“Be Careful What You Wish For...” (Part 1)
Aesthetic Ideation Brings About Its Own Demonstration
Aesop, who flourished six centuries before the birth of the Christ, wrote of the Herdsman who, despairing of ever finding his lost bull-calf, vowed to sacrifice a lamb to the gods should the thief be found. Running in the opposite direction from the lion he came upon devouring his bull-calf, the Herdsman hurriedly pledged to the gods a full-grown bull, if only he might be allowed to escape with his life.
Experience proves the rule in the moral instruction which concludes the fable, perhaps the earliest recorded version of what must be thousands of iterations over millenia. It has been updated for congruency with present-day psychobabble, now offered without the benefit of an illuminating story: “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”
The past 50 years bear witness to the inexorable truth, as inevitable as gravity, that the imagination demonstrates itself. In the 20th century, Americans, in the midst of plenty, in the freest nation in history, where peace and safety reigned within its borders, imagined dystopias of destruction outrivaling the Book of Job.
Americans today live in the horrific demonstration of what they had imagined. Americans brought it about.
In the 1950s, New York City residents enjoyed the post-war brilliancy of what was, for a time, the capital of the world in theater, music, publishing, finance and business. All the while, perverse ideas gestated.
A small cadre of nihilists were the carriers of a malignant strain of wasting, parasitical ideas that wormed its way into minds that were stimulated by it, and persuaded a nation to adopt as its core principle a wrecking conclusion: Life is meaningingless.
These “thinkers” thrived, feeding off of the rich host upon whom they predated to destroy what Americans had collectively achieved: wealth, peace, quality, family, faith, freedom. Christopher Rufo discusses the academic origins in his latest book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Real scholarship is a calling. The elite academies were the first to fall to the hypnotic spell of nihilistic affectation after the Second World War. In these venues, one might think that the minds would be the strongest, surely the more capable of rejecting the nihilism that ravaged the profession. But the culprits had propagated their toxic seed-planting in fertile soil of the academies which have grown rife into the wild fields of now poisoned Ivy.
In the hallowed halls where scholars had once set to their work of discovering Truth, they now invested their energy in making meaninglessness somehow mean something. Nothing could be further from the truth than to make the claim that the results they have since achieved — de(con)struction, for example — have made the life of the mind, the lives of our people in our country, richer, more satisfying and more gratifying.
Rather, the opposite has come about. Words can supposedly mean anything — because academics fashioned a literary theory to justify the claim. Gold needn't be the economic standard, but in fact printed paper backed by a promise has a lasting and intrinsic value — because academics conjured up a financial theory to enable the creation of “wealth” out of the air. The fine arts became a devotion to ugliness (at Yale, I learned of art students who were never trained in perspective!) — because academics claimed, while abandoning the traditional pursuit of Beauty, that life is nasty, brutish and short (ugly), thus so must art “reflect” life. Human beings are “social constructs,” assembled by the capricious views of other similar empty beings, who, for all they know, might not even exist — because the academics who assembled the theory to justify their claim can not find their own souls within them and impute that lack to all mankind. The list of which this is but a poor sample is, sadly, endless. How could it have been otherwise?
Lux et Veritas – the centuries-old motto of Yale University, where my father, my brother and I all earned graduate degrees – remains, but it has been retired in fact. University President Salovey makes the claim, against the evidence of the bastard theorems and loathsome ideologies that have coursed through his campus for decades, that Yale is a school where truth is valued! Scholars who, god-like, devote themselves to truthifying falsehood condemn themselves to Sisyphean stone-rolling. Truth is the last thing they can discover when they have abandoned it. They can only achieve the utter meaninglessness they posit in the first place.
But outside of these academies, apart from the classroom and the library, Americans were imagining the worst.
[To be continued in Part 2 here.]