Saturday 18 November 2017

Many things will die out with my generation

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Many things will die out with my generation, which is to say people born in the 1960s. European ethnic states, Christendom, or at least the idea that Europe is Christian, cash, cheque books, land lines and telephone kiosks, much of the English countryside, high streets, masculine dominance. Free speech is already restricted, except in the USA and Eastern Europe. Mothers who cook each evening. Lard. Smoking, I hope. Newspapers made of paper. Privacy. 


Children in many Western European countries are no longer taught Christianity as factually
true - in Sweden it is illegal to do so, I think. They are taught instead comparative religion, which was not long ago only studied by graduates. 

The England of the late 1960s and the 1970s, that seemed such an ugly, seedy, graceless, calamitous era when I was in short trousers, now seems old fashioned. But it still repels me. The 1960s social revolution has led us to where we are now.

While students in West Berlin in 1968 were protesting in favour of Communism the rest of Eastern Europe, ruled by Marxist tyrants, remained immune to the social revolution in the capitalist West. This is why the region is so attractive and civilised.

The young people who wanted to change the world in 1968 are now in their late 60s and succeeded in doing so. They didn't do a good job of it. 

Their ideas are very powerful and most powerful in universities and schools. So they are passed on to the elite of thirty years from now.

Yet, even though I loathe the era, I admit that it does give me pause to think that if the extraordinary revolution in tastes and thought had not taken place in the West in the 1960s the iconic 1960s film might have been The Sound of Music.

Very much that is taken for granted in England and the developed world started in the 1960s. Affluence, motorways, celebrity worship, mass immigration, feminism, classlessness, consumerism, rock, the end of colonialism, the idea that traditions are oppressive, legal abortion and of course the sexual revolution. The last of these happened oddly enough on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

The vast increase in the numbers of abortions led someone to say that the sexual revolution was a pleasure chamber built above a charnel house.

The list of changes that happened in the 1960s is long and contains many very good things (higher living standards for all classes and legalising homosexuality, for example) and many very bad things.  You know what you think about them.

The post-Christian era began in the 1960s in most of the First World except the USA. In England it began with a book called Honest to God, by the Protestant Bishop of Woolwich, who misunderstood the ideas of Paul Tillich and was in turn understood by the public to be saying that there was no God. He changed his mind much later but by then the damage was done.

It might be argued that single sex marriage moves a country from being post-Christian to anti-Christian. But it isn't necessarily so. America has legalised single sex marriage and remains very Christian, for the time being, though becoming less so as each year goes by. Malta, which only recently legalised divorce, has now also legalised single sex marriage, yet the little island remains the one country in Western Europe that is still devoutly Catholic. 

Revolutions take place when traditions harden, lose their meaning and cease to capture the imagination, when enthusiasm turns to cant and change is needed. This has certainly happened since 1989 when the last big ideas, anti-communism and communism, vanished like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty falling from the Reichenbach Falls

Their place was taken by an olla podrida of free market economics, equality of opportunity (which meant identity politics), internationalism and welfare considerations. Taken together or separately they didn't have the rallying power that patriotism possessed in the days when people were open about loving their country. 

Which is why we are seeing the beginning of another revolution in the West today. It is a revolution in thinking in which Central Europe may play a big role, though I doubt if Romania will. The fight in the developed world is increasingly a fight about and against the ideas of the 1960s. 

If the revolution is successful and  far-reaching it will save some important things, but it would have to be much more extraordinary than the cultural revolution of fifty years ago to make birth-rates start to climb or Europe rediscover Christianity or faith in the superiority of Western civilisation to any other way of organising things. 

What happens to people who do not practice their religion? They are invaded by people who practice theirs.  


45 comments:

  1. All is not yet lost. I predict a big cultural revival is one the way. Whether or not organized religion will play any part of it is entirely up to the Church leaders (Who seem perpetually stuck in the 60's mindset). This revival is already starting to happen. It's lead by those young people who are smart enough to see the damage their elders have caused and are anxious for change, even revolutionary change, if necessary. The old order is on its last leg, thank God. A new one is waiting to be born.

