Determined to Die
In memoriam
I.
A few months ago my gram died.
Don’t be sad. It was time. She wanted to go.
In truth, she’d been gone for a long time. Dementia took her away from us years ago – replaced this brilliant woman with an acerbic tongue, a mind like a steel trap, a vocabulary as thick as the ten-pound Olde English dictionary she kept at her reading table, an invincible self-confidence, an iron-clad disdain for social convention and stupidity, and sparkling, mischievous eyes, with a listless, shrinking shell that could only stare out the window and doze, unsure what month it was, or who these strange people coming to visit her were.
My gram had been gone for a long time, in all the ways that mattered. Our grief was stretched out over the years like carefully rationed food in a famine, and when her spirit let go of her body, there was precious little left to give. But the sight of my grandfather sitting beside her in the hospital, crooning to the love of his life along to the Vera Lynn songs I was playing from my aunt’s tablet, every now and then eliciting a response from his dying wife as one of the verses sparked a memory deep down inside her ... this memory will cut like a knife forever.
“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when....”
The months passed, and the clan gathered together from the far corners of the Earth for the first time in years, to memorialize her. It might seem odd that we would wait so long; my grandfather is a deeply practical man, and he wanted everyone to be there, which meant giving everyone plenty of time to prepare. It wasn’t a funeral. There was no body. She was an atheist to the very end, and despised priests. He felt the same. Her body had been donated to science, given to the medical school at their alma mater, the university at which they’d met seven decades before, where the dashing young economist and amateur boxer, paying his way on the war bill, had proposed a week after meeting her to the precocious working class genius who’d won herself a full-ride scholarship, who accepted on the spot. The university said they’d treat her body with respect, although I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. They’re certainly not saying prayers for her departed soul, or burning incense over her body. It’s just lying on a slab in cold storage, until it will be cut up by subcontinental medical students, after which it will be run through the incinerator. It all seems so horribly utilitarian.
But my gram wouldn’t have cared. She said as much. She took Diogenes’ view – what is it to him, throw his body out for the dogs, he’ll be dead and won’t care.
So it was not a funeral, but a memorial. In preparation, my mother and sisters had gone through the old family albums, collecting all the pictures of her that they could find. Tiny black-and-white squares from her girlhood, sepia polaroids from the seventies, glossy digitally processed photographs from the noughts. My brother-in-law assembled them into a slideshow for the projector, which everyone gathered around as the guests arrived.
One by one, we went up to say a few words, share with family and friends what she’d meant to us. We went in order of age. First my niece, who knew her great-grandmother only through stories for she’d been a shell as long as the young girl could remember, but she had nonetheless distilled those stories into rhyming couplets that encapsulated her personality wonderfully. A cousin told how she’d grabbed his arm and forced him back down when he’d made to rise with everyone else as the animatronic Honest Abe at Disney World took the stage to lead the pledge of allegiance – we’re not Americans, young man, we don’t stand for that, and we certainly don’t stand for robots. I got up to share a series of anecdotes, memories that I felt illustrated the kind of person she was: how she’d taught me to tell time from an analogue clock; how she’d healed up my knee after it got infected from a bad scrape at summer camp while chortling about how doctors had always said that honey wasn’t an antibiotic but what did they know; how she tricked me into saving money one summer in university when she’d charged me ‘rent’ that she handed back at the end of the summer, the twinkle in her eyes telling me she was enjoying every moment of my surprise. My mother told of an old friend from school, who’d lived across the street and spent an inordinate amount of time at their house; she’d contacted my mother after my gram’s death, to explain that her father had been abusive, her family deeply unhappy, how she’d spent so much time at their house because my gram made it such a happy place. My aunt quoted Thucydides’ rendition of Pericles’ funeral oration, “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Last was my grandfather. As was expected and proper, his was the longest, the deepest, the most insightful, and the most moving. After all, he’d known her longer and loved her more than anyone alive. He wove his tale together around the theme of her determination, which he took to be her most defining trait. Determined to win the scholarship that got her into university; determined to survive, after nearly bleeding out when their firstborn came disastrously prematurely; determined to keep that baby alive; determined to make the household economy work as they struggled to feed four children on a single salary; determined to make for herself a brick patio, when such things were not done by women, but they could not afford a bricklayer.
