December 11, 2022

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion, a periodical devoted to literature and the arts.  He is also publisher of Encounter Books and author of many books.  The latest is Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads, which appeared for the 40th anniversary of The New Criterion.  It includes essays by many prominent writers like Victor Davis Hanson and Anthony Daniels.  The essay I summarize and comment on below is Mr. Kimball’s essay from that book, with the same title.

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“Every “Age of Enlightenment” proceeds from an unlimited optimism of the reason . . . to an equally unqualified skepticism.”

—Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West 

Mr. Kimball, an erudite essayist if there is one, opens with some rumination on cultures and men at a crossroads, pondering the choices available.  Kimball asserts that a “dark and bloody crossroads” also stands before us, “posing different and perhaps even more ultimate questions.” 

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Kimball says it is inevitable that there is a decline in the West, but he points out that, in fact, the decline is of “Christendom.”  This decline “results in the decaying moral vocabulary of Christendom but also the values of words like ‘virtue,’ ‘manliness,’ ‘womanly,’ or ‘respectable. … Christendom names a dispensation in which the individual possesses intrinsic moral worth … predominantly classical and Judaic, which flowed into and helped nurture and define that baggy creation we call ‘the West.'”

Kimball rightfully regrets the decline of academia.  “That is where we are today: occupying a husk of decadence assiduously emptied of vitality.  Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the querulous educational establishment are sodden with money but spiritually and intellectually bankrupt.”

Culture

Kimball points out that when a society is in decline, it acts in opposition to the elite and adopts the customs and behaviors of the proletarian, resulting in “sense of drift,” “truancy,” “promiscuity,” and general “vulgarization” of manners, morals, and the arts.  The elites, instead of holding fast to their own standards, suddenly begin to “go native” and adopt the dress, attitudes, and behavior of the lower classes.  He makes a great case for what Arnold Toynbee called “barbarization of the dominant or, rather ‘once-dominant’ minority.”

Mr. Kimball emphasizes that the drift of the culture is measured by what we tolerate and accept as a normal variant.  That invites what Senator Moynihan proper characterizes as “defining deviancy down.”

Mr. Kimball references Michael Anton’s warning about a world in which Western civilization is overrun and destroyed by unfettered third-world immigration: wholesale cultural suicide in which demography is weaponized and deployed as an instrument of retribution.