Sultan Knish
The slogan under which Obama hopes to win the next four years is
"Forward". "Forward" is the quintessential progressive slogan,
progressives being people who are so forward-thinking that they want to
remake the 21st Century in line with their 19th Century ideas.
Progressivism, like so many other flavors of futurism, is so new it's
old. It's the world of tomorrow as imagined by men with top hats and
full beards whose Twitter-wielding descendants are still shouting,
"March Forward!" at us 150 years later.
The last century has represented a great love affair with the future. A
hundred years of spring cleaning accompanied by the resounding cry, "Out
with the old, in with the new." Everyone was a progressive now. The one
thing that all the participants in the Second World War had in common
was that they were all dreaming of the future. A Thousand Year Reich, a
United Nations or Communism: millions died for the sake of a wonderful
future.
The Germans died for a Nazi superstate built out of Albert Speer's
monstrous concrete towers of babel, a technocratic revival of Mad King
Ludwig's castle building projects. The Russians died for collective
agriculture and inspiring posters of grim workers hoeing the earth and
electrifying the countryside. Everyone else died because they were
either in the way of one vision or the other. Then they died so that a
United Europe and a United Nations might usher in a better world.
The world of tomorrow has seen better days. The West is still in love
with the future. If you doubt that, stop by an Apple Store and marvel at
all the shiny surfaces. Try not to notice that the aesthetic is a retro
futurism because even our future has become our past. Forty years after
the Soviet Union tried to land a Mars rover and fifteen years since the
first time we did it successfully, we landed a bigger and better rover
on Mars. We may not be able to reach the ISS without taking a ride on
Soviet Soyuz tubs, but the parts of NASA that aren't dedicated to
proving that science and technology are burning up the planet through
Global Warming, can still execute an occasional engineering triumph.
But the future is not so much a place as it is a state of mind. It is a
fervent faith in the inevitability of human progress. Men have died for
this faith and men are still dying for it.
Britain's Olympics opener celebrated the journey from the industrial
revolution to the NHS euthanasia bed. While capitalism killed workers
randomly and unscientifically, the progressive state kills them
scientifically and methodically. Any old factory can kill a worker by
dropping a load on his head or allowing him to inhale fumes that in
retrospect turn out to be toxic, but it takes a genuinely progressive
turn of mind to leave him lying in bed for three days begging for a
drink of water while he dies because he has become, in the fine German
phrase, "Lebensunwertes Leben" or "Life Unworthy of Life." That is true
progress, which also happens to be the name of the unmanned Soyuz cargo
ship that keeps American astronauts from starving or dying of thirst up
on the ISS.
The Nazis and the Communists believed that certain races and classes had
to be wiped out to make the future possible. We, the modernists who
communicate through shiny slabs of white and black plastic, who use the
flag of the United Nations as our background image and John Lennon's
"Imagine" as our ring tone, don't believe in such barbaric things.
Instead we kill people because they are too old or too sick and use up
medical services that are always short in a collective system.
WW1 and WW2 were fought over regional ambitions, but we have gone beyond
them. Our scientists can measure every atom of carbon in the atmosphere
and assign responsibility for it to individuals. "Who hath measured the
waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span,
and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the
mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?" Yeshayah's prophecy
asks These are the territories that now concern us.
When our modern institutions aren't starving retired workers to death in
soiled hospital beds, they are rationing out water and air, earth and
sky. They warn us that there are iceberg shortages, shortages of soil
and swampland. Our rationing has gone planetary. We imprison men for
filling in wetlands and cap and trade the heat of the planet. Our
collectivist world state allows no sparrow to fall without charging
someone with unlicensed hunting.
But their taking ownership of the planet may be a bit premature. Outside
a few enclaves where the smooth and shiny still predominate, the
barbarians are at the gates of the empire of tomorrow. While the West is
still in love with the future, even if it is a future of rationed
everything where everyone is entitled to a tofu turkey in every
microwave oven and a whopping tax bill to pay for the tofu turkey's
carbon footprint, the rest of the world is in love with their past.
No sooner did mobs gather in Cairo, Tunis and Damascus than Western
foreign policy analysts began dusting off their history books and
drawing analogies to the 1848 European Revolutions. But there was
nothing modern about these revolutions even if they relied on Twitter
flash mobs and Facebook posts. It isn't the future that the Muslim world
wants, even if the modern Albert Speers fill Dubai with horrendously
futuristic architectural vomitoria, it's the golden past.
In Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, Hamad Jebali, the new
Islamist Prime Minister of Tunisia, proclaimed, "My brothers, you are at
a historic moment in a new cycle of civilization, Allah willing. We are
in the sixth caliphate."
