The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  How did Rome reduce its population? “Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished … . Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect.”51 Adds Durant: “Perhaps the operation of contraception, abortion and infanticide … had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect. The ablest men married latest, bred least and died soonest.”52 Christians were having children, the pagans were not: “Abortion and infanticide, which were decimating pagan society, were forbidden to Christians as the equivalents to murder; in many instances Christians rescued exposed infants, baptized them, and brought them up with the aid of the community fund.”53

  Irony of ironies. Today, an aging, dying Christian West is pressing the Third World and the Islamic world to accept contraception, abortion, and sterilization as the West has done. But why should they enter a suicide pact with us when they stand to inherit the earth when we are gone?

  WHEN SURRENDER OF his forces was demanded at Waterloo, General Cambronne replied, “The Old Guard dies; but it does not surrender.”54 A splendid motto for those holed up in our own Corregidor of the culture war. Yet a cold appraisal of the battlefield—who has the big guns? who holds the high ground?—suggests that the Old Guard is going to die. For the decisions women are making today will determine if Western nations will even be around in a century, and Western women are voting no.

  But where did this revolution come from that so swiftly captured so vast a slice of the most Christianized and “churched” people of the West? And what are its dogmas and doctrines?

  THREE

  CATECHISM OF A REVOLUTION

  When the Round Table is broken every man must follow Galahad or Modred: middle things are gone.1

  —C. S. Lewis

  What does this new religion, this new faith that came on the wings of the revolution, hold and teach? How does it differ from the old?

  First, this new faith is of, by, and for this world alone. It refuses to recognize any higher moral order or moral authority. As for the next world, it will happily yield that to Christianity and traditional faiths, so long as they stay out of the public square and public schools. As for the old biblical stories of creation, Adam and Eve, the serpent in the garden, original sin, the expulsion from Eden, Moses on Mount Sinai, and the Ten Commandments being written in stone and binding on all men—believe all that if you wish, but it is never again to be taught as truth. For the truth, as discovered by Darwin and confirmed by science, is that our species and world are the remarkable results of eons of evolution. “Science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces,” declares the second Humanist Manifesto, written in 1973.2 That picture on the wall in biology class of the apes walking on four legs, then on two, then evolving into Homo erectus—that is how it happened.

  The new gospel has as its governing axioms: there is no God; there are no absolute values in the universe; the supernatural is superstition. All life begins here and ends here; its object is human happiness in this, the only world we shall ever know. Each society establishes its own moral code for its own time, and each man and woman has a right to do the same. As happiness is life’s end and we are rational beings, we have a right to decide when the pain of living outweighs the pleasure of living and to end this life, either by ourselves or with the assistance of family and doctors.

  In the moral realm the first commandment is “All lifestyles are equal.” Love and its natural concomitant, sex, are healthy and good. All voluntary sexual relations are permissible, and all are morally equal—no one’s business but one’s own, and certainly not the business of the state to prohibit. This principle—all lifestyles are equal—is to be written into law, and those who refuse to respect the new laws are to be punished. To disrespect an alternative lifestyle marks one as a bigot. Discrimination against those who adopt an alternative lifestyle is a crime. Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the evil that must be eradicated.

  “Thou shalt not be judgmental” is the second commandment. But the revolution is not only judgmental; it is severe on those who violate its first commandment. How defend this apparent double standard?

  According to the catechism of the revolution, the old Christian moral code that condemned sex outside of marriage and held homosexuality to be unnatural and immoral was rooted in prejudice, biblical bigotry, religious dogma, and barbaric tradition. That repressive and cruel Christian code was an impediment to human fulfillment and happiness and responsible for the ruin of countless lives, especially those of gay men and women.

  The new moral code is based on enlightened reason and respect for all. When the state wrote the Christian moral code into law, it codified bigotry. But when we write our moral code into law, we advance the frontiers of freedom and protect the rights of persecuted minorities.

  A corollary to the new moral code that enshrines sexual freedom logically follows: As condoms and abortion are necessary to prevent the unwanted and undesirable consequences of free love—from herpes to HIV to pregnancy—these must be made available to anyone who is sexually active, down to the fifth grade if need be.

