On Entering a Dark Age
Cooper, Douglas W.
"On Entering a Dark Age" LIGHTS WENT OUT all over the country last spring and the once dazzling smiles of many American cities looked like the grin of a Brand X toothpaste user who lost a bare knuckle boxing match....
...Chicken Little was pretty close to themark...
...From the ups and downs, I discern a downward trend...
...They hope America's impotence will bring humility...
...More government, less financial stability and growth, declining international influence, a more perverse culture, even less civility...
...Keeps 'em off the streets...
...Rodney Danger-field isn't the only one who "don't get no respect...
...The failure to defend the peripheries is a problem we share with Rome in decline...
...Government cheats the people by financing its deficits with inflation and the people cheat the government by evading taxes...
...On Madison Avenue they might put it this way: We've put the "cult" into culture and taken the "civil" out of civilization...
...Onward, Naturalism...
...Albert Jay Nock, the great libertarian essayist, considered writing an essay on how one could know he was entering a Dark Age...
...The United States was victorious in World Wars I and II, stalemated in Korea...
...Fifty foul-mouthed pickets were as effective in keeping us from school or job as would have been a few brutish storm-troopers with guns...
...The egalitarian zeitgeist accords us the equality of cipherdom...
...Why have Russian forces in Europe increased as NATO's diminished...
...There are two schools of thoughtamong the believers in the historical inevitability of progress...
...Smart money" invests not in enterprise, but in gold, silver, and Swiss francs in Swiss banks...
...Darwin convinced us we are animals...
...Pressure-group warfare has resulted...
...As factories shut down, they delight in the cleaner air...
...Groups of people are still treated gingerly, but individuals fare less well...
...We are inured to the plights of individuals, but like cut flowers retain enough vitality, moral vitality, to wince at the treatment of certain minorities, and even that response is limited: Russian Jews get help and sympathy, Chi,.;;se Christians go unaided...
...Are the lights dimming...
...Perhaps Nock would have been willing to try if alive today...
...Tom Wolfe and Duncan Williams sized up our modern culture and found it lacking...
...Big money is to be made if certain government decisions can be turned to one's advantage, and a market for those favors has developed far beyond the control of campaign spending laws...
...To the philosophic and resourceful, the decline need not be tragic...
...Even so, a remnant will endure...
...Socioscientists, watchers and weighers of the world's well-being, cannot be similarly relied upon to warn us of an imminent Dark Age . . . a period like the five hundred years between the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism, cities and commerce...
...Are nitwits getting Ph.D.'s...
...We are at war even now, at war with our criminal class...
...Nock, a man who once voted for the long-dead Jefferson Davis on the grounds "that if we can't have a man who amounts to anything, by all means let's have a first-class corpse...
...Government controls begin to rival those of France's uncicnregime, with similar results...
...Gentility was taken advantage of, so "hanging tough" has replaced it...
...Naval chief Admiral Zumwalt tells us our navy cannot fulfill its mission, but Russia's can...
...Only powerful groups have clout now...
...Humiliation is more likely...
...Our money is eroding...
...The cockeyed optimists seem to predominate: As the jungle engulfs civilization, they rejoice in "the greening...
...Our nuclear arsenal goes from "massive superiority" to "parity" to "sufficiency," while not-so-mighty France reads between the lines and makes her own, just in case...
...we resigned in Viet Nam and we pressured our Israeli allies to quit in the Middle East...
...I think Emerson is more nearly right, civilization "recedes as fast on one side as it gains on another," but the Dewey-eyed apostles of ineluctable progress are furthest from the truth and much more hazardous to our welfare than the pessimists...
...The Christian fundamentalists tell us that it has been a downhill slide since the Fall...
...But the coalition of the greedy and envious would rather stifle creativity than endure the obscenity of the success of the creative minority...
...our solutions arithmetically...
...previously he advocated socialism because we were too affluent...
...Afraid to face deterioration, they like the "informality" of non-art, non-manners, and nonsense...
...Insolence abounds, as well...
...So uve qui pent...
...They are making boots in Minsk and slippers in Massachusetts . . . so much for "Pax Americana...
...The would-be social engineers are more likely to gum up the works than are the salvation seekers...
...No, we have to assess our trends without such help...
...Those who understand what is happening and who cut their dependence upon other men and society can repair to the monasteries of their minds...
...How can one tell...
...Leftist ideologues on the make at Berkeley and elsewhere found that filthy speech and "non-violent" coercion could take advantage of the manners of moderate Americans to gain ends difficult to achieve otherwise...
...The public bi's learned to vote itself money from the treasury, as Tocqueville warned we would...
...We need men like...
...Thus, John Kenneth Galbraith now finds socialism necessary to enable us to share scarcity...
...But our Panglossians assert our problems are really blessings in disguise, not problems at all, and thus not contradictions to their belief in the ever-upward spiral...
...Those who work resent their bosses and customers...
...Geoscientists assure us they could discern early the onset of another Ice Age...
...Those on lie dole sneer at the boobs who labor...
...you and I can gauge civility for ourselves...
...Too many in the social sciences are blind believers in Progress...
...These worshippers of the New, our neoterics, applaud the New Man in the Making in Mao's China just as their addlepated antecedents praised Stalin's socialist paradise in the days when the New Socialist Man was being created in the ashes of the purges...
...We absorbed from Freud a picture of man as neurosis-ridden...
...Does The Exorcist uplift only meals...
...Things look better some days, some decades, and worse others...
...Socialist opportunists claim our difficulties are inherent in capitalism, a necessary but unpleasant stretch on the road to Utopia...
...Justice has degenerated into a game between lawyers, to the applause of the intellectuals who want none jailed but Nixon, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Haldeman...
...Foreshadowing the advent of a second Dark Age...
...If history is "the sound of hobnailed boots trampling up, up, up, and silken slippers shuffling down, down, down," we are due to hear more shuffling at home and more trampling from afar...
...It certainly seems we are in a Malthusian bind: our problems grow in geometric progression...
...The criminal jungle threatens to engulf our cities, as the crime statistics indicate, and the crime stats tell only part of the story: we make no entry for the moments of fear increasingly felt by our city dwellers...
...That lessens the glare...
Vol. 8 • October 1974 • No. 1
