There is probably no picture which better encapsulates modern western culture than a woman standing on her car and taking a smiley selfie as it sinks into an icy river https://t.co/wrAT7SEMvk

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 17, 2022

Lost in London’s fog in 1909, William D. Boyce was aided by an unknown Boy Scout doing his daily good turn. Impressed by the Scout’s devotion to principle, Boyce founded the Boy Scouts of America on February 8, 1910.

Mark Pulliam wrote a grim, and just slightly in-advance of the complete end, obituary for the Boy Scouts of America, once a widely popular boyhood rite of passage, imported a little over a century ago from Britain.

Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the hero of the Siege of Mafeking, dismayed at the lack of idealism, physical weakness, and unfamiliarity with the Out-of-Doors of Boer War recruits drawn from British industrialized cities, created an organization for boys specifically designed to inculcate manliness, virtue, and outdoor skills. Boys were encouraged to model themselves on the experienced and skilled frontiersman able to guide and reconnoiter for military forces in the Wild, on super-human figures like Frederick Russell Burnham, on the Scout. Boys should additionally be developed into patriots and Christian gentlemen of spotless honor, making a point of doing a good deed every day.

Baden-Powell invented the Scouting Movement specifically to oppose the negative influences of Modernity: moral relativism, effeminacy, cynicism, sloth, weakness, and self-indulgence. A bit over a century later, the BSA’s corporate leadership proved itself to be exactly like the rest of America’s national establishment: a pack of spineless, air-headed sheep ready to surrender quickly to the Sodomy and the Left’s Gramscian Long March Through the Institutions. It’s very, very sad.

While overall membership peaked in the early 1970s, the participation rate—the percentage of age-eligible boys who were members of the BSA—began to decline a decade (or more) earlier. The effect of this decline was disguised by increases in the U.S. population and expansion of the traditional scouting program. The heyday of the BSA coincided with the demographic bubble of post-WWII births—the Boomer generation. As this cohort grew up, the attention of American youths was distracted by other cultural influences: greater affluence, competing recreational activities, the proliferation of organized youth sports, the ubiquity of suburbia and its rich array of creature comforts, growing demographic diversity, and—in the past decade—the advent of computer games that now consume the interest of many boys.

The Boy Scout Law—with its embrace of religious faith (“reverence”) and heterosexuality (“morally straight”)—faced hostile headwinds in an increasingly secular and “tolerant” society. And, to be honest, in a youth culture increasingly sensitive to what is fashionable—a norm rigidly and relentlessly enforced by social media through the omnipresent smartphone—the Boy Scouts in recent decades was regarded as unacceptably “uncool.” In the 1950s and 1960s, peer pressure went in the opposite direction, reinforcing the attractiveness of scouting. Norman Rockwell’s cover illustration for the February 1965 issue of Boys’ Life depicts two parents proudly watching as their clean-cut son—standing at attention in a crisply-pressed uniform—receives his Eagle medal. Alas, times change. As the BSA’s membership began to decline, the national organization tried to remain “relevant,” adapting to America’s abrupt cultural and demographic shifts with responses that were sometimes clumsy and even counter-productive.

After decades of litigation brought by atheists and homosexuals regarding the BSA’s exclusionary membership requirements—which were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) as the exercise of the BSA’s First Amendment rights—the BSA reversed itself by allowing gay youths full participation in 2014 and allowing openly gay adults as leaders in 2015. Instead of stemming BSA’s membership decline, the national leadership’s acquiescence to atheists and homosexuals—some believe due to pressure from major corporations whose financial patronage had become indispensable to the organization’s operation—only accelerated it.

With recent moves more closely resembling the actions of a Fortune 500 HR department, the BSA now has a Chief Diversity Officer, boasts a Diversity and Inclusion Statement, and in 2020 even proposed an Eagle-required merit badge requiring mastery of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to achieve scouting’s highest rank. This last innovation was apparently too much for traditionalists to swallow, and the proposed merit badge has been put on hold pending further study.

