POLITICAL correctness, the world of woke and all our related social disasters – where did they come from?
I tried to account for these catastrophic innovations in my book The Secular Terrorist in 2009. Of course, it fell dead-born from the press. Since then things have got much, much worse: the iconoclasts in the Frankfurt School and their comrades, supporters and their successors have defeated Western civilisation. That was always their ambition, but they could hardly have hoped for the degree and extent of the success they have achieved.
They first infiltrated, then permeated and now hold sway in all our institutions: education, schools and universities, health, the churches, social policy, public morality, the law, the press and publishing, architecture, the arts, literature, music and – of course! – the electronic media.
Every ideology invents its own slogans in which to enshrine its prevailing mythology. The iconoclasts’ signature slogan is ‘Saving The Planet’ and their overarching myth is climate change.
These subversives – who have now become our masters – are usually described as neo-Marxists. Really, their prophet is Nietzsche (1844-1900), particularly in his book The Antichrist in which he called for ‘the transvaluation of all values’. Of course, he meant Judeo-Christian values. These were – please note my use of the past tense – the values which created and sustained European civilisation for 2,000 years. Now this whole culture and way of life has been abandoned and destroyed. This too was prophesied, by T S Eliot (1888-1965) in his Choruses from the Rock (1934):
‘Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?’
The iconoclasts have other prophets beside Nietzsche. Among them was Charles Reich (1928-2019) who made the revolutionaries’ aims perfectly plain in his book The Greening of America:
‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed. and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity and already our laws, institutions and social structures are changing in consequence.’
The subversives’ victory was guaranteed once Christianity had died in the soul of Western man. This was happening at a speed which the revolutionaries could hardly have expected even in their most optimistic moments. This civilisational conflict has been described as ‘culture wars’. In fact, there was only a phoney war, as the Christian institutions surrendered as soon as the first shots were fired. The method of the nihilists was an ideology of perpetual change, the human spirit the subject and victim of endless malleability. This method found its rationale in the doctrine of ‘absolute historicism’ – which meant that all morals, values and standards were products of the age. There are no absolute moral standards and morality itself should be seen as ‘socially constructed’.
The leading light – one is tempted to say misleading darkness – of the 1960s revolution was Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). He invented Critical Theory, whose supporters repeated time and again the slogans that Western societies are racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, fascist and Nazi. The fundamental ambition of Critical Theory was the mass inculcation of ‘cultural pessimism’ and ‘alienation’ wherein, as Patrick J Buchanan (b 1938) wrote: ‘A people, though prosperous and free, comes to see its society and country as oppressive, evil and unworthy of affection and love.’
Marcuse knew that past revolutions had prospered by the use of rallying oratory and persuasive books, but he believed drugs and sex were better weapons. In his book Eros and Civilization he called for the universal embrace of the Pleasure Principle – derived of course from Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) – and the creation of a world of ‘polymorphous perversity’. It was like the trumpet call of the pagans and bacchanalians who stirred the Israelites to the licentiousness of the Golden Calf while Moses was up the mountain talking with God. Marcuse’s infamous slogan caught on worldwide: ‘Make love, not war.’
Marcuse’s colleague, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was the subject of a successful movie, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which promoted the argument that ‘there is no political revolution without first a sexual revolution’. The sexual revolution was simply the subversion of traditional Christian morality and the family. This subversion is now more thorough than Marcuse and Reich envisaged. Today, even personal identity has been deconstructed: the sexes have been reduced to genders which can be changed at will, and changed back again if you do not like where you have ended up.
‘God made man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’ – Genesis 1:27
But this God has been improved upon. This God is dead.
Where does this leave us? Well, as Eliot said: ‘With a heap of broken images . . . in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones.’
For, ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’
But do please try to look on the bright side, for we have not died intestate: we have bequeathed our world to China.
And so finally, ‘Goodnight, ladies. Goodnight, sweet ladies.’