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    1. Unfortunately the "new" order is likely to be a Chinese order.

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    2. The Chinese are another good example. The chinese are not religious but they believe in science and genetics and (very sensibly) are pressing ahead with human genetic engineering. Meanwhile in the West we remain stuck in a backward egalitarian mindset so that even stating the fact that different races have different average IQs is shocking to most people. So, ironically, even though the West developed the technology to potentially engineer a promethean master race with four digit IQs, we will be left behind while China beats us at our own game.

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  2. Things probably do go in cycles. How delightful when in the 1980s double-breasted suits returned. When I'm 90, possibly national service will be back and gibbets at crossroads. As i fully intend to live until i am 100, I shall have a full decade to enjoy it all.

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  3. My generation did quite a number on the Western world. I knew it when I was young. I never thought we were about anything except ourselves. And I know it now.
    Barb

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  4. Maybe it's because I'm now in the most communist state in the Union but I just don't see it coming indigenously without an outside source such as a religious entity (which I think is the only wellspring for such a cultural turnaround).

    There were saints in the late 19th Century who predicted the coming of a great storm that would eventually cover the entire globe with Russia being the first to fall. But one added that those of us still focused on God will always have a refuge. I think that's much more likely and in some ways more hopeful.

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    1. "...the most communist state in the Union". Heh, heh. That gave me something to chortle about. Which state is that ? haht are the other, lesser, communist states, please. Is there free health care, free education to third level, full employment and a terrific State ballet company and State opera offering cheap seats for each performance? Because if there ain't then it's not even state socialism never mind communism.You sure you know what you're talking about ?

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    2. Also, are all the stores empty of even the most basic items like toilet paper, was a good part of the population exterminated in labor camps or summarily executed in basements and forests, is everyone living in fear of the secret police and its informants? Because indeed if none of the above is true I agree with the previous comment - you don't know what you are talking about.

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  5. Very good. I think your best so far. You should put your best of in a book.
    Alexandra

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  6. Bravo Paul, I loved your piece. Christian Richard

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  7. No. Legalization of homosexuality was not a very good thing. It was a rejection of the notion that the family, and therefore the nature of sex and relation between the sexes, is basic to social order. And that, along with ideas that are inextricably connected to that change, has meant a society in which global markets and transnational bureaucracies are the only legitimate authorities.

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    1. No. Legalisation of homosexuality was not a very good thing. It was a rejection of the notion that the family, and therefore the nature of sex and relation between the sexes, is basic to social order.

      It was part of the push to turn sex into a purely recreational activity. To separate sex from any notions of responsibility or duty. To undermine the very idea of family life.

      When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 he understood very clearly that sexual freedom would be used to persuade us to give up political freedom. Which is exactly what has happened. The legalisation of homosexuality was one of the first steps towards this.

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  8. Who said we still have " free speech" in the US? But I can agree with all the rest.

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  9. There are many discussion points here, but I pick 2. First, the 2 big ideas "communism and anticommunism vanished". There is a high support for socialism and. communism among millenials , and that is because in part there was no " Nuremberg" trial for communist criminals and in part because of very little knowledge about what they practically are when it comes to class war, the old rich vs poor political story. Second, "anti-christianity"(anti-religion in general), as revealed by the sexual revolution continuing today,is inherent to militant atheism. Yet, because communism did not end but felt into disgrace, mainly in Europe, it had to reinvent itself,now wearing new outer clothes, proclaiming multiculturalism and anything that was tabu as suddenly acceptable.The grey uniform would be instantly rejected. Innerly, all comes at the cost of what is typically the core of anything totalitarian - freedom of speech. Demolishing the Christian foundations of Europe by people loosing Faith, makes it then easy to implement whatever. Moreover, Islam can't coexist, neither with other religions, unless at gun point,nor with any reinvented communism atheism. Cover ups of multitude of crimes already happen in western countries. It's a new totalitarianism, let's face it and I also wonder what a socialistically entitled, but rebrlliouds against authority, generation can doout of its own mind. A buzzword generation. still with some understanding, at a crossroads btw past and future. Frankly, as a follower of Yahshua (Jesus), I think no morals made by man can keep humanity in balance, without the hope of life after death. With anything permissible, this will just be the revived Babylon, ancient Greece or Rome. Anything new.