In the corporate jargon of the BSA’s national leadership, “The introduction of the proposed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion merit badge is being delayed to allow for the careful consideration and evaluation of feedback received from a wide variety of commenters on the draft requirements.” The New York Times reported that “The nonprofit also joined a growing number of organizations announcing public support for racial equality and the Black Lives Matter movement.” Earlier this year, the BSA’s century-old official publication, Boys’ Life, was renamed Scout Life in order to be gender-neutral.

RTWT

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1833-1836, New York Historical Society.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic warns that the Abendslandes are Unterganging awfully badly these days.

[F]or over a century—at least since Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was published in 1918—there have been warnings by philosophers, political scientists, theologians and others, mainly disbelievers in “progress” and the improvability of man, that our civilization is in peril. They make use of a massive body of evidence to point out that we live in abnormal times, characterized by the collapse of moral norms and civilizational standards on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The malaise is strikingly augmented in our own time by the metastatic growth of Weiningerian self-hatred throughout the Western world.

Over the past year the U.S. sociopolitical system’s crisis has acquired a mature form, with increasingly frequent outbursts of acute dysfunctionality. The process is manifested primarily in the legitimization of violence, debasement of the “democratic process,” imposition of crude forms of censorship, and criminalization of words and actions unacceptable to the Beltway regime and its cohorts in the media, Big Tech, the academe, and Hollywood.

A horrid new order is being set up. For a brief while it may yet resemble the Old Republic, but only as Count Dracula resembles a living person.

On the eastern side of the Atlantic, much of Europe is being transformed culturally and demographically into a gross caricature of its former self. Its southern maritime border is as porous as the U.S. border with Mexico. Europe’s “secular theocracy” (to borrow Paul Gottfried’s pertinent term) is focused on reforming and reshaping its subjects’ conscience to accept multicultural self-annihilation as an attitude, a set of beliefs, and mandatory policy.

As a result, the Old Continent is increasingly populated by aliens physically residing in Berlin, Toulon, or Leeds, but spiritually in Anatolia, Punjab, or the Maghreb. They are often desperate to get to Europe, but once established there they want to replicate the cultural environments of their unpleasant native lands in their new abode. Full of scorn for the hosts’ cultural Marxist professions of “tolerance” and “diversity,” their disdain is unappeased by groveling concessions.

Today’s “United Europe” is light years away from the civilized and, on the whole, decent community of nations which existed before 1914. The EU does not create social and civilizational commonalities, except on the basis of wholesale denial of authentically European standards and values. The result is dreary cultural sameness of anti-discriminationism and anti-Christian veneration of Otherness.

Nor have the controllers of the EU machine given up on their Superstate project after Brexit. In the loss of diversity of social evolution that goes alongside the diminishing diversity of nature, they seek the obliteration of the identity of European nations, their special color and uniqueness. They see national elections (e.g. in Hungary or Poland) as a nuisance which throws reactionary sovereigntist spanners into their works, such as imposing mandatory quotas of Muslim immigrants on each member country. Their obsessions, which but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric or insane, now dominate the Western mainstream.

Almost a century ago Julien Benda published his diatribe against the intellectual corruption of his times, The Treason of the Intellectuals. The “Treason” happened when the intellectual elite gave up promoting lasting civilizational values and allowed short-term political preferences to distort their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. In 1920s Europe, intellectuals started discarding their regard for traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals, venerating particularisms and moral relativism instead.

Half a century later Christopher Lasch diagnosedthe mature form of Benda’s “treason.” Alluding to José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, Lasch called his collection of essays The Revolt of the Elites. The phenomenon’s key feature is the detachment of the new professional-managerial elites—lawyers, media commentators, academic experts, think-tank analysts, financial planners, etc.—from traditional, naturally emerging communities. This new elite exists in the abstract world of manipulating information inputs and figures. It generates a new, strongly ideological form of political discourse which is based on secularism, moral and cultural relativism, and its members’ rejection of any sense of attachment to the wider community.

