Good Times Create Weak Men

“Dinosaurs and man. Two species separated by sixty-five million years of evolution have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?” -- Dr. Grant, Jurassic Park

I wish Michael Crichton were alive today. I enjoyed his surprisingly deep and refreshingly honest approach to science fiction.

Western civilization is the newcomer in the global political ecosystem. It isn’t natural, isn’t an obvious product of the rough evolutionary pressures that drive cultural development. It’s an outlier, something exceptional for the value it places on every individual, the range it offers – or strives to offer – every person to live a full and rewarding life. It’s the product of a long line of extraordinary men and events that reached its apotheosis in the great American Experiment, and that brought with it widespread prosperity and freedom never before experienced by mankind.

Western civilization is all those things, but it isn’t natural. It isn’t inevitable. It isn’t favored, privileged, or guaranteed. And it isn't the world's majority position.

It’s easy for us to think of the civilization we enjoy as the norm, as safe, as the reference state to which everything else is compared. It’s a mistake to believe that. The reality is different: civilization as we understand it is a minority player on the global stage, with enemies everywhere -- within and without -- eager to tear it down and replace it with something much closer to the natural and historical state of man.

Communists and socialists and tyrants from China to Russia to Brussels work to undermine the world we take for granted. The woke nihilists who instruct and disrupt our universities nip at the heels of civilization like so many hyenas, weakening one by one the institutions on which they unwittingly depend for their pampered existence. One of America’s great political parties treats the institutions that constitute the framework of our civilization as hindrances to the realization of their progressive agenda, unmindful of the disaster they invite when they tear down centuries of supporting structure to erect their unworkable Utopian vision.

In the Middle East, Israel, the lone outpost of Western civilization in a world of barbarism, is savaged by the antithesis of modernity, an oppressive theocracy that enslaves its believers in seventh-century misery. The banshee cries of the attacker echo in the corridors of the West’s most elite institutions of higher learning.

And the United Kingdom, the mother of the Anglosphere and the fount of our very conception of Western civilization itself, is being gutted from within by a toxic mixture of relativism and Islam and civilizational ennui and environmental paganism that is on the brink of destroying the birthplace of modernity.

What we enjoy isn’t natural. It isn’t guaranteed. And, despite it being self-evidently and demonstrably superior to its more primitive alternatives, there is no certainty that it will survive.

The barbarians are rising up and, if we are not yet overpowered, we are certainly outnumbered.