Are we moving out of a Golden Age and into a Dark Age? A Dark Age happens when the skills and habits of civilization are forgotten because they are no longer relevant to survival. A Golden Age is a time of peak peace, prosperity, power, and artistic achievement.
In my fifty-seven years, I experienced in my youth a vigorous United States at the center of a vibrant and growing Western Civilization. Global population grew apace with improving living standards. Totalitarianism was contained, and Americans explored the Moon and led the development of the Earth’s newest central nervous system of internet networks and supply chains. From World War II through the 1990s, for us in the United States this was a Golden Age.
In my old age, will I bear witness to the dissolution of the West and the fall of our global industrial civilization? Are we about to experience a fall worse than that of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476? Is our end to be more akin to the obliteration-without-legacy experienced by the largely forgotten Indus Valley Civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro? Does a coming Dark Age threaten humanity itself with cannibalistic savagery and even extinction?
This concern may seem overblown. Surely, every moment has its difficulties and every generation its worries. Certainly, these times we share must not be unique.
If only this were so! As a history teacher, my vocation is to encourage students to discern significant trends in any past or present society. Any culturally literate person can consider these trends and distinguish between a society that is rising or falling.
Such trends include the given society’s standards of what constitutes mental health, common sense, moral clarity, personal ambition, pragmatism, and social cohesion. Such matters are not objectively quantifiable, nor are they measurement universally agreed-upon.
Marxist, feminist, post-modernist, deconstructivist, and race-baiting historians will all deny that such trends matter. These cognoscenti undermine the meaning of such words and the validity of such concepts, because they are alien to their ideological prejudices. The existential confusion that such experts sow is, itself, a sign of intellectual and moral decay.
Art, in all of its forms, indicates the qualities of intellectual acuity and emotional stability of any society. Consider the differences between the original “Star Trek” (1966-69) and “Star Wars” (1977) and their current iterations. Then, our stories often went awry into schmaltz or silliness, but there was a willingness to boldly dream big and stake one’s all the hope that the individual can rise to the occasion and improve the world. Creativity, imagination, and sheer fun characterized these works.
Today’s withered husks of those “franchises” carefully extoll a future defined by conformity to a Woke party-line. This preordained politically-correct lockstep kills creativity, stifles imagination, and replaces thoughtful inquiry with dull propaganda. In their rigid “utopia”, all private persons are secretly depraved. In today’s sagas, there is no place for the dynamic individual. There is no room to breathe. There can be no heroes.
Art like this, which will not bravely consider life without a filter of convention is mediocrity, exemplified.
Instead of trying to conquer nature as we once did by, for example, plumbing the oceanic depths with the bathyscaphe Trieste and the Lunar surface with the Apollo moon craft, today’s luminaries focus on conquering their fellow man.
We then wrested with objective challenges like discovery, tyranny and poverty. Today, we play at redefining reality by writhing the acceptable meanings of words. Pluto is no longer a planet, truth is now offensive, objectivity is white supremacy, and men and women can change sex just by saying so. 2+2 is whatever our social media censors say it is, and freedom is the ability to slavishly do what we are told in thought, word, and deed.
Our once vaunted American practicality and common sense has been transformed into a feverish desperation to thwart reality by reclassifying the terms we use to describe it.
Sex, once understood as a way to intimately express love with a life partner which could also perpetuate the next generation, is now seen as the core of one’s very identity. For many generations, homosexuals and others of variant natures rightly complained at the illegality of their predilections. They asked why their divergence from the norm must be punished.
Now, our society having long granted such tolerance, is plagued with endless demands to normalize what is exceptional conduct. Schools and libraries, Disney and popular culture all are prematurely sexualizing children. This is self-evidently an attempt to recruit confused children into the ranks of the alternatively sexual. Worse, these stealers of a chaste innocence offer chemicals, hormones, and genital amputation to permanently maim such victims without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
Such practices are so obscene, and do so much damage to innocent children, that they must be once again classified as criminal perversions. Consenting adults can and should be tolerated in many ways, but the intentional harming of children should fill us each with a righteous outrage.
In a world overpopulated with human beings with untapped talent and in need of meaningful work, our Technomancers seem determined to create Artificial Intelligence. Such tools employ power without moral judgment and perception without perspective. Only by eliminating such abominations can humanity retain its role as the apex intelligence on this planet.
We have enemies within our society who in past generations would have been our “best and brightest”. Current elites learned at formative ages not to identify themselves with the Judeo-Christian Western tradition. They learned to be proverbial citizens of the world, rather than proud Americans.
Their loyalty is not to us or to our society. Their identity does not rest upon the dual pillars of Abrahamic monotheism and Enlightenment principles. Over these agents of change, neither the Bible nor the Constitution hold sway.
These would be masters of humanity actually see a post-American world order as a good thing. They view themselves as being fit world emperors because they consider themselves to be both above the limits of human nature and beyond the wisdom of history’s many lessons. Their lack of humility is nothing short of hubris. The Greeks knew that hubris, overweening vanity, invites the nemesis of annihilation.
Beyond the West, the brittle butchers of Beijing are so desperate to keep the Chinese people enslaved that they would burn the world just to rule the ashes. Their domestic vulnerability and hollow economic poses are crippling weaknesses.
These Inner Party Mandarins are tempted to risk a new World War in order to rally mainland Chinese around the flag. They dream of solidifying their power by capturing Taiwan, the only free Chinese nation on Earth. The Chinese Communist Party is only the most acute of many dangers to the post-WW II Pax Americana.
Are we doomed? Are we helpless? Is collapse inevitable? Should we despair? No, no, no, and never!
Whether we experience a Golden Age or a Dark Age, while we live we may choose. This is what we can control, not the wider world but we, ourselves, in our words and acts.
We can exercise our freedom to speak, act, and vote to reject the siren song of today’s decadent elites. We can work to restore the West as a healthy and vibrant culture where children thrive and merit earns success.
Living well is the best way to address those who betray notions of human dignity and personal liberty. We must refuse to allow ourselves to be rendered bestial by desperation. In desperate times, refuse to behave desperately. Pray for the strength to be faithful under duress.
We should behave with generosity and integrity. How we each react within the context of our daily life will be more critical in determining our fate than whatever the social engineers may attempt on a macro-scale.
Be worthy of freedom. As William Bradford, Puritan Governor of Plymouth Colony once wrote, we should each do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
