons I think that ‘woke’ is more Christian than Marxist, and again I speak very generally, is because I see ‘woke’ as largely an exercise in self-flagellation. In this way, the West has returned with some gusto, as it does periodically, to its eternal, deeply Christian, masochism. I also think that this self-flagellation is melancholic, and that it has been brought on by the ‘dread of error in my reasonings’ that is always present somewhere deep in the psyche of the West.

Unlike some commentators and indeed many exponents of ‘wokeism’ themselves, I do not believe that ‘woke’ has its own ‘truth’ or ‘correct reasoning’. I stress that I am speaking philosophically here. I know ‘woke’ has its updated version of ‘PC’ and ‘un-PC’ terms, and I know that it likes to cancel people. But philosophically speaking it has no ‘correct reasoning’ – ‘feelings’ or ‘justice’ don’t count.

Woke might promise to make Hume feel better about himself for example, but it does not promise to relieve him of the ‘error and absurdity’ in his ‘reasoning’. It rejects reason for passion or what we now call emotion, and this is because it is first and foremost what I am calling a ‘mood’ or a disposition.

Passion or emotion has always been used to serve politics, of course, and especially when politics is taken to be above all a question of what is ‘moral’. This was Robespierre’s take and for him politics was in fact nothing more than public morality: “Reason with its insidious language can paint the most equivocal enterprise in captivating colours but the virtuous heart will never forget the interests of the humblest citizen. Let us place the virtuous statesman before the clever politician”.

Robespierre and Mirabeau put this into practice in their speeches, mounting sentimental appeals to the ‘soul’, ‘tender humanity’ and ‘virtue’. In fact, the whole revolution had its own language and in France a new literary vocabulary emerged that was saturated with emotive associations. It drowned out rococo wit and attempted to oust classicism altogether. You can see the inklings of this in the new Romantic sensibility of the 1770s and 1780s. It’s most obvious in Rousseau who not only makes his heroes and heroines blubber at the slightest provocation but goes so far as to ‘weep’ himself. But it’s also in Diderot and in Greuze. Salon critics would apparently sob and weep beholding Greuze’s paintings so eager were they to display the ‘sensibilité’. This is what happens when passion—or the capacity for intense passion—becomes the precondition for morality. It was for the French in the lead up to their revolution and in this way Emile and the Nouvelle Héloïse were more important than The Social Contract.  To be moral was to possess ‘a feeling heart’ / un coeur sensible.

Woke is far from anything like this and comparisons with the French revolution or the Jacobeans or attempts to understand 'virtue signaling’ as something like what was going on with Greuze, I have no time for. I doubt anyone is bothered about Greuze, but I have seen some ‘awokening’ and Jacobin comparisons made, and they too miss the mark.

Why? Because, I repeat, woke is not an ideology. Where is wokeism’s art?  It has none. What is its goal other than to ‘deconstruct’ and to ‘feel’ ‘just’? It doesn’t have one, it has no telos. It is a disposition, and a ‘mood’ and its only goal can be to sustain itself, to keep up a never-ending ‘culture war’, which I note, means that the enemy ‘Western culture’ or ‘reason’, no matter how battered and beaten has to stay, if only to continue to be beaten within an inch of its life. See the masochism now?

The West has to be the most masochistic culture on the planet. Despite this, as Ali observes, it has managed to produce the most “flourishing societies in all of human history”. And as I have already suggested, for most commentators this means that we should focus on the productive and positive Western values. But this becomes complicated when we consider scepticism because Western scepticism is a double-edged sword. It is also so part of the Western mind, I would argue it is its defining feature, that you cannot untangle it from its trappings. You cannot ignore its tendency towards self-destruction; that it often goes hand in hand with apathy and cynicism and that at times it can turn iconoclastic. We ignore scepticism sick at our peril.

In Ali’s case, we end up laying the blame on the Islamists, and the Marxists, and the Chinese Communist Party, and whatever Putin is up to. This is barking up the wrong tree, it’s howling at the moon. So, I will instead take a brief look at what Western scepticism has looked like when it has fallen into its melancholic state in the past. One could of course do this by simply reading parts of the bible (it’s all in there somewhere) but I will instead look at the mal du siècle and then mention the fine de siècle and art after the Great War as an afterthought. There is more in these periods that has something in common with wokeism’s mood than in the postmodernism of the 1970s or the revolutionaries of the Great Terror or in Marxism at any time or anywhere.

