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Liberal politics and the Last Man
As Canada’s election returns were coming in a few nights ago, I checked out the website and platform of Canada’s New Democratic Party, a minority party of the left which did well in the elections. The platform seems to be about nothing but providing services: Education; Health Care; the Environment; Aboriginal Peoples; Ethics; Getting More Done; Jobs; Children; Child Care; Housing; New Canadians; Seniors and Pensions; Ending Violence (notice they don’t say “law enforcement,” maybe they plan to negotiate with the violent criminals?); Respect, Renewal, Peace and Security; Agriculture; Women. All liberal/left politics is about nowadays is the services that government provides to the people and their various subgroups, as though we were simply the consumers of government goods, even as we are consumers of consumer goods. Is this the future of the human race? Or, rather, is this the end of the human race—in both senses of the word “end”? Are we the Last Men?
Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können. Ich sage euch: irh habt noch Chaos in euch.The theme of the Last Man leads to an idea I’ve been thinking about lately. Is Western suicide, the lack of will of Western peoples to defend their civilization and their very existence, due to various ideologies, such as liberalism with its cult of non-discrimination toward the Other, and leftism with its cult of sacrificing our guilty selves for the Other? Or does Western suicide, at its core, have nothing to do with ideology per se? Is our loss of love for our civilization simply the result of the prosperous conditions of modern life, which turn us into Nietzsche’s Last Men—small, complacent beings who only care about our personal lives, pleasures, comforts, and consumption of goods, and are indifferent to all higher values? As an example of what I mean, look at any official or public gathering in today’s Europe, any Davos Economic Summit or EU conference or any meeting of any parliament of any European country (except for Britain with its magnificent House of Commons). Look at the decor, the background of these parliaments and conference halls. Invariably everything of a traditional or uplifting nature has been stripped away. The decor consists of some abstract, modernist, depressing motif (often with the slogans of the conference or the party displayed on the wall behind the speakers) conveying the ideal of a managed society where bureaucracies provide everything and control everything, and man’s soul has died. Indeed, the speakers themselves seem dead. Or look at almost any European movie of the last twenty-five years. Do you ever see a European film with a large, romantic, tragic, or even socially significant theme? No. Contemporary European movies, virtually without exception, are about the smallest, most unedifying minutia of personal lives, sex affairs, and family squabbles. The characters are without dignity, without anything large about them. It is the cinema of the Last Man. Es ist das Kino des letzten Menschen.
So far, America’s coarser energies, smaller Provider State, residual love of liberty, and greater belief in God have kept us from the seemingly terminal spiritual condition of the Europeans and Canadians. But we are merely at a different point on the same continuum. Email entry |