Wild Geese

 

Dulac: Beauty, of "Beauty and the Beast."

Our civilization is collapsing because we have been failing to pass it on to succeeding generations.

When we left the land and moved en masse to the cities, we cut the roots of the extended family: no grandparents around helping to educate the children. Then we decided that all mothers should enter the regular workforce: now nobody had time to tend to the children’s upbringing. They were abandoned entirely to the professional “educators.”

The educators, meantime, have not just abandoned any attempt to pass on cultural wisdom: they teach against it. Not just denigrating our history, as in the 1619 project in the US, or the myth in Canada that Sir John A. Macdonald was an anti-Indian racist. There is also a very systematic movement in critical pedagogy to subvert all the old stories, the fairy tales, to make the dragon or the ogre the hero, and the heroic knight or princess the villain.

Not so long ago, nobody went to school. These old tales, along with the Bible and the Catechism, were what passed on all the wisdom of civilization. They were our guides to life. By reversing valences, children are being taught to act like ogres, poison apples, and jump into pots of boiling oil.

This is the way you destroy a civilization. And here we therefore are, with rioting in the streets, rising suicide and drug addiction, and no shared norms we can unite around.

In the meantime, with the cutting of the ties of the extended family, a lot of retired people are feeling abandoned.

Some have found that it does old folks in retirement homes a world of good in terms of their morale if a pet is introduced: a dog or cat. But this is only a weak substitute for what nature obviously intended: to have young children around. Old people are often bursting with wisdom they want to pass on before they die; doing this is their function in almost any other society. And they are being warehoused and ignored at the very same moment that young people are dying for lack of direction.

I propose enlisting a volunteer corps of retirees to simply read aloud the old traditional stories, unexpurgated and unaltered, to neighbourhood children after school. The stories just as they are, in Grimm, or Perrault, or Andersen. With the life lessons fully intact. Surely schools, local libraries and community centres would cooperate; or could be forced to cooperate.

Or we might arrange for the same in retirement homes: kids could come in for it.

I call it the Mother Goose Militia.

The progressives will inevitably object that this is all indoctrination in “white supremacy” and “the patriarchy.” They will object in principle to any attempt to preserve and pass on civilization, because to them civilization is by definition “white supremacy” and “patriarchy.” Even though these tales are always of someone who is oppressed winning through.

They must be ignored.

They will object that it is all “white” culture. But the fairy tales are from all over, and essentially the same tales are found all over the world. Cinderella’s plot can be traced to ancient Egypt, and is familiar in China or the Yucatan. The heroes in the Thousand and One Arabian Nights are obviously not European. I have spotted an incident from Jack the Giant Killer in a collection of traditional North American Indian tales.

It is artificial in any case to claim it makes a difference if the setting is Iran or Atikokan: fairy tales take place in fairyland.

Who’s with me?