  UNDER THE NEW catechism, the use of public schools to indoctrinate children in Judeo-Christian beliefs is strictly forbidden. But public schools can and should be used to indoctrinate children in a tolerance of all lifestyles, an appreciation of reproductive freedom, respect for all cultures, and the desirability of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. In the new schools, the holy days of Easter Week, commemorating the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ, are out as holidays. Earth Day, where the children are taught to love, preserve, and protect Mother Earth, is our day of atonement and reflection, from which no child is exempt. Environmentalism, wrote the conservative scholar Robert Nisbet, is “well on its way to being the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism.”3

  The cultural revolution is not about creating a level playing field for all faiths; it is about a new moral hegemony. After all the Bibles, books, symbols, pictures, commandments, and holidays have been purged from the public schools, these schools shall be converted into learning centers of the new religion. Here is John Dunphy writing with refreshing candor in 1983 in The Humanist about the new role of America’s public schools:

  The battle for humankind’s future must be fought and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith, a religion of humanity … . These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach … . The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of “love they neighbor” will be finally achieved.4

  The new secularism is no milk-and-water faith.

  IN POLITICS, THE new faith is globalist and skeptical of patriotism, for an excessive love of country too often leads to suspicion of neighbors and thence to war. The history of nations is a history of wars, and the new faith intends an end of nations. Support for the UN, foreign aid, treaties to ban land mines, abolish nuclear weapons, punish war crimes, and forgive the debts of poor nations are the marks of progressive men and women. Whenever a new supranational institution is formed—the World Trade Organization, the Kyoto Protocol to prevent global warming, the new UN International Criminal Court—the revolution will support the transfer of authority and sovereignty from nations to the new institutions of global governance.

  Shelley once called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”5 In modern times, songwriters have replaced poets in the consciousness of the young, and in the 1960s, the Beatles were the most famous, with John Lennon the poet lau
reate to a generation. In his song “Imagine,” Lennon lays out in a few stanzas the heaven on earth that is envisioned in the post-Christian dispensation:

  Imagine there’s no heaven

  It’s easy if you try

  No hell below us

  Above us only sky

  Imagine all the people living for today.

  Imagine there’s no countries

  It isn’t hard to do

  Nothing to kill or die for

  And no religion too

  Imagine all the people

  Living life in peace.6

  A self-described “instinctive socialist,” Lennon went on to imagine a world of “no possessions,” where everyone shares everything. Yet, on his death, at forty, the world would learn that Lennon had coolly managed to acquire $275 million worth of possessions, making him one of the richest men on earth.7 And though the world of John Lennon’s imagination, and that of fellow Beatle Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, was utopian, that did not diminish its attraction for the young. For these songwriters offered a new faith to believe in, with its own beatific vision of life here on earth, to replace the Christian faith that had shriveled in their souls. As David Noebel, author of The legacy of John Lennon, wrote, the poet-songwriter knew exactly what he was about. In a statement that stunned the America of the mid-1960s, Lennon predicted: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and will be proven right. We’re more popular than Jesus now.”8

  “THE CANCER OF HUMAN HISTORY”

  But a religion needs devils as well as angels. And much of what the new faith teaches stems from a hatred of what it views as a shameful, wicked, criminal past. To the revolution, Western history is a catalog of crimes—slavery, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, atrocities, massacres—committed by nations that professed to be Christian. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag, a birth mother of the revolution, in 1967. “The white race and it alone … eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads.”9

  America was founded on a genocide … . This is a passionately racist country … . The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.10

  Like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, our elites have come to accept Sontag’s indictment of their civilization and have volunteered, pro bono, to assist the prosecution in making its case. If many Americans look back on their history with disgust, who can blame them? For, as Myron Magnet writes in The Dream and the Nightmare:

  Campus after campus [has] jettisoned traditional Western civilization great books and great ideas courses as obsolete … . An alternative canon, supposed to be adequate to the new reality, emerged: Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, later even the lyrics of Bob Dylan, shouldered aside Plato and Montaigne. The relevant message was Western Society’s oppressiveness, stifling the instinctual satisfactions for the privileged and tyrannically exploiting the poor and nonwhite at home and in the Third World.11

  What was novelist James Baldwin’s view of his country at the end of his life? There is not in American history, he wrote, “nor is there now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution.”12 In her text Progressive Constitutionalism, Robin West adds, “The political history of the United States … is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexual devaluation of women … .”13 Deconstructionalist Jonathan Culler says that the Bible must be understood “not as poetry or narrative but as a powerfully influential racist and sexist text.”14 Such sentiments are no longer rarities, but more and more the rule in higher education in the United States.

