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If I could apply only one word to my feelings while reading
this book, it would be “frustrating.”
Reno does a reasonably good job of describing the current situation in
the West – the dissolving society, the loss of meaning, the ever-increasing
extremisms that come with the ever-increasing fragmentation and individualism
found in society.
Reno does a less than adequate job of pointing to the
causes, looking at the root during a time when the West was already lost, and
known to be lost by many thinkers many years before. He does an even worse job of parsing out the
benefits of voluntary and free actions when compared to the purposeful, planned
destruction of societal norms.
A few examples of his insight to the current situation with
which I agree – demonstrating a little healthy bite along the way:
… it is a sign of nuance when a
member of our chattering class compares Trump to the Spanish strongman
Francisco Franco rather than to Hitler. … A uniquely Western anti-Western
multiculturalism deprives people of their cultural inheritance. … Borders are
porous, even the one that separates men from women.
He finds the roots of this destruction in the post-war
period – not post the French Revolution or even post-World War I; Reno’s focus
is post-World War II and the work of Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek (among a
few others):
…the postwar left fixed its
attention on moral freedom and cultural deregulation, seeing them as natural
extensions of the antiauthoritarian imperative, while the postwar right focused
on economic freedom and market deregulation for similar anti-totalitarian
reasons.
And in this one statement, many of my frustrations with Reno’s
work are brought to the fore.
Let’s start with the timing: World War II marked the end of
a thirty-year war that represented, according to Jacques
Barzun, the suicide of the West. The
suicide can be dated to the summer of 1914 – and you can choose your own starting
point: the assassination of the Archduke, the shelling of Belgrade by Austria-Hungary,
the Russian mobilization, or the German declaration of war. Of course, none of these were accidental occurrences:
many leaders of the West were
planning for – and even hoping for – this war.
Yet suicide doesn’t just happen in a day – one doesn’t just
wake up one morning and think “today is the day.” Suicide is the culmination of many years of
sickness, illness, tragedy. Daniel Ajamian
examined the roots of this sickness in The Cost of the Enlightenment,
pointing to the cost of reason and individualism without God. To point to the philosophies that came after
World War II is to point to the fruit of the tree and not the root of the
tree.
That there has been a destruction of cultural norms, there
is no doubt. This has been by
design. Reno gives strong evidence
connecting this to the thought of Popper, and one can certainly see this
through the fruit of his very wealthy follower, George Soros.
Reno also points to libertarianism as a culprit, although
libertarianism as properly understood – not as popularly advertised by
(so-called) friends and enemies alike – has nothing to say on such matters. Lew Rockwell has made this quite clear in his
recent book Against
the Left: A Rothbardian Libertarianism, when he writes:
If we get rid of the State – and
that is a big if – we have accomplished our goal as libertarians.
There is no libertarian goal to mold people to some
ideology; it does not view the family as an enemy – in fact, it finds in the
family the foundation for a decent society.
Rockwell suggests: “Unfortunately, a number of so-called libertarians
ignore these essential points.”
Returning to Reno: here again, one can point to the effects
of World War One, and the cultural destruction that was a result of that
war. As Ajamian offered:
…family life broken, careers ended,
government allowance in the place of productive work, and a tide of
egalitarianism; in other words, the perfect cultural soil for the expansion of
monopoly state power.
Further, it is difficult to comment on the cultural
destruction of the West without at least mentioning Antonio Gramsci. He was the one to point to the necessity of destroying
the culture of the West if communism was to advance – in other words, the
workers of the western world would never violently unite against their
proletarian neighbors.
Second, comparing the cultural deregulation to the market
deregulation since that time: WHAT MARKET DEREGULATION? OK, now that I got my yelling out of the way…:
the federal register only grows, it doesn’t shrink. To the extent that there is growing
frustration in the masses toward “the market,” the roots of it can be found in
central banking and government bailouts, not in any non-existent “deregulation.”
Look at any chart on wealth inequality (I hate the phrase,
but can’t think of a better one right now): the lines bend significantly to the
favor of the wealthy beginning in the early 1970s – perfectly coincident with
Nixon’s closing of the gold window, thereby freeing the Fed from any last hint
of monetary discipline.
Yet it isn’t just coincidence, it is also correlation: those
connected to the state and the central bank get first access to this fiat. To develop this further is beyond my purpose
in this review.
As to government bailouts: recall the anger in the broad
population in 2008 when the government bailed out the banks, passed TARP,
etc. Something like 90%-plus of the
letters and calls into congress were against these actions. And you know the history: they were bailed
out and the rich got unfairly richer – this followed by (the healthy
manifestation of) The Tea Party, the sit-ins against Wall Street, etc.
Don’t tell me about market deregulation. It is a tired argument offered by those
ignorant of or unwilling to consider the reality of government intervention in
the market.
Conclusion
Enough of my venting of frustration. I do agree with Reno regarding the
atomization of society, the loss of cultural norms, the necessity of
transcendent and metaphysical values. Unlike
Reno’s portrayal, there are proponents of this to be found in the free-market
and libertarian community. As I
mentioned before, Ludwig
von Mises and Murray
Rothbard wrote often enough about this reality and the necessity of tradition,
family, and community when it comes to human liberty.
In my next post on this book, I will examine Reno’s
prescription for a cure – within the context of his diagnosis and compared to
my diagnosis and prescription.
"Don’t tell me about market deregulation."
ReplyDeleteI hear you. It is a bogeyman people want to point at, but government intervention is the overwhelming theme of the US market in the 20th Century. There a few pockets where some intervention went down but much like government spending never down to the point it was at before and always back up from there.
People look at me weird when I say this but the American economy is fascist and becoming more so all the time. Hitler would love the way the Federal Government dictates pretty much everything to corporations.
"Let’s start with the timing: World War II marked the end of a thirty-year war that represented, according to Jacques Barzun, the suicide of the West. The suicide can be dated to the summer of 1914 . . . ."
ReplyDeleteIndeed it can. Pope St. Pius X saw the suicide as it was happening. It killed him:
"In 1914, the pope fell ill on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary (15 August 1914), an illness from which he would not recover. His condition was worsened by the events leading to the outbreak of World War I (1914–1918), which reportedly sent the 79-year-old pope into a state of melancholy. He died on 20 August 1914, only a few hours after the death of Jesuit leader Franz Xavier Wernz and on the very day when German forces marched into Brussels" (Wikipedia).