And finally, at the end of it all, refusing all offers of food, turning her head away from every proffered sip of water, determined to die.
So you’ll understand why death has been on my mind, of late.
II.
There’s a general exhaustion pervading every aspect of our lives. Millennials quiet-quitting their bullshit jobs. Men dropping out of the workforce to chew pain pills as professional screen-starers. Collapsitarians turning their weary and disenchanted backs on the myth of progress ... and not without good reason1. Extinction Rebellionistas demanding civilization be torn down, and voluntary human extinctionists evangelizing for the final end of hominid lineage. The perennial fascination with the post-apocalyptic, the blasted wastes left behind by nuclear armageddon or the biohorror decay of shambling revenant armies. The popularity of synthetic opiods and selectively bred cannabis, drugs that deaden the mind and swallow the cares of the soul in a warm fuzz of non-being, as though their users wish to become zombies themselves. The endless regurgitation loop of pop culture, movies and music and novels that merely reiterate what has been said before with ever less originality and depth, and therefore needing ever greater doses of hyper-stimulating noise and graphics and action to hold their audience’s waning attention. The sex drought, an entire generation devitalized and listless, apparently losing all hope of romance and therefore all interest in pursuing it.
Oswald Spengler developed a theory of human cultures as organisms2. Spengler was not a scientist of the modern sort; while well-versed in mathematics and the exact sciences, he was a polymath, equally adept in history, architecture, literature, and philosophy. His model was qualitative, working via analogy and metaphor; indeed, it had metaphor at its very core. Spengler’s concept was that each great culture was grown, not just from the soil of its native land and the flesh of its human constituents, but from a central symbol that informed its approach to all aspects of life.
Spengler believed that cultures, as must be the case for any organism, had a life-cycle – a span of several centuries characterized by periods of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Over the course of its life the ramifications of a culture’s world-symbol would be explored to their fullest extent, through a period of naive exuberance in youth, a flowering in summer, through to the fruits of their complete intellectual development in autumn, and finally crystallizing into their final, rigid forms in winter. ‘Civilization’, in Spengler’s model, was the last stage, a harbinger of the end.
Famously, Spengler was a pessimist – he warned that the Faustian West was, in his time, on the precipice of its winter. The creative potential of its central symbol, the expansion into infinite space, had been exhausted; all that was left was for the West to harden into a terminal, inflexible imperium. Then would come the end, when its railroads and freeways and skyscrapers would rust in the fields like abandoned aqueducts and crumbling amphitheatres.
If a culture is an organism, can it be self-aware? Do egregores possess a consciousness of their own, a higher will that is something more than just the sum of their human cells? I can’t think of any reason why not. Observe the superorganisms formed by the eusocial insects. An ant colony certainly seems to act with an intentionality that cannot possibly be encoded into the genetics of individual ants, or somehow be latent in their rudimentary nervous systems. Why should human superorganisms be any different?
Not every culture will live out its full span. They can be murdered before their time. The Aztec culture was put to the sword in their civilizational summer; that of the North American Indians, before they’d even completed their long gestational spring.
Can a great culture, then, commit suicide?
Can it become determined to die?
In that vast and all-encompassing exhaustion that permeates the West, is there not more than the whiff of Thanatos?
See the enthusiastic rage with which the woke turn upon every symbol of the culture that bore them, their hatred for Christ, for the heroes of the past, their desire to overcode the literary legacy bequeathed by our ancestors with the ideological imperatives of the moment, their abandonment of every principle of reason and science. The only sex they celebrate is the sterile copulation of the homosexual; the union of man and woman is rape. The dismemberment of foetal tissue is a sacrament to them; the sexual confusion of the young, a catechism; the mutilation of teenage sex organs, a baptism.
