Caught Between Two Poets

Robert Frost wrote:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

We’re doomed. Everywhere you look it’s as if billboards have been erected to let us know that the West is systemically condemned. The ball’s rolling down the hill; the question is, when will it smash against the wall? I’m getting older, is this the paranoia that’s associated with aging, feeling that the world is no longer a friendly place, but one of hostility and threat?

If one accepts the premise of impending collapse, there’s no end of conjecture as to why we’re in this fix. Maybe the problem rests with our collective great-great-great Judeo-Christian grandfather, Adam, who had no childhood. This has led to Western culture repressing childhood and dooming itself to childish adult behavior. The idea’s fascinating: I wonder why now and not at some earlier date in the 7000 years since he was created. On the other hand, it could explain why so many contemporary adults continue to want to be teenagers even when their teeth have dropped out.

Another theory is our language has doomed us. This is the premise that our perspective on life and philosophy is based upon the noun-adjective-verb relation. This means we see objects with qualities in defined states. In an article I read, this was compared to the Chinese language which has a different type of construction and therefore may help us to escape the destiny that logical grammar has doomed us to.

The entire political structure of the Occident has been compromised by blackmail, sexual à la Jeffrey Epstein/Mossad/CIA, financial, or just threat of death. Concomitant to this is that the governments of the world have thrown off any semblance of democracy and can be seen for what they are: organized gangs. The leaders of the world are a private club, a group of self-satisfied elites who see their constituents as pawns to manipulate. To this end, immigration and Wokeism are used to weaken societal bonds, increase violence and alienation, all of which contributes to a population that’s easy to control.

There’s also the Last Stages of Capitalism position which proposes that when the diminishing returns of surplus value, i.e. profit, reaches the zero point, then the entire edifice will crumble, like a sandcastle hit by a tidal wave. The result is chaos, social barbarism, and worldwide anarchy, or, on the bright side, if you happen to be a Communist, a perfect world of fully-realized humans.

Though things at the moment are in difficult position, there’s nothing new in all this. Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West about 100 years ago based on the idea that civilizations were organisms with a specific life cycle to them, childhood, adulthood and decay. Each is an independent entity with a particular destiny. Once this destiny is fulfilled, the organism passes away, making room for another. Hegel had a similar idea revolving around The World Historical Man, people who come out of nowhere (like Napoleon) shape things and then move on. For him, these people were associated with specific countries at specific times.

Finally, there’s the religious perspective on the final end, which traditionally in the West has been the optic of The Apocalypse of St. John. This is the basic template that all the others have tried to redefine into secular versions, but which, at its base, remains the most convincing. God has a plan and it’s coming to fruition, so get ready.

At one time, we could take refuge in the Future. I recall as a child hearing how the future would be a time of leisure as automation allowed people more free time to develop their potential. Now, it seems more of a juggernaut threatening to destroy us, either by AI (for example, automated killer drones) or other forms of robotic human replacement. Seeing the metro filled with zombies staring at their phones doesn’t give a positive image of innate human creativity.

It’s not always easy to find the enthusiasm needed to create (I’m speaking here as an artist), when you think the world will disappear. When I ask my artist friends for whom they’re creating, they search for an answer. Sometimes what you see are like the images taken after the Russian Revolution of peasants sitting in the Czar’s throne, or the stories about the revolutionaries forcing Louis XVI of France to wear the Red Bonnet of the French Revolution at the window of the Louvre palace. In the book by Ferdinand Lot, The End of the Ancient World, he describes how the barbarians who entered Rome often wanted to be as Roman as the people they were displacing, but, since it wasn’t really their culture, it didn’t work and it all fell apart.

Maybe poetry has the answer. Walt Whitman wrote:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.