To wit, at the White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead in February 1972, Carl Gerstacker, Chairman of Dow Chemical, outlined his vision of the “anational” corporation of the near future. “I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation,” he said, and of establishing the Dow world headquarters there, “beholden to no nation or society.”

Two years later, Richard Gardner enthusiastically asserted in Foreign Affairs that the “house of world order” will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down: “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” This was clearly a variation of the Gramscian theme of the long march through the institutions. For his vision and efforts Gardner was subsequently rewarded by Jimmy Carter with ambassadorships to Spain and Italy.

In the same spirit, Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott declared shortly after leaving office that the United States won’t exist “in its current form” in the 21st century because the concept of nationhood itself will become obsolete. Talbott stated in 1992, and reiterated in his 2008 book, The Great Experiment, that in the 21st century “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority and that all countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.”

In short, members of the Western elite class know no loyalty to country or nation. They seek a peculiar end of history in the transformation of deracinated and brainwashed hoi polloi into a postmodern sociotechnological system regulated by themselves. Their edifice rests on the dictum that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited them for generations, but to all who happen to be within their boundaries at a given moment. Enlightened persons must not feel a bond for any group except for allegedly underprivileged minorities. Accordingly, they actively promote self-destruction and encourage self-hate of Caucasians and demonize all white male heterosexuals. They seek the final blending of races, genders, and the burgeoning array of sexual preferences into a pliable melange ruled by Dr. Talbott’s Single Global Authority.

RTWT

“Andrea Long Chu“

How does it feel to live in a time in which the grand establishment newspaper of record will publish, with grave seriousness and implicit nodding approval, the self-pitying posturings of a crazy who has created a personal identity and political ideology based on maladjustment and futile, self-destructive efforts to rebel against Nature and Reality?

Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.

I like to say that being trans is the second-worst thing that ever happened to me. (The worst was being born a boy.) …

I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones. One reason is that, absent the levies of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret. Another reason is that I take estrogen — effectively, delayed-release sadness, a little aquamarine pill that more or less guarantees a good weep within six to eight hours.

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.

I won’t go through with it, probably. Killing is icky. I tell you this not because I’m cruising for sympathy but to prepare you for what I’m telling you now: I still want this, all of it. I want the tears; I want the pain. Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it. Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.

As long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself, with a dictator’s benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it. Transgender people have been forced, for decades, to rely for care on a medical establishment that regards them with both suspicion and condescension. And yet as things stand today, there is still only one way to obtain hormones and surgery: to pretend that these treatments will make the pain go away.

The medical maxim “First, do no harm” assumes that health care providers possess both the means and the authority to decide what counts as harm. When doctors and patients disagree, the exercise of this prerogative can, itself, be harmful. Nonmaleficence is a principle violated in its very observation. Its true purpose is not to shield patients from injury but to install the medical professional as a little king of someone else’s body.

Let me be clear: I believe that surgeries of all kinds can and do make an enormous difference in the lives of trans people.

But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman. I will live with this, or I won’t. That’s fine. The negative passions — grief, self-loathing, shame, regret — are as much a human right as universal health care, or food. There are no good outcomes in transition. There are only people, begging to be taken seriously.

RTWT

Personally, I think that we sane and normal people have a lot more reason for melancholy based on sheer embarrassment over the contemptible intellectual state of our culture and establishment than does some nutcase who does not like the sexual characteristics he was born with.

I fail to understand how Society and the medical profession and government are all supposed to adapt to whims connected with sex on the part of an infinitesimally small number of deeply neurotic malcontents without feeling exactly the same obligation to “take seriously” and accommodate the wishes of every madman who thinks he is Napoleon.

