No Rudder, No Compass, Troubled Seas

 

WB Yeats, in Nineteen-Nineteen, saw the ordered, mannered Victorian world he knew in collapse, and mankind revealed by the First World War as no more than weasels fighting in a hole.

I get the same sense in 2021. The long moral decline continues, even as we improve our situation materially.

We used to be able to trust the Church as a counterweight to secular excesses, and a moral compass. It seems no longer—Francis acts like a politician with little interest in spiritual matters, presiding over a hierarchy preoccupied with covering up its scandals.

We used to look to the press, the “Fourth Estate,” to rake the muck and hold the high and mighty to account. No longer; the media are now an arm of government. All journalistic ethics have in recent years been abandoned.

We used to assume a neutral and professional civil service. Recent revelations in the US about the “deep state” and the Russia dossier make that now seem naive.

We used to think of the military as a place where ideals of chivalry persisted. No longer: the Canadian military is riddled with scandal, and the American military seems, on the evidence of General Milley, to have gone political.

Artists used to be a prophetic voice, speaking out when the secular powers had gone astray: George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, William Golding. No longer: all artists can be assumed to be on the partisan left.

Every institution and quarter has been subverted.

I think this comes because we have stopped taking morality seriously. We have called it “conventional morality,” and abandoned it.

Nice chickens. Nice roost.