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  10. What exactly are any of us passing on? Whether your are 20 or 120, what are we passing on?

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  11. Sorry for some typos in my earlier comment, didn't find an Edit option (I'm on tablet)/ rebellious, do out.

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  12. Good post. A great many indecent things came out from the cellar once the cultural revolution was released on the West and those things (including homosexuality) should be banished to them again. I have no problem with what degenerates, druggies and malcontents do in their own homes so long as they don't show the face of it in public.

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  13. Romania will not join in, most likely. You have to count on Polish and Hungarians, maybe Czechs, but not so sure, they are always rationally pro-European.

    Now a question: the Christian, pro-family conservatives want to see birth rates rising at any costs. They don't care about over-population and climate changes that will dislocate millions of people who will take the roads to Europe. I think is obscene to push for a public policy designed to raise the number of birth only for political/ideological reasons with no concern for the consequences. How do you accommodate these two?

    You have many ideas splashed in this small essay. The end -coming soon - of the masculine dominance is welcomed, so long, die.

    For the rest of the things that we lost and will disappear I share your nostalgia. The robots are coming.

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    1. I didn't say I regretted male dominance or any of the other things. I only said I hoped people would stop smoking. I am glad that you mourn the other things though. Personally I think climate change fears are unnecessary and wish I had married and had five children. As Benedict said, 'The world must be peopled'. (Much Ado About Nothing.)

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    2. The end of masculine dominance isn't going to happen. All that is happening is that white male domination is being replaced by non-white male domination. The large majority of feminists support importing a new non-white patriarchy. 90 percent of the white people at pro-'refugee' demos are young white women. Feminists are absolutely silent on the epidemic of migrant rape.

      The fact is, there is a primal female desire to submit to the more dominant male. This is why Fifty Shades of Grey is the most popular book of all time surpassing even Harry Potter. White masculinity having been destroyed, women naturally want their men replaced by more dominant black and brown men.

      The key thing to understand is that this was NOT the unintended accidental consquence of feminism. The big picture or the "red pill" if you like, is that 60s feminism was not primarily an attack on men but a racial attack on white Europeans that made use of an attack on men. See Kevin MacDonald's "The Culture of Critique" for a more detailed explanation of this.

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    3. "Women are instinctively attuned to selective pressures, and when a woman sees foreign people flooding in and people seemingly powerless to stop it, her limbic system starts to presume that selective pressures favor some gene or genes in the former and starts to think about acquiring those genes for her own offspring, especially since those genes are going to confer immunities to diseases and pathologies that the foreign people are likely to bring along with them that the natives aren’t going to be immune to."

      Women are aroused by male strength and dominance above all other considerations. If the wider culture and ruling classes are arranging society so that Muslim migrants have the run of the place, and the native White men are hindered from expressing their displeasure and acting on it, the native White women will begin to feel desirous of those migrants, feeling in their bones that these are the tribe leaders they are looking for.

      https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/men-invade-women-invite-into-their-vaginas/

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    4. Peter J that's racist tosh probably to make up for your own inadequate progress with the humanities majors, Paul you should know better than to give oxygen to it.
      Radu

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    5. This is the only liberal response. Just snide remarks and coined phrases. Calls to deny oxygen to your opponent. Liberalism must seal itself off because it can't survive any fresh breeze of disagreement or competing views (except from house-trained conservatives who agree with them on all the fundamentals). Thats why all liberal sites are heavily moderated if they allow comments at all.

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    6. I don't let through things that are hurtful or immoral or rude. I draw the line at defending IRA terrorism, encouraging violence, four letter words. I encourage a free debate politely conducted.