Sad bois (and girls) at the end of centuries

I have looked a little at the Eighteenth century or the end of it and France and reason and passion and idiom and so I suppose the philosophes or the period immediately after them. This always makes me think of how the English, in particular in the early eighteenth century were so different with their gentle, mocking, Augustan wit. The pseudo-heroes of Swift’s Rape of the Lock, his Modest Proposal.

For the English, manners, style, and wit became the privileged modes of self-understanding and self-disclosure, and you see this all in the new form of journalism, in the spectator and the observer. Grub street was a funny place and Samuel Johnson was a grub street man, but there was a grub street in France as well, filled with those Voltaire called the ‘rugged rabble’. There is a book by Robert Darnton The Literary Underground of the Old Regime that I read years ago that is very good on all this. He argues that the hacks were those who could not make it as philosophes and fuelled the underground of the revolution. Some ended up really making it in the end: Camille Desmoulins, Dollot d’Herbois, Fabre d’Eglantine.

But in the same way that our new moralism—'virtue signalling’, cancellations, #whatevermoralcause—is almost the opposite of ‘sensibilité’ in that it is ‘lite’, it has no real direction, and underneath it all is really just apathy, I don’t think there is a modern-day grub street or even real hacks. You could argue that the whole internet is precisely this but even then, it is real sentiment—real enthusiasm and then the scepticism that make its appearance and tempers this—that is lacking today. The woke are too sad, and probably too stupid to really put anything like this together. So, what are they like then?

Probably Chateaubriand’s René. The woke students, at least, are all a bit like little René’s, the protagonist of Chateaubriand’s novella of the same name. Chateaubriand was a royalist who wisely jumped ship or rather got on one and sailed for America shortly after the revolution broke out. René is a solitary cosmopolitan who although he travels far and wide remains unsatisfied: “The ancient world had no certainty, the modern world had no beauty.”

"I soon found myself more isolated in my own land, than I had been in a foreign country. For a while I wanted to fling myself into a world which said nothing to me and which did not understand me. My soul, not yet worn out by any passion, sought an object to which it might be attached; but I realised I was giving more than I received. It was not elevated language or deep feelings that were asked of me. My only task was to shrink my soul and bring it down to society's level."

He withdraws from society but finds that intolerable as well. Moves to the countryside, plans to kill himself. Ends up dying in a battle between the Natchez and the French.

The young romantics went wild for René – Alfred de Musset and Berlioz were fans, and it was considered I think the quintessential expression of the mal du siècle. Goethe and Byron liked the novella too and they ripped it off in The Sorrows of Young Werther and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, respectively, although Goethe was less of a plagiarist. Both are brilliant works.

So, the woke share something with the melancholic young Europeans of the early 19^th century. Underneath the screeching I think they are just bored and paralysed by contemplation. This may seem wrong because the general understanding is that the woke do not contemplate at all. As many have observed, they reject reason and reality, they have no time for facts or basic truths. But in this lies their preoccupation with truth. To hold such a radical position, to say 2 + 2 = 5, you have to be almost obsessed by truth, and sort of crippled by it. They have been deconstructed and so turning their eye inward “find nothing but doubt and ignorance”, and I am with Hume again, “All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho’ such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loonsen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others”.  Despite the mob that is twitter these people don’t really have ‘others’ in any meaningful sense. Identity politics is so clearly empty to me, so devoid of comradery and so, again, so unlike Marxism, the woke are philosophically stuck and alone and more atomised than ever. Like René they are melancholic. Mal du siècle means ‘sickness of the century’ and at that time the sickness was ennui, disillusionment and melancholy.

Something similar happened with the fin de siècle and what I am observing is the Western mind grappling with reason and the problem of the Enlightenment. When you take a little tour or dip into art and literature you see that the West has been plagued by this forever, but it really came to the forefront with the Enlightenment. So, if these are the values that we want to preserve and that are being ‘subverted’ why you would start by thinking about the Chinese Communist Party or the Islamists I have no idea? Scepticism is the solution and the problem, and it is this so very Western disposition that explains it all, or well enough for now.

A note on the fin de siècle and art after the Great War

Basically, I have noticed that people are reading G.K Chesterton again, and I think this is good if they are paying attention to not just his Catholicism but to the mental breakdown that contributed to it. In his autobiography, Chesterton explained how The Man Who Was Thursday was inspired by his own experience of the decadence of the 1890s, and the radical pessimism that was all the rage at I think the Slate? Where he was studying at the time. Anyhow, pessimism, England’s preferred strain of the fin de siècle was indeed all the rage amongst the young at the time and Schopenhauer was the man of the minute. According to Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday, or the nightmare in that book is “a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the ‘90s”.