  In 1990, Tulane announced a new program, “Initiatives for the Race and Gender Enrichment of Tulane University.” University president Eamon Kelly explained the urgency: “Racism and sexism are pervasive in America and are fundamentally present in all American institutions … . We are all the progeny of a racist and sexist America.” 15 A recent New York State Regents Report on curriculum reform underscores the need for a fresh look at American history: “African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos, and Native Americans have all been victims of a cultural oppression and stereotyping that has characterized institutions … of the European American world for centuries.”16

  This is the message children receive in college and even in high school: Europeans and Americans are guilty of genocide against the native peoples of this continent. Our ancestors transported millions of Africans in death ships to the New World, enslaved them to do the hard labor that our forefathers would not do, and maimed and killed millions. Europe’s nations imposed racist regimes on peoples of color, especially in Africa, and robbed them of their wealth. Christianity coexisted with and condoned slavery, imperialism, racism, and sexism for four hundred years.

  “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” asks the old man in Eliot’s “Gerontion.”17 “We are used to hearing the Founders charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests,” wrote Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind; these slanders are “weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes.”18 Indeed they are, for that is their purpose.

  Before the bar of history, America and the West have been indicted on the Nuremberg charge of “crimes against humanity.” And all too often Western intellectuals, who should be conducting the defense of the greatest and most beneficent civilization in history, are aiding the prosecution or entering a plea of nolo contendere. Too many can only offer the stammering defense of the “good Germans”—“But we did not know.”

  In moving this indictment, the revolution has complementary goals: to deepen a sense of guilt, to morally disarm and paralyze the West, and to extract endless apologies and reparations until the wealth of the West is transferred to its accusers. It is moral extortion of epic proportions, the shakedown of the millennium. If the West permits its enemies to pull this off, we deserve to be robbed of our inheritance.

  Why are so many Western leaders unable to refute the accusations? Because in their hearts, Clinton, Jospin, and Schroeder believe the charges are true, and that the West is guilty. Why else would Mr. Clinton have traveled to Africa to apologize for slavery to the heirs of the tribal chiefs who captured and sold the slaves? Slavery existed, even before Arkansas. And the West did not invent slavery; the West ended slavery.

  IN THE CATECHISM of the revolution, why did the West perpetrate history’s greatest horrors? Because Western nations believed that their civilization and culture were superior and that they had the right to impose their rule on “inferior” civilizations, cultures, and peoples. This is the radix malorum, the root of all evil, the belief that one culture is superior to another, which leads to the murder of the other. Eradication of the idea of superior cultures and civilizations is thus a first order of business of the revolution.

  Equality is the first principle. Who sins against equality is extra ecclesiam, outside the church. In the new dispensation, no religion is superior, no culture is superior, no civilization is superior. All are equal. It is “diversity,” the representation in society of all creeds, colors, and cultures in the multiethnic, multicultural nation that we should aspire to and, prayerfully, are headed for. Logically it follows that any candidate who would rally a constituency on the idea that Western civilization and culture are superior and Christianity is the one true faith is a heretic and a menace.

  How crucial is this conviction to our new cultural establishment?

  IN 1994, THE culture war came to Lake County, Florida, when the school board voted three to two to require that children be taught that America’s heritage and culture were “supe
rior to other foreign or historic cultures.”19 Board chair Pat Hart, a self-described patriot and a Christian, said the idea was adopted in response to Florida’s multicultural education policy. It is fine, said Mrs. Hart, for students to learn about other nations and cultures, but they should be taught that America’s is “unquestionably superior.”20

  A stunned teachers’ union called the proposal jingoistic. “People don’t understand the purpose and point of this,” Keith Mullins of People for Mainstream Values told the New York Times.21

  Nonsense. The blazing controversy that ensued showed that people knew exactly what “the purpose and point” were. School board member Judy Pearson made it clear: “We need to reinforce that we should be teaching America first.”22 Otherwise, said Ms. Pearson, young people, “if they felt our land was inferior or equal to others, would have no motivation to go to war and defend our society.”23

  One dissenter charged the school board majority with “undermining our school system.”24 The Associated Press reported, “Some teachers and parents say what’s really being taught is bigotry.”25 The spokesman for the national School Boards Association, Jay Butler, warned that “‘values’ in education … is something we hear more about with the rise of the religious right wing.”26

  The local teachers’ union president, Gail Burry, accused the board of violating the First Amendment: “The board’s majority wants to start from a conclusion—that America is superior to all other nations—and then work backwards from it … . That’s not education. That’s indoctrination.”27 But isn’t starting from the conclusion that America is simply equal to all other nations also “indoctrination”?