Thursday, November 24, 2011

The Death of the Individual

It should now be obvious that in the name of “the brotherhood of man,” of human sympathy and an oceanic desire for peace, a travesty is being enacted. Pragmatic democratic institutions and powers ready to entertain the prospect of conflict and sacrifice in the service of specific, empirical commitments to beneficial change, or the preservation of authentic liberal values, are slagged as aggressors, and courageous individuals unwilling to surrender themselves to the chants, slogans, and sentimentalities of the morally occulted are swept aside as vestiges of an archaic state of mind. As C.S. Lewis presciently wrote in his 1944 The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Such is the paideia, the method of education and cultural transmission, that obtains today in the West, chiefly in the debased Humanities.

Read the rest of
David Solway's essay here.

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