As I have discussed elsewhere, the Cultural Revolution signaled by Woodstock actually began with 19th Century Romanticism, many of its iconic figures being, by traditional Western standards, moral degenerates.
According to a recently published Blaze article, the city of Philadelphia was plagued with 562 murders in 2021, a significant increase over the 356 committed in 2019. But 24 hours into the New Year and 14 people have already been shot, 2 of them fatally! Venturing out into the streets of Philadelphia quite literally entails putting one’s life at risk. Is the stress imposed by Covid to blame or are other factors involved in America’s apparent decline into barbarism?
Of course no one at CNN would ever admit to condoning murder, but that Network’s and indeed the entire Left’s constant invocation of the nihilistic Marxist notion that those not happy with their lives are always the Victims of Oppression, that the Poor are inevitably the victims of the Rich, that Blacks are unequivocally the victims of Whites, naturally leads to the conclusion that one has every right to resort to violence in the pursuit of Justice. It is a narrative that quite literally spells the death of Morality, the death of the Principles of Self-Awareness and Personal Responsibility that used to inform the Western Vision of Man. It is a narrative most assuredly related to both the pandemic of criminal behavior sweeping across America and the tendency of many “intellectuals” to accept it as perfectly natural.
My apparently obsolete “conservative” perspective assumes violence against another human being, other than as a matter of self-defense, is never justified; indeed that murder is the ultimate moral abomination. Respecting the integrity of each Individual, abjuring specious conclusions based on stereotypes, it finds “social justice” policies which reduce Complex Human Beings to mere Statistics utterly absurd. Two wrongs do not make a right and vilifying perfectly decent people because they happen to share the Identity of a group which the Left has designated as “oppressive” represents the abandonment of the very notion of Morality. But that would seem to be the defining mode of our “progressive” culture which is forever finding excuses to exonerate repulsive behavior among the designated “oppressed,” while being more than eager to vilify all those who have managed to prosper, as the villainous benefactors of an unjust world.
Will Witt, a former student of the U. of Colorado, Boulder, which he said seemed more intent on indoctrinating rather than educating him, is now affiliated with Prager U. In spite of the mainstream culture’s relentless attempts to paint “conservatives” as slaves to their hateful biases, he insists his “conservatism” has actually set him free.
Freedom, Socrates thought, entailed viewing both the Self and the surrounding World rationally and reacting in accordance with that acquired knowledge. But 19th Century “thinkers” such as William Blake turned the world upside down, declaring what he called the “realm of necessity” to be a tyrannical regime Man was in no way obligated to respect. While Blake saw this as a declaration of radical freedom, it actually enslaved Man to the mindless pursuit of his innermost needs, however self-indulgent, however incompatible with the facts of the Real World. It is no coincidence that many of the Romantics had syphilis by the age of 20!
This decadent 19th Century notion that Life is inherently unfair informs our contemporary Culture and most obviously the sensibility of the radically “woke” who see Victimization as the fundamental fact of the human dynamic. When Will Witt says his “conservatism” has set him free, he is clearly endorsing the traditional Humanist belief that we are Intelligent Beings whose Minds both obligate us to accept the irrefutable facts of the Objective World while also enabling us to take charge of our journey therein. It is a Moral perspective rooted in Man’s capacity for Freedom and it is distinctly at odds with the childish egotism of those who feel entitled to pillage and rob and perhaps even kill because Life, they have been told, has been so unkind to them.
Culture matters and the decadent cultural values promulgated by the Left are demonstrably responsible for the whining, self-exonerating mind-set behind the West’s seeming decline into barbarism.