Albion Agonistes
Muggeridge, Malcolm
Malcolm Muggeridge Albion Agonistes • A Of all the Great Issues which confront us today, none can be considered of greater moment than the manifest threats to the survival of our Western...
...it was to the Rome of the Emperor Nero—a ruler who makes even some of ours seem, by comparison, positively enlightened and humane—that the Apostle Paul carried the gospel with such fantastic success, founding a universal religion which has endured through twenty centuries because, and only because, it has never finally identified itself with any earthly power...
...What blessing, I have often asked myself, could equal having for one's native tongue the language in which Shakespeare wrote, and into which the Authorized Version of the Bible was translated...
...there is a nightmare which from time to :ime afflicts me...
...Let it not be supposed that I am thinking only, or even primarily, in terms of such outward and visible intimations of dominance in the world as power and wealth and influence...
...Statistics, the dismalles of all stock-taking, views a birth rate fall ing below zero, juvenile delinquency 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 197( crimes of violence, and racial antagonism rising alarmingly, divorces and bankruptcies alike multiplying, a health service and an education system slipping towards collapse, and many other unmistakable indications of wrath to come...
...Western science and technology have made possible the virtually illimitable production of ourhuman necessities, and put into the hands of those who govern us weapons of unparalleled potency, besides making possible the exploration, and perhaps in time the colonization, of the universe itself...
...Let me, in conclusion, pass on to you two extraordinarily sharp impressions which accompany this condition...
...Should we not, then, rejoice that once more it has been demonstrated to us unmistakably that God never abandons us...
...himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down...
...the clenched fist or the phallus, Nietzsche or D.H...
...On the contrary, it is the breakdown of power which provides Christianity with its greatest opportunity...
...In our ;tudio the discussion proceeds, and a ady participant with a particularly shrill mice is insisting that if only the school ige might be raised to 20 and the age of -onsent lowered to ten, if only birth conrol pills could be distributed to Brownieswith their morning milk and extended to tiny tots in the play-schools, if only marriage counseling might begin in the cradle and Lady Chatterley's Lover get into the comics, all would yet be well...
...Until at last, having educated himself in imbecility and drugged and polluted himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct...
...The barbarians who overran Rome came from without, but ours are home products, trained and suitably brainwashed and conditioned at the public expense...
...Even so, in industrial and agricultural production, and even in available weapons, the people of the West are still pre-eminent...
...In the light of these antics, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Western man, having wearied of the struggle by himself, has decided to abolish himself...
...How I envy the historian who, looking back across the centuries at the decline and fall of our Western civilization, as Gibbon did on that of Rome, will remark on how, as we systematically destroyed or allowed to be destroyed, all the values and restraints of the Christian way of life which we had inherited, we remained :onvinced that each innovation, each new assault on marital fidelity, on the sanctity 3f the home and the responsibilities of parenthood, was bound to be conducive -0 our well-being and enlightenment...
...Malcolm Muggeridge Albion Agonistes • A Of all the Great Issues which confront us today, none can be considered of greater moment than the manifest threats to the survival of our Western civilization...
...that however somber the darkness, His light still shines...
...When men turn away from God, Pascal tells us, they must either imagine they are gods themselves or, aware of the disastrousness and absurdity of such a pretension, revert to being animals and seek their satisfaction in their own carnality...
...The first is of the incredible beauty of our earth, its colors and shapes and smells and creatures...
...as a newspaper correspondent in 1946, America was incomparably the richest and most powerful country in the world...
...The whole stupendous effort, that is to say, made at such a cost in blood and tears to condition man to a purely terrestrial existence—what is called social engineering—has been a gigantic failure, a fiasco, as such efforts must always be...
...Creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own strength...
...With the same sublime unction it will destroy a presidency and recommend the magical qualities of a new detergent, lose a war and promote a cake-mix...
...At that time we ruled over a quarter of the world and most of my countrymen firmly believed that this was an arrangement ordained by God and likely to continue indefinitely...
...I find myself in a BBC ;tudio deep underground, while up above he mushroom cloud gathers and the last vestiges of civilized life disappear...
...for the English people and their history, yes, and their humor (and this from an ex-editor of Punch, who for some four desolating years had the thankless and hopeless task of trying to make the English laugh...
...Spengler's The Decline of the West made a considerable stir in my young days...
...the only possible response to the pretensions of absolute power is the absolute love proclaimed in the Gospels...
...he Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 11...
...No, what is at issue, as I see it, is not the means to survive, nor even the will to survive, but the faith to survive...
...Lawrence, Hitler or Hugh Hefner...
...These are essentially trivial matters, easily adjusted when theneed so to do is apparent, as in time of war...
...Before such a prospect, are we then, as Christians, to fold our arms in resignation...
...The second, a certainty surpassing all words and thought, that as an infinitesimal particle of God's creation I am a participant in His purposes, which are loving not malign, creative not destructive, orderly not chaotic—and in that certainty a great peace and a great joy...
...I would say myself that some sort of civil war followed by authoritarian government of one stamp or another is a more present prospect today than it has been at any time since the time of Cromwell...
...If it should prove to be the case that Western man has now rejected these origins of his civilization, persuading himself that he can be master of his own destiny, that he can shape his own life and chart his own future, then assuredly he and his way of life and all he has stood and stands for must infallibly perish...
