It is a truism that “armchair generals discuss strategy; professionals discuss logistics.” All competent generals focus not just on tactical defeat of their enemies on the battlefield, but upon attacking their supply lines, and capacity to fight. An army without bullets or food cannot win on courage alone.
We are, it is often said, in a cultural war. Depending on where one stands on that field of battle, it might be religion against atheism, or reaction against progression, or tradition versus flippancy.
In my own view, it is a battle between whether to be or not to be. Read the soliloquy, again, with new eyes.
What is he asking? Why live at all, when you can your “quietus make” with a simple knife? You can slit your wrists, bleed out, and end the oppressions in your life. But what is death? We don’t really know. Thus “conscience doth make cowards of us all”. Brilliant. The human condition in a nutshell.
The war we are fighting is whether we human beings want to continue existing, or not. Do we want to make plans for the future, as if the human race will still be alive 100 years from now, and free; or is it best to let the natural human tendencies towards conformity and authoritarianism run their course?
I have said often that no man can tell a lie to any woman and get away with it, unless she chooses to ignore her own instincts–unless she wants to be lied to.
One does not have to look long or hard to see leftists of apparent capability, good nature, and good will. Yes, confronted they will get nasty, but in their own natural settings–coffee houses, playhouses, nice restaurants, kitchens–they are quite amiable and congenial. They are nice. They are friendly.
But in my view, on some level they know they are embracing a lie. Deep in their hearts, they see that the policies they pursue will damage our freedom in the long run, damage our moral fiber, ruin our economy, and prevent an amicable future from emerging from our present difficulties. This is what they want. They want to run from the responsibility of creating meaning from nothing. Confronting the primal wind, they seek shelter. They give up.
And one can do this articulately. Dashing young professors, and serious young women can go about giving speeches on social responsibility, and social justice, and global peace, and environmental crises and the like. Earnest, engaged, knowledgeable, articulate: they are still wrong, and they should know they are wrong.
To fight an army, one need not hate the soldiers. One need merely point and fire one’s weapon accurately.
To the point here, what are the weapons in a cultural war? What are the analogies with conventional war? Self evidently, not actual weapons. It was frankly nauseating to me to see the immediate political use to which the assassination of a conservative 9th District judge–and attempted assassination of a House Rep.–was put. None of us are calling for violence. Violence is not the answer. Reform is the answer, and that is done within a political and legal structure.
Herein lies the answer: the battlefield is in the realm of ideas. The essence of conservatism is continuity. Conservatism is not opposed to change. It is simply opposed to radical change done quickly and without the time to see if it is prudent. It takes time to make a proper soup. You have to let the ingredients blend and mellow. You can’t do it in one minute simply because you are impatient.
Reform in our modern world will be a move back towards meaning derived outside of radical leftist politics. Religious people are of no concern. Their cultural system provides continuity. The people whose system does not are those who want to overthrow our system and implement a tyranny which will deliver them from their own failed meaning formation, their own moral gaps and failings–their lack of faith in the future, lack of stolidity, lack of courage; their pusillanimity.
This is the aggression. This is the forward movement. From whence, though, are our opponents resupplied? The answer can only be in the acculturation process itself, in the environments in which new Americans grow up. This means TV and Radio, internet, and our educational system.
How do we attack these supply lines? Our opponents, of course, are as brilliant in their tactics as they are defective in their strategy. They have long sought after the cultural distribution centers, and won many of them. These are the thought leaders out there, the figurative lights on the hill.
Retaking our society, redirecting it towards a sustainable future, will then involve the persuasion of centrally placed people to reconsider their views. Towards this end what are needed are coherent, intelligent ideas as to how they might accomplish the aims they claim to want, differently.
At root, this will involve attacking moral pessimism, in favor of what I suppose could and should be called moral optimism. Meaning can be formed. It can be stable. Homes can be built that can be lived in across lifetimes.
This is the project I have set myself, and which I would encourage any readers I may have to pursue as well. Victory is possible. Human civilization the world over 100 years from now can be peaceful, vibrantly happy, and sustainable.
But we have to want to make that happen, and we have to be intelligent about it. This will require everyone to get smarter, not smart people to rule over us. People get smarter when they are free, and when they are given challenges they have reason to expect they can meet.
This is the task. Go to it.