Some of this draws upon the opportunistic resentment of foreigners, yes, who sense in this time of weakness the chance to finally get revenge on the West for the shame of past defeats; but for every second-generation immigrant who adds their sadistic glee to the woke horde, I’ve met another who is indifferent to it all, and another still who regards this descent into madness with worried bafflement, the way you might look at a teenage girl who’s taken to cutting herself. The cultists seem to be mainly the lost children of the West – the soyboy, the AWFL, the bugman, the hicklib, the autogynophile trannissary ... all of them as white as factory-fresh oxycontin.
Consider the lives of the professional-managerial Zoom class, those soft-featured Eloi with pronouns-in-bio. They live in anonymous suburban housing developments populated by identical ticky-tacky houses thrown up as cheaply and efficiently as possible, or in high-rise condominiums, surrounded by the blank, featureless geometry of steel and glass. In either case, their neighbours are mere faceless placeholders, their ‘community’ nothing but a street name and a postal code. Work consists of attending meetings, and filing reports, and writing memos, and writing memos about filing reports, and attending meetings about writing memos about filing reports. Leisure consists of consooming product – Vietnamese takeout delivered by Doordash consumed in front of the screen while consuming Netflix, maybe on the weekend an excursion to the state park where they consume the kayaking experience, or a trip to the bucolic village where they consume authentically hoppy local craft beer in authentically crusty local establishment.
This is not a life in which there is meaning. It is a very comfortable life, hedonic and easy, but there is nothing of the sacred in it, nothing to inspire reverence, no nourishment for the spirit. There is no real challenge, there is no beauty, there is no emotional depth, only a superficial, planar surface of experience, denuded of context, from which one must always maintain a detached and ironic distance lest a moment’s sincere emotion touch upon the raw nerve of the ever-present anxiety that lurks in the unacknowledged depths, that fear that they will be cast out and sucked down into the dirt and filth of the underclass. Fleeing that anxiety that gnaws at their roots like a hungry worm, they run the Red Queen’s rat race, studiously ignoring the utter pointlessness of the make-work the system chews up the irreplaceable spans of their lives with.
They are trapped in a gilded cage, one whose very bars they cannot allow themselves to see, and though they cannot admit it even to themselves, in their secret hearts they want to tear it all down. So they watch post-apocalyptic entertainments, imagining how free they could be if it all just went away. They refuse to reproduce, for they cannot bring themselves to have even this much faith in the future of a system that is murdering their souls. Meanwhile, the emptiness and anomie sublimates itself into the Woke rage against everything, this desire to annihilate the past, to wipe away the present, for the sake of some unarticulated utopia. They become the IEDs of Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity wrapped around the foundations of their world, ideational suicide bombers filled with a religious fervour. Only in destruction can they find meaning.
They are determined to die.
And, as they are the neural tissue of the machine world that shaped them, they will surely bring that world down with them. The implications of engineering schools prioritizing IED over technical acumen are obvious. I hope you aren’t too attached to indoor plumbing. If the Woke project is carried to completion, flushing toilets and hot showers will become an upper-class luxury.
Some of you will say that Woke is a psyop perpetrated by the elite, a cynical deployment of paralogical postmodernist cultural Marxist pseudo-philosophy in conjunction with emotional conditioning in the schools and psychological engineering via algorithmic nudge mechanics, all simply for the purposes of cementing social control. Of course this is all happening too. But the soil must be receptive to the seed. Without the alienation and apathy that suffuse our disenchanted world, social justice would never have become synonymous with an enthusiasm for tearing it all down. Certainly, there may be an element of the conspiratorial here, of the susceptible being led down the primrose path; but at the same time, many in the elite themselves seem to be true believers. It’s possible, even likely, that many of those in the penthouse suites feel most keenly the absence of meaning in the mechanical world, and are therefore those most fanatical in their religious fervour against it.
III.
