Tumbling Walls

 

Joshua fought the battle of Jericho; and the walls came tumbling down.

No doubt the Biblical story is not literally true. But it presents a spiritual truth: obstacles that seem insurmountable can and often do suddenly disappear. And when they fall, they fall from moral force. 

We saw it in the Nineties when the Berlin Wall came down. We saw it in the Sixties when the British Empire withdrew from every dune and headland without a war.

We are seeing it now with the Trudeau Liberals. 

A year ago, they seemed frustratingly invincible, no matter what the scandals or incompetence. The Conservatives seemed always to hit a vote ceiling; and the NDP would support the Liberals if they fell short. And the Liberals were taking full advantage of their power to stifle dissent.

Then suddenly this summer, something clicked. Were a vote held tomorrow, Poilievre is projected to win the third-largest majority in Canadian history.

I think we are seeing the same phenomenon with wokery in general, aka postmodernism, DEI, gender ideology, SOGI, etc. We saw the sudden collapse for Bud Light, which was the biggest beer brand in the States. Now a collapse for Disney, which only a few years ago seemed to be buying up everything in entertainment. I think we’re about to see a similar collapse in China, touted for years as the inevitable future world hegemon.

It even seems the biggest, most formidable-looking things are most likely to collapse. 

Marshall McLuhan used to call it the “dinosaur effect”: that a thing reached its apparent largest extent just before collapse.

But the better analogy is, again, in the Bible: the Tower of Babel. Given success, people are prone to become over-confident and over-extend. Prestige and momentum lets them live on fumes for a while. But when it catches up with them, it is sudden.

And I think wokery has been overreaching enormously. Sudden collapse is inevitable. If we are not there yet—the fog of war makes it hard to be sure—we will be there soon.

This segues naturally into a second great truth, that I always repeat to my students: if you never give up, you never lose. No matter how formidable the obstacles, failure is always a choice you make. Sooner or later, every wall falls.

It was this secret that built the Roman Empire. Pyrrhus of Epirus soundly beat them twice; and then, because the Romans refused to accept these defeats, was forced to withdraw. In the Punic Wars, the Romans built a fleet to challenge Carthage at sea; the whole fleet was sunk. They built another fleet. It was sunk. They built a third, and won command of the sea. So Hannibal crossed the Alps on land, and defeated the Roman army repeatedly on their own soil. He wiped out the entire army. The Romans retreated behind their walls, mustered another army, then sallied forth.

But they won because they crossed the sea, landed army, and threatened Carthage. Carthage sued for terms. In the same situation in which the Romans would not surrender.

It was this same secret that built the British Empire. As at Dunkirk, their superpower is retreating in good order. It has been said, “the British lose every battle but the last.” 

The British took Quebec when they should not have, and the French lost Quebec when they should not have; because, when the British lost the Battle of Carillion, and most of the other battles early in that war, they did not give up. When, in their first attempt on the citadel at Quebec, they lost the battle at Montmorency Falls, they did not give up. When, after taking Quebec, they lost the Battle of Ste.-Foy, they did not give up. They just tried again.

 But when the French lost the relatively smaller Battle of the Plains of Abraham, they broke in disorder, surrendering the crucial strongpoint.

This is also how Ulysses S. Grant won the Civil War. At Shiloh, he was defeated on the first day. He counterattacked on the second, and won. On his progress through Virginia, towards the end of the war, he fought battle after battle indecisively at best—and just kept advancing.

It’s a simple trick; and it works. As Woody Allen put it, nine tenths of success is just showing up.

The only problem is, it may not seem or be worth it. Surely it is often not worth it if it is just a matter of getting something for yourself. This is where moral force matters. Rome stuck it out because the Roman method of battle reinforced moral consciousness: each man defended his neighbour, not himself. By contrast, Carthage was fighting under the heavy guilt of ritual child sacrifice. As were the Canaanites in Jericho.

The British were historically buoyed by being relatively democratic and egalitarian; they were therefore able to fight as a team. The Empire faded, in turn, when they began to doubt the rightness of their cause, under the moral force of Gandhi.

Something worth remembering in life; and something worth remembering in these times when the world around us seems to have gone mad.

The Dinosaur Effect

 

The experts contemplate signs appearing in the sky

Putin’s formal annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts looks like an example of what Marshall McLuhan called the “dinosaur effect.” It also perhaps gives insight into what is going on in the wider world right now.

According to McLuhan, things commonly reach their greatest extent, indeed, suddenly balloon, just before they become extinct. This is not quite an accurate description of the dinosaurs, as it turns out, but it looks superficially plausible in some other cases. Consider the British Empire. It reached its greatest extent after the First World War. On paper, on the map, it was magnificent. It had just won the war to end all wars against its great rival. 

Yet, thanks largely to debts incurred in the war, it was already financially unsupportable. Within twenty five more years, it was being rapidly dismantled.

It is just when they realize they are losing their grip—as Putin is now—that the powerful will lunge for grandeur. The instinct is to grab the last few glorious moments of power before it is gone forever, and exercise that power fully. That is what Putin is doing, annexing provinces he does not even now fully control, the day before his forces are surrounded in Lyman. He is living his preferred fantasy while he can; because he knows the reality is slipping away.

And this is just, I submit, what the clerical elites are doing now all around the world, in countries as widely spread as Canada, New Zealand, China, the Netherlands, the USA. They have grown abruptly more dictatorial, because the underlying news is bad for them. They have become suddenly more censorious, because their instinct is to suppress the news and pretend. For now, men can decide to be women, there is no right and wrong, and the narrative is whatever you want the narrative to be.

As in the case of Putin’s Russia, this cannot last much longer. Communications technology is making the established elites redundant to the rest of society. We are witnessing the mad thrashings of a dying beast.