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    7. I am afraid Peter J that once you start quoting as your authoritative source a white nationalist pickup site, written by a convicted rapist and proponent of ephebophilia, you rather lost any moral high ground you might think you had, and moved into the realm of Poppers intolerance of intolerance quandary. There is no debate about the equivalence of men and women except in the heads of those who feel themselves superior to the other, and that extends as equally to race as to gender. Surprisingly most of us are actually turned off by dominance or laugh at it, sometimes to your faces. More often behind your back. So when we smile it's not laughing with your flirting, it's at it.
      Mr Wood I would ask that you take a look and comment if you agree with Mr Weidmann and his views?

      https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Chateau_Heartiste

      Cornelia

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    8. "There is no debate about the equivalence of men and women except in the heads of those who feel themselves superior to the other and that extends as equally to race as to gender" that's just another data free assertion with nothing to back it up. You just quote a left-wing site rational wiki that just restates his arguments but doesn't attempt to refute them. Again, no argument of any kind to respond to here. Leftists can't debate they can just point and splutter. "This man says this about X therefore his opinion about Y is invalid" isn't an argument.

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    9. No it's the assertion that there is no debate to enter . Just as I have no right to talk from your perspective, you and Weidmann have no right to tell women what we want. Your argument appears to be be that women sexually crave men who are dominant and you use fabricated newspaper articles like those on the calais jungle to back this up. If your facts are so solid why have there not been mass marriages in Germany to the tide of barbarians?You are simply expressing outdated misoginist views to try to perpetuate your so called dominate when science has thrown the greatest lever to equality to women ever. The new industries do not require brute power for results, but brains. Guess what women have them as well as tits and vagina's. We do not reject men like you because of some lurking sexual dominator from the east, we do so because you are superfluous to our purpose on an equal playing field.You will find that it is tilting even faster in Romania than the rest of Europe where more men than women are now in part time work. I should go and find yourself a nice position as a house husband while you still can.

      Cornelia

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    10. ha ha ha; you must be quite young my dear, as a later blogger rightly remarked. As they say if you are not a Liberal at 25, you have no heart, if you are not a Conservative at 35 you have no brain .
      Biology is a bitch indeed, even when working as as an IT'er. Been there, thought that, and the tide of wisdon brought me back to God's laws. You must not be working in a purely technical field tough, or else you would not be as hopeful as you are about female dominance. Do not let yourself caught up in the Western version of feminism, that is a transposition of the class struggle nonsense. If you really want to be a strong woman just do a better job than others (regardless of sex), and you'll surely be one. Be ware though, with much power comes much responsibility much loneliness and sorrow, in particular if you have to choose power over family.
      I agree that Peter's views are too robotic, and the laws of the soul are as far as you can get from statistical generalizations, but he does have a point: your version of feminism is rejecting the intelectual misoginism of the mostly polite white male and gladly importing the physical brutality of the others.
      Just keep in mind that today's convictions may change and keep an open mind.

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    11. I am a fifty four year old married with two grown children Hydroelectric Engineer, your assumptions are crass and unjustified

      Cornelia

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  14. So it is Marxism (the "1960's ideas") vs Christianity (everything else before that) in the West.

    The Marxist religion offers a consistent story vs a disorganized and tired field on the other side. So it is more like Marxism vs everything else. Its disadvantage is that it is somewhat easy to see how false it is.

    That's why the two parties are still in balance in the US after 50 years of the younger demographic layers voting predominantly left. After a certain age, and reaching a certain wisdom, a number of these voters switch and replenish the other side.

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  15. So true...

    Alexandra

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  16. Really good piece. And yes it has been a bad thing. We are witnessing the left in the US cannibalise itself due to sexual assault claims which are dating back to the 70’s. You have migrants who have not long been in the UK *complain* that the houses on offer are not big enough. Equal pay for women even though we must include maternity pay and an assortment of other goodies. I’d say it’s a case of too much too soon.

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  17. The last paragraph is certainly correct....

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  18. The West doesnt need to rediscover Christianity, it needs to rediscover race realism. Which is the most powerful and successful racial group in the world? I think most people would say the Jews. Yet most Jews are atheist and among the least religious people. They success is due to their extreme tribalism (and high IQ) not their religiosity. Even their religion is based on blood. It preaches inequality of souls. Non-jewish souls are worthless, jewish souls are worth everything. Christianity teaches the opposite; all humans have souls and they're all equally valuable. Thats why Europeans and Americans have open borders while Jews have their own ethnostate protected by border walls. Birth rates among atheist Jewish women in Israel are doing just fine.

