Our ever-more ambiguous and incoherent state

This is one of those days when it’s hard to care about anything happening in the news. A calamity occurred last night, the passage of the homosexual “marriage” law in New York State, and it’s not easy—it’s not right—to go on reacting to the usual events and issues as though nothing had happened, as though we were still living in the same reality that we were living in yesterday. We are not living in the same reality. Yet another major step has been taken in the ever-advancing perversion and ruin of our country.

I wrote in a similar (though more troubled) mood in July 2003, following the Grutter v. Bollinger and Lawrence v. Texas decisions:

Since the Supreme Court’s decisions in the diversity and sodomy cases two weeks ago, I feel, politically speaking, as though I, and all of us, were suspended in mid-air. Going beyond previous Supreme Court exercises in judicial law-making, these decisions fundamentally alter the nature and identity of United States, and it’s not possible to pretend that this hasn’t happened. It’s not possible to go on as normal, debating the usual mix of political issues the usual way, when the very ground we stand on has been taken away. Where are we now? Who are we now? How can anyone henceforth talk about America as a “moral” country, or appeal to moral principles in public or even private life, when the U.S. Constitution now embodies the libertine belief that people can do whatever they want, so long as they want to do it? How can anyone still appeal to “equality under the law” as a cornerstone of America, when race preferences and anti-white discrimination have now been made constitutional principles? Indeed, how can we claim that we’re a country under the rule of law at all, when the judges of the Supreme Court openly and explicitly re-write the Constitution from the bench, adding fundamentally new principles to the Constitution based on nothing but their own desire that it be so?

I then added in a comment:

[W]hat I say in this article about an existential crisis obviously does not refer to the existence of the U.S. as a political society, but to the substance of its identity. The political society will continue, but in an an ever-more ambiguous and incoherent state, as it continues to morph more and more into something utterly unlike its historical self, even while keeping the same name and the same general governmental structure.

Given the continued existence of the United States as a political society and the fact that life seems to be continuing as normal, it’s easy for people to dismiss statements such as “our culture has been destroyed.” But, as a friend once said to me, “The fact that life goes on doesn’t mean that our culture hasn’t been destroyed.”

Well, there is much destruction in a culture, just as there is much ruin in a country. Meaning that some destruction or even a lot of destruction doesn’t mean that it’s all over. At the same time, the fact that much remains doesn’t mean that much hasn’t been ruined and destroyed.

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Dean Ericson writes:

“This is one of those days when it’s hard to care about anything happening in the news.”

That’s just the way I feel. I don’t want to think about people, or our country. It’s too awful.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 25, 2011 06:27 PM | Send