Revolution Within the Form

Oswald Spengler wrote in the Decline of the West about the “revolution within the form.”  In such circumstances, things appear to be what they always were.  They have the same names–nations, parliaments, cultures–but their essence is fundamentally changed, like the farce that was the Roman Senate under the Emperors.   Rick Darby of Reflecting Light describes this sad phenomenon brilliantly with regard to the now decadent entity that is Europe:

Old Europe died in 1945. A lot of it was physically destroyed, but buildings can be rebuilt, and in fact some have been re-created exactly as they were before the bombs struck. But Europe’s sense of itself, its individual nationhoods, its links with a past going back to the Roman empire, are gone.

What passes for Europe now is generic and technology-minded, its so-called leaders agreed on only one thing: that its indigenous citizens are cursed with a terrible past best left behind as quickly as possible. The quickest way is population replacement. And the Third World, especially Islamic, is happy to abandon their wretched homelands for Europe’s pleasure garden. But not to abandon the tribalism and belief systems that messed up their states of origin.

The New Europe is to be, officially, anything and nothing. Unofficially, in reality, its future is Islam unless the tide is turned soon.

This indeed is the great swindle of liberalism.  An entire continent exchanges its faith and its ethnic integrity for what? Microwave ovens and the ever-receding goal of forgiveness from the gods of political correctness?  It’s a depressing situation, a crime really, and one where the chief perpetrators will escape punishment.

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Our Politicized Language

We’re told by our half-educated proctors that “everything is power” and “everything is political.”  But, failing to follow through on the logic of their relativism, they also behave as if cracker-barrel Marxism and their various faddish neologisms are an expression of truth and justice. 

The whole thing is a pathetic, closed, and uninteresting system that has done so much to make the world ugly and our lives flat.  Consider the decline of poetry, film, literature, fine art, painting, sculpture, and every other field of high culture through the twin ravages of democratization and anti-truth uniformity.  This assault can broadly be grouped under the heading “poltical correctness.” 

Vanishing American, commenting at Brave New World Watch, had a good take on our changing mores by considering the decline of the word “slut”:

When I was a child (many moons ago) I remember the word was certainly disparaging but not considered obscene or even particularly vulgar. It could refer to a woman with sloppy habits, and my old 1937 Webster’s Dictionary says the primary meaning of the word ’slut’ was ‘a slovenly woman; a slattern.’

The secondary meaning listed is ‘A lewd woman; a harlot.’

However though lewd women were held in much lower regard then than now, the word ’slut’ was not a taboo word. Odd. Now lewd behavior is glorified but words describing lewd women are taboo.

The ‘b’ word used to be taboo in polite society unless referring to a female canine, but now it’s an everyday word, and the word ‘whore’ is going to be supplanted by the illiterate usage ‘ho’ any day now.

I’m not sure what all this says about our values.

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