Michel Houellebecq

Slawomir Sierakowski interviewing Slavoj Žižek back in 2015 after the Charlie Hebdo murders.

Do you see common ground between you and Michel Houellebecq, with his critique of Western liberal societies, combined with no justification for reactionary alternatives like Islamist or Russian ones?

Yes, definitely. Crazy as it may sound, I have much respect for the honest liberal conservatives like Houellebecq, Finkielkraut, or Sloterdijk in Germany. One can learn from them much more than from progressive liberal like Habermas: honest conservatives are not afraid to admit the deadlock we are in. Houellebecq’s Atomised is for me the most devastating portrait of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He shows how permissive hedonism turns into the obscene superego universe of the obligation to enjoy. Even his anti-Islamism is more refined than it may appear: he is well aware how the true problem is not the Muslim threat from the outside, but our own decadence. Long ago Friedrich Nietzsche perceived how Western civilization was moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another:

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. “We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

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Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog, 1982. –Our time’s version of The Raft of the Medusa.

Brett Stevens notes that the birthrate of Europeans (and that of the more elite sectors of the American population) has fallen below replacement and he blames Modernity itself.

Modernity is killing us. As Plato intuited, the problem with bad systems is not solely that they are inept, but that this ineptitude shapes people. It causes people to despair. They then die out, much as Western Europeans are in Europe and North America. Why strive if life is fundamentally empty, miserable, and filled with neurotic worry?

Just as with animals, when we are in a good environment, we thrive; when we are confined, hopeless, cornered, despairing, miserable, or in pain, we will ourselves to death. Western European people worldwide have been living in a state of constant hopelessness since the end of WW1, but our doubt about life itself goes much deeper.

Modernity arose with the French Revolution. Away went the little villages ruled by gentle lords, the customs and culture, and the sense of purpose and faith in life itself that quelled our existential suffering. Before the Revolution, we knew we were doing the right thing if we lived according to our tradition.

After the Revolution, in came bureaucracy. Cities replaced the towns. Mass culture and mass mobilization replaced intelligent leadership. There was constant infighting, from the politics of elections to the churn among companies trying to decide who would control large swathes of the economy.

Our once-intelligent society had become shocking dumb. Not only did the stupid but obedient thrive in the age of managerial control, because every manager loves a low-risk worker even if that worker is not particularly good at anything, but all public opinions had to pander to a crowd with the collective intelligence of the audience for an amusement park.

Spread by social coercion, this stupidity quickly absorbed every institution in the West so that they got dumb together. Government got dumb at the same rate that the church, art scene, schools, professionals, corporations, and non-profits did. We kept pace as we rushed into the abyss.

By the time 1968 came around, ready for the coup de grâce, the West had given up on itself for three generations. They had nothing to believe in because modern life was really not all that much fun. Sure, it was prosperous, but everyone spent their time in mindless unnecessary jobs, maintaining glitchy gadgets, babysitting third world or low caste labor, dealing with government and our crazy fellow citizens, filing paperwork, and otherwise being forced into confronting the tedious, ugly, and faith-crushing every day.

This delighted the Left, who are fundamentally neurotics that are motivated by a desire to destroy everything beautiful, good, and true because they do not detect those things in themselves. Solipsism, it turns out, is a form of neurosis where we mistake ourselves for the source of reality itself, when we are really only mirrors.

Our modern world makes us hate life. We spend way too much time working in jobs that are jails, then must live in ugly cities where most people are neurotic or otherwise low-grade mentally disturbed, and participate in a process of life that is designed to humble, humiliate, bore, and subjugate all of us. No wonder people are not reproducing.

RTWT

Qaisar Mahmood

Front Page:

Qaisar Mahmood, a Muslim born in Pakistan, is the new head of the Swedish National Heritage Board. This is an extremely anomalous appointment, since he readily admits that he has not read anything about Sweden’s cultural heritage. But his new job is not really about preserving and protecting Sweden’s cultural heritage and historical sites at all.

