"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in-between."
The article began with LaTulippe describing his first impression of seeing the HBO TV show, Sex and the City, how he found it simultaneously brilliant and horrifying. To give the Devil his due, he says, the script, acting, cinematography are amazing, and the comedy truly hilarious. But brilliance of production aside, Sex and the City has a number of profound socio-political nuances that dovetail with an issue I’ve been kicking around for quite some time; namely, that the Western world is experiencing the final stages of a cultural struggle between two radically different versions of social organization (which I call "organic culture" and "post-modernism"). This struggle is the single dominant issue of our age, and it defines a variety of conflicts both within Western civilization and between it and other civilizations, stretching from the relentless expansion of our government to our misbegotten "war on terror."Sex and the City represents the post-modern paradigm. The thirty-something single women living in New York City live a life that is, says LaTulippe, while all too common today, perhaps unprecedented in human history, particularly for women. They are completely uprooted and homogenized, with no discernable family connections. They have no religious convictions. They wander around Manhattan, eating in chic restaurants, maxing-out their credit cards in fashionable boutiques, and engaging in a bewildering variety of casual sexual relationships. Their lives are more like those of animals than anything fully human, dominated by impulses and sensations rather than intellect and spirit, indulgence rather than purpose. They have no reverence for the past and no regard for the future, living only in the present. Even more disturbingly, says LaTulippe, their lifestyle has a "spooky passivity" to it, "a sense of slavery" to their vices: "If someone takes them to a swanky Thai restaurant, they’ll eat. If someone hands them a martini, they’ll drink. If a handsome guy appears, they’ll copulate." This, in effect, is the sum total of their lives, illustrating the fact that post-modernism isn't really a culture, but an anti-culture, or a parasite upon what remains of a past culture in the absence of any present culture.
At the opposite end of the spectrum lies what LaTulippe calls "organic culture." The most extreme examples of this type of social organization,
he says, are the Amish and the Hasidic Jews. Organic cultures are characterized by a "chain of being," by which an individual sees himself linked in a chain extending back through innumerable generations, as well as to future generations of descendants. "Respect of one’s ancestors and concern for one’s descendants are thus wrapped together in a religious and culture milieu that is of profound importance in everyday life," says LaTulippe. And, obviously, this sort of culture has been severely eroded as our intellectual and cultural elites have long abandoned whatever remnants of organic culture they may have had and now totally embraced the new, dysfunctional cultural Weltanschauung of post-modernism. Post-modernism, in LaTulippe's view, suffers from three major flaws: (1) ethical relativism, (2) auto-genocide, and (3) the death of the sacred. LaTulippe developes his analysis at these points more extensively in a political direction than I am able to give space to here, but here are a few highlights.
(1) Ethical relativism. Here LaTulippe looks at foreign policy and domestic policy, focusing, in particular, on the financial scandals that have come to light in connection with the latter. These have as their common root, he suggests, "the amoral quest for the unearned, which is perhaps the final common denominator of our entire political system." Post-modernism, he says, is locked into a "dysfunctional synergy with statism," in which each feeds the other, and they are sucking all of us down with them. He writes:
As for organic culture, I’ve often mused that the Amish are a clear and present danger to our system. As Lew Rockwell noted recently, they take no welfare, they pay for their own medical care (in cash), they save for their own retirement, they don’t join our military on its exciting escapades, and they educate their own children.(2) Auto-genocide. "Post-modern culture treats children as an expensive and peculiar hobby, something like a curious fashion statement. Children are, after all, expensive, messy, and they interfere with an active dating life. And if children are seen as a mere fashion accessory or an emotional indulgence, then one will do just as well as two (and much better than three or four)," writes LaTulippe. This attitude is reflected in the precipitously falling birthrates of those countries that suffered erstwhile panic attacks from fear of "population explosions."
At some point, I fully expect to hear of government bureaucrats recommending that Amish children be whisked away from their families and redistributed to urban housing projects for a less "antisocial" upbringing.
After all, if the Amish worldview should spread, our entire welfare-warfare system would literally collapse.
By contrast, the view of children reflected in 'organic culture' is poignantly summed up in a quotation LaTulippe offers from Oswald Spengler's The Hour of Decision:
A woman of [tribe] does not desire to be a "companion" or a "lover," but a mother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and distraction, but of many: the instinct of a strong tribe speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her, the tribe....LaTulippe writes: "Western elites believe they can avoid a demographic collapse by importing replacement populations and corrupting them with post-modernism before the newcomers are able to impose their own organic culture on the host nations. This may work for America and its largely Hispanic immigrant population, but its prospects with European Islam are, to say the least, highly suspect."
3. The Death of the Sacred. Post-modernism is this-worldly, recognizing nothing beyond the immediate, concrete world. It has no higher aspirations. It offers no spiritual sustenance. "If a man has food stamps, a welfare check, and a place in a government housing project, it believes he has everything he could possibly need or want. (Actually, that is true only as far as the commoners are concerned. For the post-modern elites, they require exotic ethnic cuisine, cheap immigrant household labor, and a custom Maybach...but this is a difference in degree, not kind.)" Whatever one's income level, however, the shift in frames of reference is that from the Sistine Chapel and Bach's requiem mass to the vulgar creations of contemporary cultural nihilism.
By way of conclusion, LaTulippe laments that it is difficult for contemporary generations to even imagine what has been lost. That is why he likes, he says, cinematic portrayals of Jane Austen novels and their depiction of a past world of complex manners and morals with their vibrant sense of right-and-wrong and even the bad guy carries a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets in his pocket. He observes:
Those of us born during or after the sixties social revolution have no living memory of even a vestigial remnant of Western culture, but rather have experienced only the degenerate post-modernism, drenched in stifling humanism, absurd universalism, and fatuous egalitarianism, that has dominated ever since.Whether LaTulippe's grim prognosis is right, and the die is cast, and the women of Sex and the City will be our civilizational epitaph, only time will tell. There is always, especially for Catholics, the possibility of rebirth -- given that Beauty "ever ancient, ever new."
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted so trenchantly, democracy has led us down the primrose path to decadence, which in turn has provided continuous justifications for yet more statism. This system of decadence, however enticing and delectable it may sometimes be, is unsustainable. This cannot go on. It will ultimately end in bankruptcy, demographic implosion, or Road Warrior-style chaos."
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