For the Islamists who inherited the Arab Spring and their eager
supporters, the future was the past, a return to the glories of the
Caliph and his harem, to an era where Christian and Jewish Dhimmis knew
their place and he Islamic Empire stretched across the world. The Arab
Spring, which began when a Muslim man was so intolerably humiliated at
being struck by a woman that he set himself on fire, culminated in gang
rapes and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. A revolution which began
when a man was humiliated by a woman ended with the ritual sexual
humiliation of women at the hands of revolutionaries and the regime, and
the restoration of the old patriarchal order of Imams and Islamist
Neo-Caliphs.
So much for the future and so much for the world of tomorrow where all
men will be brothers so long as they can beat their sisters.
Western liberals are still pretending that Caliphate is just United
Nations spelled backward, but their faith in the progressive future of
no nations, no borders and no freedom can only be sustained for so long
by Benetton ads and cheerful multicultural sitcoms. Outside their
enclaves the future looks nothing like them. While they parcel out the
carbon atoms of the North Pole, their capitals are being carved up into
tribal enclaves where the future is as much the past as it is in Cairo
or Tunis.
Our present future is defined by the spillover of violent chaos. In the
throes of Egypt's revolution, Bedouin tribes in the Sinai are violently
asserting their rights and the Kurds are rising in Syria. As the fall of
the Czars and the Austria-Hungarian Empire devolved sizable portions of
Russia and Eastern Europe into violent chaos, a violent chaos that
repeated itself several decades later when the Nazis pounded through on
their way to the Thousand Year Reich, the fall of the last modern states
in the Muslim Middle East has ushered in its own chaos of bandits,
tribalism and terrorism.
The West has been marinating in that chaos for some time now. It is the
reason why we have a police state, a massive military with no equal and
social welfare spending that is through the roof. It isn't, as the
modern progressives would like us to believe, because people are living
longer, but because of a domestic instability rooted in tribal violence
and cultural chaos. And no amount of euthanasia set to a tune from Paul
McCartney, who unlike John is still free to imagine that there's no
heaven, only an earth where they stop feeding you if your illness gets
too expensive, will fix that.
But the architects of our future still can't see the present for the
future. They also can't see that the present has become the past. In the
urban mosques it is not to the infidel Queen or the Republic that
allegiance is owed, but to the Caliph and the Mahdi, to the martyrs who
give their lives in orgies of death so that the wheel of time may turn
back and that yesterday may replace tomorrow.
Their own native culture is equally decadent. In art and literature, in
film and fashion, the new is still the old. The two biggest summer films
are based on characters that debuted in 1939 and 1963. Stop by Broadway
and you can choose between a musical based on Abba, another based on a
Disney movie from twenty years ago, and Sister Act, Ghost and Bring It On,
musicals based on more movies from the last twenty years. We are
remaking remakes with tongue firmly in cheek to show that we don't
really mean it, that we aren't truly culturally bankrupt, only ironic
connoisseurs of the past.
Liberal websites denounce the 1950's in retro fonts painstakingly
designed to look like they are from the 1950's. Clothing brands aimed at
young people aim for that same retro look. Abercrombie and Fitch's
popular Hollister brand is pegged to 1922. American Apparel is rooted in
the 70's. There is nothing modern because there is no modern. Only bits
of cultural appropriation to give the retro a more exotic flavor.
The progressive sneers at the past but cannot escape it. Whatever
creative energy his assaults on culture unleashed have long been spent.
He has nothing new to offer, only rationing plans for the old. Our
technocracy has made us into sophisticated communicators, even if we
have nothing new to say. Institutionally we harvest and wield massive
amounts of data and use it to manipulate people. We cheered so loudly
for Curiosity's arrival on Mars because it has been a long time since
our culture did anything noteworthy. Even if it isn't truly new, it's
new to us.
There is no world of tomorrow because there is no tomorrow. A decaying
culture has no future. Only a stasis that is easily ruptured by internal
and external enemies. To have a future we must have a culture again and
to have that we must rebuild an identity by meeting challenges. We can
discover who we are through what we can do. It is not futurism that
makes futures, but a people striving to make something because they
believe that the future is worth making.
The great progressive project of the future is a rotting stench that
blows across the Atlantic. It is a formless dream that died. It is a
future without a future. It is a million conferences and a billion
regulations. It is a world where everything is known, where each atom is
weighed and every man is found wanting. It is a closed room and a white
bed on which to lay down and die on while the machines count off the
seconds.
If we are to have a tomorrow it will not come from those places. It will
be not be the Everycity or the eternal conference. It will not be from
the men and women who have appointed themselves the rulers of the earth
and all that is within it. Rather it will come from those who defy the
decay, who cope with the chaos that the progressive program has spawned,
who hang on to their homes and their businesses and fight for their
dreams.
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