Qaisar Mahmood, who once rode his motorcycle around Sweden in an apparently failed attempt to discover what being Swedish consisted of, is using his position as head of the Swedish National Heritage Board not to highlight and celebrate that heritage, but to downplay Sweden’s cultural heritage and history, and to create a false narrative that will help compel Swedes to accept mass Muslim migration. He says he doesn’t want simply to alert people to Viking artifacts and the like, but to use Sweden’s history to “create the narrative” that will make Muslim migrants “part of something.”

We have already seen how that works. Remember the fake news story about the Viking burial cloth bearing the word “Allah”? Last October, a Swedish researcher gained international headlines by claiming that burial costumes from Viking graves dating back to the ninth and tenth centuries had been found to be inscribed with the name “Allah.” The intent of this was obvious: to convince Swedes that Islam had always been a part of Sweden, all the way back to the days of the Vikings, and so they should not be concerned about the mass Muslim migration that was now bringing Sweden unprecedented rape and other crime rates. Islam has always been a part of Sweden! Stop opposing mass Muslim migration!

The Viking burial cloths didn’t really feature the name “Allah” at all, as Stephennie Mulder, an associate professor of Medieval Islamic art and archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin, proved shortly thereafter, but by then the damage had been done. The idea had entered, however dimly, the popular consciousness: the Vikings were really Muslims. Islam is Swedish. Sweden was Islamic before it was Christian. The Muslim migrants are Swedes.

The “Allah” Viking burial cloth propaganda offensive was one manifestation of what Qaisar Mahmood and others like him are doing. There is no Muslim history in Sweden, but Qaisar Mahmood is working to change the very idea of cultural heritage and fabricate fictions about a historical Muslim presence in Sweden in order to advance his political and sociological agenda.

Qaisar Mahmood, as a Pakistani, of course has no Swedish heritage of his own. His admitted lack of knowledge of Swedish heritage and history ought to have disqualified him from his position, but this is how Sweden is obliterating itself and committing cultural and national suicide. After all, Swedes appointed Qaisar Mahmood to this position. It is Swedish leaders who want to destroy Swedish cultural and national identity.

RTWT

Design is Fine:

KML Royal Super Constellation, cabin interior design by Henry Dreyfuss, from Revue der Reclame, 1954. Netherlands. Source. Pic 2/5: Club Lounge Pic 4: The Flying Chef offers a 7-course champagne dinner.

Patrick Deneen has more bad news from the Academe.

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students have not been educated to know them. At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide.

Another must-read.

Breitbart has some really bad news.

Fewer than 1 percent of papers published in scientific journals follow the scientific method, according to research by Wharton School professor and forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong.

Professor Armstrong, who co-founded the peer-reviewed Journal of Forecasting in 1982 and the International Journal of Forecasting in 1985, made the claim in a presentation about what he considers to be “alarmism” from forecasters over man-made climate change.

“We also go through journals and rate how well they conform to the scientific method. I used to think that maybe 10 percent of papers in my field … were maybe useful. Now it looks like maybe, one tenth of one percent follow the scientific method” said Armstrong in his presentation, which can be watched in full below. “People just don’t do it.”

Armstrong defined eight criteria for compliance with the scientific method, including full disclosure of methods, data, and other reliable information, conclusions that are consistent with the evidence, valid and simple methods, and valid and reliable data.

According to Armstrong, very little of the forecasting in climate change debate adheres to these criteria. “For example, for disclosure, we were working on polar bear [population] forecasts, and we were asked to review the government’s polar bear forecast. We asked, ‘could you send us the data’ and they said ‘No’… So we had to do it without knowing what the data were.”

According to Armstrong, forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) violate all eight criteria.

“Why is this all happening? Nobody asks them!” said Armstrong, who says that people who submit papers to journals are not required to follow the scientific method.

A must-read.