Recently over at Deimos, we were discussing an article by Heather MacDonald, Higher Ed Must Choose Merit Over Diversity. The piece essentially does what it says on the tin. She isn’t wrong, of course, but she’s shouting uselessly into the hurricane. The woke aren’t rejecting merit because they don’t understand the consequences of doing so, but because doing so enables them to destroy the institutions that have made their lives so meaningless. They are determined to DIE and therefore have made DEI their deity and built an IED in its image.
MacDonald is an exemplar of an abundant species of vaguely conservative anti-woke crusaders who seem to think that the woke are simply wrong, that they can be won over with plain-spoken logic and common sense, and that we can then all return to the sensible classical liberalism of 1995. Their analysis tends to focus on demonstrating the obvious flaws in wokeness, which is frankly low-hanging fruit because Marxcissists are quite clearly mentally ill – any sapient human can see that women are not men. Everything else about our civilization is, these conservatives seem to feel, absolutely fine, and therefore worth conserving. That’s what makes them conservatives.
Others see more deeply. Aporia recently carried a book review of Michael Bonner’s ‘In Defense of Civilization’ by the brave ethics philosopher Julie Ponesse3, suggesting that Maybe We Deserve To Die. The book is apparently about the very subject of this essay: Bonner begins with the claim that there is a palpable feeling, in the West anyway, that something is deeply wrong, that the “liberal democratic order is in danger, and that civilization itself hangs in the balance.” ' Ponesse then concludes:
At the end of the book, I struggled to decide whether we would do better to collapse or to hold on with ‘white knuckles’ to the remains of our civilization. If Bonner is right, then we will fare well either way since a civilization that loses its civilizing features ought to collapse and, when it does, something with greater clarity, beauty, and order will emerge in its place.
It’s that sentiment that animates the third option – the one being developed by the sensitive young men of the dissident right, who are as repulsed by the bland, brute ugliness of modern society as they are by the sadomasochism of those driven over the precipice into madness by their love-hate relationship with the desacralized abomination of our collective hallucination. To the dissident right, the problem is not merely Drag Queen Story Hour or carbon hysteria or mass third world migrant invasion or the Brawndo Tyranny. As pressing as they are, these are only symptoms of the underlying disease. To turn the clock back to 1995 or 1950 or 1850 would be merely to reset the timeline on the same trajectory that carried us to into this enervated purgatory of post-modernity.
The dissident right are not conservatives, because they do not see anything worth conserving in the present dispensation. Meaningless make-work corporate jobs? Pointlessly specialized academic research? Fast-food franchises? Wall street? Modern architecture? What is there to love, in this fake and ghey plastic world we’ve created? Nothing.
If this world is so determined to die, perhaps we should let it, and orient ourselves towards what comes next.
IV.
Yesterday I attended my godmother’s funeral.
I told you death was on my mind.
Don’t be sad – she was very old, and her end came just as Alzheimer’s was beginning to eat her mind. She was spared the worst of that, as was her family. They didn’t have to watch her become a shell. It was a mercy.
In any case, we weren’t close. It had been probably 20 years since I’d last seen her. It was my godfather, her husband, that had been the connection. He’d been something of a mentor figure to my father. When he’d passed, and then my father shortly after, the connection was broken.
But I went to the funeral. She was my godmother after all, and while I can’t claim to have known her especially well, I have warm memories of her and her family from when I was very young.
It was held in an Anglican cathedral, a grand, beautiful old building. Unlike my secular grandparents, her family had opted for a more traditional farewell.