...If, by way of illustration, I look at the parlous plight of my own native land, England, it is nor, God knows, to glory in its present discomfiture, or to preen myself on prophecies which may seem to come true...
...So it is today...
...Well, in our lifetime an Empire on which, we boasted, the sun never set, has become one on which it never rises...
...rather than the question "How?''—about man's relationship with his Creator rather than about his energy supplies, his currency, his balance of trade and Gross National Product, his sexual fantasies, and his other passing preoccupations, with which the media interminably concern themselves...
...And this voice —one among many and speaking for many—coming from among the regime's favored elite, those who in worldly terms have everything to gain from adhering to its rules and principles...
...It seems to me clear, beyond qualification or equivocation, that our Western civilization was born of the great drama enacted in Palestine two thousand years ago, the drama of the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection, and all that flowed therefrom...
...A new feature in the working out of this equation enunciated by Pascal is that it takes place to the accompaniment of the media, especially television, whose immense power to influence and shape public attitudes is exercised with little regard for any consideration except profit and self-importance...
...In other words, the real crisis which confronts us is about faith rather than power, about the question "Why...
...that in all conceivable and inconceivable human circumstances what the Apostle Paul called the glorious liberty of the children of God is available to usthe only enduring liberty there is...
...and forever will be, the glory of our civilization, besides giving, rise to innumerable lives of dedication to the love of God and of our human family...
...To this, he insists, the only valid answer is provided by Christ and his teaching...
...above all for the English language and literature...
...Including, I may add, crazed projects in our part of the world to sort out our genes into some more appropriate order, dispose of lives we consider worthless, and decide ourselves who shall be born and who exterminated, even in the womb...
...and however full the air may be of the drooling of Muzak, and the cackling of Newzak, truth will make itself heard...
...As a young journalist in the USSR in the early thirties, it would have seemed to me utterly inconceivable that after more than half a century of the most absolutistrule ever known on earth, under a regime dedicated to the destruction of the Christian religion and disclosing of powers hitherto unimaginable over the lives, thoughts, hopes, and values of its citizens, a voice would make itself heard and be heard through the whole world stating once more in luminous words of truth the great proposition on which the Christian religion in founded—that through love, not through power, men may find their way in this world, and in humbly seeking to fulfill their Creator's purposes for them, look beyond it into the eterntiy which is their true habitat...
...I refer to the Christian testimony of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who makes the point in a letter he addressed to the Soviet Government just before he was sent into compulsory exile, that what is wrong with his country is not so much its political or economic system as the Marxist materialism which is its ideology...
...men build cities and destroy them, but there is also the City of God which they did not build and which they cannot destroy...
...Margaret Thatcher, seems, to my doubtless in• curably male chauvinist eye, equal to Mc task of getting us out of our present mes: —well conveyed, I thought, by an entry read the other day in Horace Walpole': journal, in which he recorded the impres sion that everything seemed to be at sel except the fleet...
...In any case, the same causes produce the same consequences in different degrees in all the countries of the West...
...whereas the God we serve, the salvation we hope for, the light we live by in this world, and, when we come to leave it, the vista reaching before us into eternity —these concern the very fundamentals of our mortal existence...
...Megalomania or erotomania—the two great sicknesses of the age...
...Future historians, if there are any, will surely marvel at the tolerance accorded to this instrument of persuasion, and its operators, so immensely more powerful than anything of the kind which has ever existed before, and at the manner in which its pundit-salesmen have been able, with equal impunity, to topple institutions and undermine authority, and to sing the praises of some potion or pill capable of delivering us from pain, anxiety, body odor, acidity, and other infirmities...
...I am an old man, already past the allotted three score and ten and, as the old do, I quite often wake up in the night, half out of my body, so that I see between the sheets the old battered carcass I shall soon be leaving for good, and in the distance a glow in the sky, the lights of Augustine's City of God...
...Again, when I first came to Washington, D.C...
...Convincing himself that he is too numerous, and laboring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to fall an easier prey to his enemies...
...After all...
...Never have I felt so much love as I do now in old age for the English countryside...
...of the enchantment of human love and companionship, of the fulfillment of human work and human procreation...
...Has the decline Spengler observed fifty years ago now, become an irreversible stampede to destruction...
...This might seem like mere words to keep up our spirit, but actually a sign in the same sense has been accorded us so extraordinary that it amounts to one of the great miracles of history...
...It is true, of course, that on this count both England and America have suffered of late a notable decline...
...Now, some three decades later, largely as a result of the home thrust of the Sir Galahads of the Media, that advantageous situation has been transformed into the present shambles...
...particularly in the American hemisphere...
...At the same time it has to be admitted that our national affairs are in great disarray, if not worse, that our institutions of government and of justice seem to be afflicted with dry rot, and that not even that Juan of Arc of suburbia, Mrs...
...If it be so, he told his flock, it is only what happened to Sodom...
...When I first went to India in 1924 the voyage took five weeks, and pretty well every port we stopped at was flying the Union Jack...
...In the Gadarene Stakes England seems at the moment very well ahead of the field, but all the other countries are jostling and pushing in the same direction...
...I think of Augustine in Carthage when the news came that Rome had been sacked and the great Roman Empire was nearing its end...
...This is what has inspired and nourished the art and literature and music and architecture and learning which are...
Vol. 9 • February 1976 • No. 5