Reflecting on his youth and that time in particular years later, Chesterton wrote that “my eyes were turned inwards rather than outwards; giving my moral personality, I should imagine, a very unattractive squint”. He goes on:

I was still oppressed with the metaphysical nightmare of negations about mind and matter, with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of my own mysterious brain and body; but by this time I was in revolt against them; and trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life, even if it were one that should err on the side of health. I even called myself an optimist, because I was so horribly near to being a pessimist. It is the only excuse I can offer.

Some advice

So read Chesterton and find out how he sorted himself out but also because he is good. Chesterton is easy enough to start with.

Something that is also easy and fun is to go to art galleries or if this is impossible peruse the many available online art galleries. Everything important is in the public domain, anyway.

You must start by forgetting Duchamp’s urinal, however. It is not with Duchamp and Lyotard that our so-called demise kicked off—you need to observe the way European art (not ‘objects’) changed after the Great War.

Even before the war expressionism was giving way to anti-realist abstraction and the artists of Die Brücke and the Der Blaue Reiter group come immediately to mind. But you need to go to the Belvedere and just look. Go to Klimt, then through Schiele, then to Klemens Brosch—who was in the end sketching like Goya—and then, remember Otto Dix!—and, then, any idea of the possibility of ‘coherence’ understood as something like a ‘grand narrative’ not only goes out the window, you understand that it was blown to smithereens.

Picasso and Stravinsky may have tried, but in the end the ‘Return to Order’ movement could only ever be cynical, and the verists in this way won. Look at George Grosz’s Grey Day – rebirth and hope after the devastation of the war? Sure, but only for the rich.

After this we had Hitler, of course, which is another story. The point is that I think the woke are facing a similar problem to the one Chesterton faced and another thing worth thinking about is what he writes about anarchy – no doubt the attraction to that in late 19^th England, the impulse at least, is similar to some of what we are seeing in the woke now.

Ali writes to the young (I assume):

“One thing to pay attention to is your gut. Another is your mind: be discerning and skeptical of people recruiting you to their cause. Does their cause ask toleration of you or require compelled speech? Are you being recruited to fight for a cause you know nothing about? Is that cause maximalist and uncompromising; does it glorify violence?”

These are sensible questions, but I have a bit more faith in young people. At least the rich, albeit not-bright, young things who now disturbingly support terrorists and are increasingly antisemitic. I think in time they will get bored. Or the economy will tank, and they will run out of money and reality will hit. Or they might find God.

Whatever the case I don’t think they are being brainwashed by American Marxists, Islamists, and the Chinese Communist Party. They are certainly behaving appallingly, but this is as Western as it comes. It is a new fine de siècle with iphones and this gives me a perverse kind of hope. They still possess a Western mind, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be being such enfant terribles.

Ali writes that “Perhaps it is because I was born into a part of the world where these principles were nonexistent that I feel a particular love for them—and an instinct for when they are in danger.”

For me, I think perhaps it is because I was born into a part of the world where these principles were the only ones that existed that I cannot imagine a world where they would not exist.

I am quite certain that this is the same for the ‘woke’ radical left. Although they are toppling statues and supporting terrorists, I don’t think they can truly imagine, or even desire a world where liberty, representative government, and a commitment to pluralism—the principles Ali cites—do not exist.

These very principles allow them to wallow in their melancholic state, to rage and scream at the world, to have their tantrums, to continue to have statues to tear down. They certainly would not be allowed to do this in China, and I don’t think they would enjoy living under an Islamic Caliphate. I think they know this.

So, there is no systemic ‘subversion’ or brainwashing going on, but merely a new-look Western boredom en masse. It is reminiscent perhaps most, of the decadent movement of the late-nineteenth century, and we might hope that the young move on to some sort of modernism sometime soon. I have prescribed some G.K Chesterton and some art and to that I would also add some Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Get rid of DEI, purge the universities of bureaucrats, etc. make sure rule of law is still working as it should, but when defending Western values remember you can’t—or it would be unwise—to pick and choose the ones you want to keep and the ones you want to chuck. Western culture, like any other, has its flaws. It must at least be understood for what it is: that is the West, warts and all, currently melancholic.

LS

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