Mark Steyn - After America

“It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise,” says Wells’ Time-Traveler. As he subsequently reflects:

“After the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.”

In time, the Sixties rebels ascended to power and became the teachers, and then their children, until we were three generations removed from memories of World War and Depression.

During the 2010 World Cup, the eminent Egyptian imam Mus’id Anwar gave a sermon in Cairo attacking young men who follow soccer instead of memorizing the Koran:

Ask one of those young men who are so crazy about soccer to name the names of twenty of the Prophet’s companions. Only 20! The Prophet Muhammad’s companions numbered over 100,000. All I’m asking for is the name of 20 companions…. But if you ask the same guy to give you the names of 20 soccer players, he will… give you the names of the reserve team players, of those who are still active, and those who have retired. 6

Who’s to blame for this? Well, the imam looked into it and quickly discovered who’s seducing the Muslims away from their Korans: As you know, the Jews have The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . Over 100 years ago, they formulated a plan to rule the world, and they are implementing this plan.

One of the protocols says: “Keep the [non-Jews] preoccupied with songs, soccer, and movies.” Is it or isn’t it happening? It is.

Don’t some of them die in the course of a soccer match? At an important match in Egypt, a man was standing in the stadium, and when his team scored a goal, he screamed “Gooooaaal!” got a heart attack, and died…. The Zionists manage to generate animosity among Muslims, and even between Muslim countries, by means of soccer. Whose interests does this serve? The Jews.

Oh, it’s easy to be skeptical. After all, if soccer is part of the international Jewish Conspiracy, how come Israel has only managed to qualify for the World Cup on one occasion (1970) and got knocked out in Round One? 7

Ah, but that just shows how cunning these Jews are. At the time the distinguished cleric was advancing his theory, I happened to be in Bordeaux and found myself outside the Virgin Megastore, which brands itself in France as “ La culture du plaisir ”—The Culture of Pleasure. As far as I know, the chain doesn’t operate in the Middle East. If you’re a Muslim, you have to wait till you self-detonate to hit the Virgin Megastore, big time and with our entire inventory priced to clear. But it struck me that the western world’s self-evaluation isn’t so very different from Imam Anwar’s diagnosis: we promote ourselves as “the Culture of Pleasure”—preoccupied, as the imam says, with songs, sports, movies, and other sensual delights.

Or as H.G. Wells put it: “This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.”

Because even the “culture” part of “la culture du plaisir” eventually becomes too much effort. Our age does not produce great symphonies or operas but merely electronic delivery systems, new toys for enjoying old strains. The “artistic impetus would at last die away,” wrote Wells of the Eloi. “To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity.”

Odd how many philosophical singalongs of the Sixties that one sentence anticipates: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”; “All we need is music… and dancin’ in the streets”; “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day….”

A culture of pleasure can be very convenient for the government class.

In Huxley’s Brave New World , the World State Controller, to whom the author gave the oddly prescient name of Mustapha Mond, understands that people prefer happiness to truth, “happiness” being defined as round-the-clock sensory gratification—food, drugs, sex, consumer toys. Given that he was writing in the late Twenties, Huxley’s parody pop songs anticipate very well the sensual torpor of our own culture du plaisir :

“Soma,” a word Huxley took from Sanskrit, is a drug that both intoxicates and tranquilizes. In his brave new world, we’re seduced into passivity. And in such a society, as Charles Murray wrote of Europe, “ideas of greatness become an irritant.” 8Go to the heart of western civilization—Rome, the capital of Christendom; Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris, the seats of mighty empires that sent their men and ships to every corner of the world and implanted their language and culture. And yet these cities are all now backwaters—mostly pleasant and residually prosperous backwaters, but utterly irrelevant to the future of the world. And that suits their citizens just fine.

Is that the fate the United States is destined for? It’s what a lot of Americans would like. In 2008 many people were just exhausted by the “war on terror.” Not because it demanded anything of them—quite the opposite: it was entirely outsourced to a small professional soldiery the twenty-first-century Eloi rarely encounter. But so what? They still had to hear about the war, and they were bored by it. Having to be at Code Orange in perpetuity was just kind of a downer. So they voted for “change”—by which they meant a quiet life: I don’t want to have to think about wacky foreigners trying to blow us up; I don’t need that in my life right now.

As for the Eloi’s mostly inactive “activism,” professions of generalized concerns about “world poverty” or “saving the planet” do not testify to your idealism so much as what Adam Bellow calls “a certain blithe assurance about the permanence of freedom”: 9you worry about lofty and distant problems because you assume there are none closer to home. Our Eloi are smugly self-satisfied. I cite at random four stickers from the cars parked outside a children’s “holiday” concert in small-town Vermont: I THINK, THEREFORE I’M A DEMOCRAT

What kind of sentient being boasts on a bumper sticker about his giant brain? And cites as evidence thereof his unyielding loyalty to a political machine? Talk about putting Descartes before the whores. What that translates to is: “I’M A DEMOCRAT. THEREFORE, I HAVE NO NEED TO THINK.”

Including the need to question everything? Doubting everything gets kinda exhausting. In practice, questioning “everything” boils down to questioning nothing in particular—for, if everything is a social construct, a manufactured reality, why bother? Fortunately, “QUESTION EVERYTHING” ceased to be operative on January 20, 2009. After that date, dissent was no longer “the highest form of patriotism,” but merely racism.

That’s a total failure of imagination—a failure, under the guise of universalist multiculturalism, to imagine that outside your fluffy cocoon there is a truly many-cultured world full of people so “diverse” they do not view things as you do. Underneath the “IMAGINE” sticker was another: PEACE THROUGH MUSIC

That’s true if you’ve got in mind someone like Scotland’s Bill Millin, personal bagpiper to Lord Lovat, commander of 1st Special Service Brigade, who piped the men ashore on D-Day as he strolled up and down the beach amid the gunfire playing “Hieland Laddie” and “The Road to the Isles” and other highland favorites. 10Bill Millin was a musician and a truly heroic one.