The service was incredibly sad, not because it was so moving, but because it wasn’t. The servers, two shriveled old women hidden behind plastic surgical masks, led the family down the aisle. The minister’s uninflected auctioneer’s patter led us through a service that felt as cold and impersonal as a robot voice in an airport terminal – as though five minutes beforehand he’d loaded up Standard Funeral Service Number 3 in MSWord, [insert descedent’s name], Ctl-F, Ctl-V. He kept forgetting where he was, as though his mind was on the afternoon golf course. After a few mumbling attempts, no one bothered singing along with the hymns; I was the last to stop trying, and just sit there along with everyone else as empty organ music blasted the air with the illusion of sacred music. When it was time for communion, the minister was at pains to emphasize that anyone, so long as they were a baptised Christian, no matter of which denomination, was welcome to come up; let us know if you have a gluten intolerance, we have a gluten-free option; if you’re not comfortable sharing the chalice with others, you don’t have to do so. Aside from the family, no one else partook, but it had been many years since I’d last had communion, and I went up. There were plastic hand sanitizer bottles beside the altar, brutishly clinical. The wafer tasted of cardboard. The wine, served by one of the masked crones, did not taste like wine at all, and may not even have been alcoholic. Imitation communion wine. It seemed cruelly appropriate.
I’d wanted so very badly to feel something, anything. This was a funeral, being held in a beautiful cathedral, surrounded by stained glass windows depicting prophets and angels, with a wide white domed roof sumptuously decorated with frescoes, and old walls suffused with history. There were prayers and hymns and psalms and gospel readings, the full liturgical treatment, as traditional as you could like. But it felt perfunctory, and I felt nothing at all. It was as empty as the richly carved wood of the gorgeous choral balconies. I do not think it was just me that felt nothing. The listlessness of the other attendees spoke to that.
It was all shadow play. Even, I suspect, for the minister.
Going through the motions, because that’s what you do, and no one knows what else to do.
The false religiosity felt like a slap in the face to the family’s very real grief.
For all that my own family’s secular gathering had seemed so spartan, I preferred that. Everything about it was real.
V.
Our civilization is dying. Indeed it’s already dead – what did the architecture of the World Trade Center have to do with the Notre Dame Cathedral? Our daily lives working inside the decaying institutions of this society are just a form of make-believe, one that no one really makes the effort to believe in anymore. They are the twitching of a body whose skull has been crushed.
A century ago, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, who did so much to articulate the materialism that disenchanted the world, had this to say:
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
We now have a very good idea of what a world built upon a scaffolding of unyielding despair looks like. It looks like blank concrete walls covered in drug gang graffiti. It looks like junkies bent double in the streets, swaying with needles hanging from their veins. It looks like wine aunts drowning out the moans from their haunted wombs with Merlot. It looks like strip malls and Wal-Mart parking lots. It looks like abstract geometrical art intended to trouble the mind. It looks like a constantly shifting contents of unpronounceable ingredient lists. It looks like vocations reduced by micromanagement to metrics and algorithms and procedural checklists. It looks like the evaporation of everything beautiful and good and human and free from the world.
I do not think Bertrand Russell’s truths are at all certain. To the contrary they are entirely open to dispute. Indeed they are the very opposite of the truth. The mechanical cosmos he imagined, in which there is only the random collision of atoms in the void, never existed save in his mind – physics itself abandoned this clumsy model long ago.
If Russell was worried about a philosophy that rejected all of this being unable to stand, he should rather have been concerned about what would happen to a civilization that embraced it. The civilization he and his kind ushered into being is already crumbling, only a few generations after it displaced the true, organic West. Not because it is being put to the sword by another, more virile civilization, but because it is falling on its own.
A reader,
, left this comment on my previous post. There is great power in the story he provides. He begins, quoting me, “'If you’re anything like me, the world you live in feels increasingly alien every day,” and continues:“I actually feel the opposite. Prior to the pandemic (and the homelessness and unemployment it brought me) I was still struggling to make sense of a disenchanted world: grappling with the bizarre behaviours of people I found impossible to understand. Trying to find employment in the NGO sector and progress my career in the blobocracy, and being rejected at every turn. Wondering why all my PhD applications ended in failure, and how the lab I worked in could continue to perform such useless (even meaningless) research. Growing resentful and disillusioned. Feeling disgusted by the people I met, the meaningless platitudes they mouthed, the inane idiocy of the sloganeering that took the place of critical engagement or thought. Feeling disappointed by all contemporary media that echoed the same infantile ideas.
