After America - Mark Steyn [67]
Odd how many philosophical singalongs of the Sixties that one sentence anticipates: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”; “All we need is music... and dancin’ in the streets”; “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day....”
A culture of pleasure can be very convenient for the government class. In Huxley’s Brave New World, the World State Controller, to whom the author gave the oddly prescient name of Mustapha Mond, understands that people prefer happiness to truth, “happiness” being defined as round-theclock sensory gratification—food, drugs, sex, consumer toys. Given that he was writing in the late Twenties, Huxley’s parody pop songs anticipate very well the sensual torpor of our own culture du plaisir:
Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I’m in a coma;
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love’s as good as soma.
“Soma,” a word Huxley took from Sanskrit, is a drug that both intoxicates and tranquilizes. In his brave new world, we’re seduced into passivity. And in such a society, as Charles Murray wrote of Europe, “ideas of greatness become an irritant.”8 Go to the heart of western civilization—Rome, the capital of Christendom; Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris, the seats of mighty empires that sent their men and ships to every corner of the world and implanted their language and culture. And yet these cities are all now backwaters—mostly pleasant and residually prosperous backwaters, but utterly irrelevant to the future of the world. And that suits their citizens just fine.
Is that the fate the United States is destined for? It’s what a lot of Americans would like. In 2008 many people were just exhausted by the “war on terror.” Not because it demanded anything of them—quite the opposite: it was entirely outsourced to a small professional soldiery the twenty-first-century Eloi rarely encounter. But so what? They still had to hear about the war, and they were bored by it. Having to be at Code Orange in perpetuity was just kind of a downer. So they voted for “change”—by which they meant a quiet life: I don’t want to have to think about wacky foreigners trying to blow us up; I don’t need that in my life right now.
As for the Eloi’s mostly inactive “activism,” professions of generalized concerns about “world poverty” or “saving the planet” do not testify to your idealism so much as what Adam Bellow calls “a certain blithe assurance about the permanence of freedom”:9 you worry about lofty and distant problems because you assume there are none closer to home. Our Eloi are smugly self-satisfied. I cite at random four stickers from the cars parked outside a children’s “holiday” concert in small-town Vermont:
I THINK, THEREFORE I’M A DEMOCRAT
What kind of sentient being boasts on a bumper sticker about his giant brain? And cites as evidence thereof his unyielding loyalty to a political machine? Talk about putting Descartes before the whores. What that translates to is: “I’M A DEMOCRAT. THEREFORE, I HAVE NO NEED TO THINK.”
QUESTION EVERYTHING
Including the need to question everything? Doubting everything gets kinda exhausting. In practice, questioning “everything” boils down to questioning nothing in particular—for, if everything is a social construct, a manufactured reality, why bother? Fortunately, “QUESTION EVERYTHING” ceased to be operative on January 20, 2009. After that date, dissent was no longer “the highest form of patriotism,” but merely racism.
IMAGINE PEACE
That’s a total failure of imagination—a failure, under the guise of universalist multiculturalism, to imagine that outside your fluffy cocoon there