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    1. No, religious Israeli Jews have considerably more children than secular ones. The Jewish religion certainly does not consider Gentiles worthless - many think all can be saved.
      A sense of ones tribe is a good thing but it can be taken too far.
      I think Christianity is the answer but preferably not 'the God of the philosophers' in whom many believe or in the liberal misunderstanding of Him.

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  19. This is spot on. But the tide may still be turned by a revival that calls every soul.

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  20. Maurice Cowling:
    "Secularisation so far from involving liberation from religion, has involved merely liberation from Christianity and the establishment in its place of a modern religion whose advocates so much assume its truth that they do not understand that it is a religion to which they are committed."

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  21. Intriguing post, and thought provocking . Quite clearly humans will not live without spiritual, religious life; it is in our nature. I think that marxism, as a religion as well as a political/economic system is not viable, neither is "humanism" as they are too wrapped up on themselves. There is no out of this world dream to move the soul. One can feel this emptiness in the lack of grace of the 20th century art.
    Will Christianity be the one to captivates our hearts? I do hope so, although it may not have the same institutions as today. Someone above mentioned that the Asians are not religious; quite wrong. They are VERY superstitious.
    However, I think that Paul's piece is not that much about what humans do, as it is about what humans dream, and what stories they live by. It is crystal clear that the financial centers are migrating to the east, together with the modern liberal and scientific methods. Question is what will we preserve out of our heritage and what will we discard? Will we rediscover the "Greek phylosophers" again or maybe the middle age Saints?

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  22. It all seemed to happen very quickly but I think that was an illusion. Things had been changing for a hundred years or more. In the 60s those changes suddenly became extremely visible and obvious.

    Christianity had ceased to be an important part of the lives of most people in the West by the end of the 19th century.

    Birth rates had been plunging since the mid-19th century.

    Divorce was still difficult and expensive in most places until the 1960s but the idea of divorce had been accepted by most people. The idea that marriage was permanent had been tacitly abandoned.

    The idea that marriage was about responsibility and duty was also gradually crumbling. The modern idea (and by modern I mean late 19th/early 20th century) was that marriage was all about romantic love, in other words the selfish pursuit of pleasure. The deadly concept of romantic love was pushed in both high and low literature and once Hollywood (the greatest enemy our civilisation has ever encountered) came along it rapidly became supreme.

    Celebrity worship started with the worship of movie stars in the 1920s, and with the embarrassing adulation attracted by crooners like Bing Crosby in the 1930s and 40s.

    Feminism had already raised its ugly head in the 19th century, and by the 1930s the disastrous decision to give women the vote had been made almost everywhere.

    Before rock there was jazz, which was just as bad.

    Respect for tradition had been steadily declining since the 20s. The demonisation of the Victorian Era really got underway at that time and represented one of the first full-scale assaults on the past.

    What changed in the 60s was television. Suddenly the evidence of the social collapse that had been going on for decades was brought into everyone's living room.

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    1. A brilliant series of observations with which I agree - sorry not to have replied before but December is a hectic month always.

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  23. A great achievement to encompass so many variables in one piece given everyone will disagree over the finer points .. the heart of it is the evaluation of ideas about the ideas of the sixties so often misunderstood and regurgitated by nihilistic sodden lazy journos ..

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    1. Thank you. The brilliant last sentence I shamelessly plagiarised from the inimitable and brilliant Bunny Sheffield. I have been in Romania where plagiarism is rife perhaps too long.

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  24. “My name is Greta Gerwig, Queen of Queens, look on my works ye mighty and despair”. The Chain Reaction from the Barbie film, like the breaching of a pink dam is the latest sign we are deep into decline and close to fall. Some younger male viewers are writing off this This Black Panther for White Women as hilariously unintentionally based, or a the bleak cynical Kenobian tragedy, rather than damaging misandry.

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