“But the corporate power grab that came with Covid brought everything sharply into focus. Suddenly I could see who the enemy really is. It was like a shock deprogramming event, where every shibboleth could suddenly be reconsidered, and all the demoralising principles absorbed over my three decades in a post-Cold War Left Liberal Consensus End of History world were revealed for the lies they are. I had time to read and time to think -- but most importantly, I could find writers like you, who expressed precisely what I'd always felt, but had been incapable of admitting to myself.
“After 6 years of trying, I was finally accepted onto a PhD programme (fully funded, publications guaranteed) -- but there was a catch. It required the vaccine. And I refused, because I wasn't listening to the powers that be, but the people who seemed to be genuinely concerned with Truth. And so I threw away that future, and chose a different one. A few years ago I was considering a vasectomy, for typically eco-leftist and self-hating reasons. Now I'm married, and we recently had our first child. None of this would have happened without Covid, when the scales were torn from my eyes. This is thanks to people like you.
“For me, the world has gone from being a deeply frustrating and alienating place to one marked out in sharp contours: light and dark, good and evil, friend and enemy. The ugliness can be avoided and the beauty sought out. Community is lacking, but perhaps something will come about. At least I know I'm not alone.”
Here we have a man who was trapped in the stinking mud of this society, no more aware of it than a fish can see water. Then the harsh pressure of the cognitive dissonance brought on by the sudden imposition of the biomedical security state smashed through the eggshell, and the light came in. He cracked through the illusions, and saw the world anew, no longer rendered with monochromatic shades of grey, but in vivid contrast, and then in colour. He could see beauty again, and he chose life.
There are beautiful things in this world. Even our cold, mechanical cosmos has produced wonders to transport the soul. The sharply curving lines of a Kawasaki Ninja. The glittering skyline of a modern city, pouring its light into the night, freeways pulsing with the shifting radiance of its traffic. The savage power and predatory grace of an F-15 as it cracks the air. The pillar of flame thrusting our will into the heavens. The Earth seen from space, glowing cities bejeweling its continents, the dancing aurora watched from above.
Yet for all its glories, the disenchanted world is determined to die.
But we do not have to die with it.
I don’t know what comes next. No one does. But we Westmen are the inheritors of more than one great culture – the Faustian West is merely the most recent. Our lineage stretches back for several thousand years, from the castle towns of Medieval Europe, through the Forum of Rome, through the poleis of the Hellenes, through the wagons and tents of the Aryan charioteers. Dust returns to dust, ashes to ashes, steel to rust, concrete to sand. Yet memory persists. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
The current civilizational winter is not the first, nor will it be the last.
For those of us who choose life, spring will come again.
If you’re not familiar with her, Ponesse came to prominence when she quite publicly refused to take the experimental gene therapy treatment that Canada’s Western University was demanding of all staff and students, after which she was summarily fired.
Wow! This was a masterpiece, each separate theme insightfully articulated and woven together into a powerful whole. The tribute to your grandmother was beautiful, the comparison of her memorial to your godmother's funeral was amazingly apt, and the analogy of individual life-cycles and death to that of entire cultures was profoundly perfect. If you publish a book with your best essays, this one has to be in there. This piece warrants multiple readings and much contemplation and conversation between readings. You really captured so much, so concisely, and so memorably.
That's one thing that encourages me about substacks like yours: the same spirit that inspired the greatest art and science and philosophy through the ages is still very much alive and well. Our culture may be dying, and its parasitic elites may have no care or concern beyond feeding on its corpse until nothing is left, but given the creative genius that is so palpably flowing through substack and other such hangouts for the dissident right today, we can be sure that another renaissance of cultural beauty will come. As you said, it's Springtime!
Beautifully written, John, and glorious illustrations. I think the world is the hallucination of our collective death wish, the suicide urge of an eternal being. But that's a story for another time.