Losing the Culture War

SEE HERE The death of a civilization doesn't come in large battles lost in a twinkling of the eye. Instead it comes with the erosion of values, the lose of vision, one slow drip at a time draining away the vitality of virtue and settling slowly into the slime.

The American moment may well have already passed. The signs are there to read. Would that it were not so. If we have a chance to turn the whole thing around it is only a slender one and only in the next few decades. After that we likely will have crossed the divide, if we have not already, and the decline will have become more a torrent than a trickle. It all begins when we forget both virtue and God. We are now a nation that gives only lip service to either. Soon enough we will have forgotten altogether. There is a piece of Chesterton that always comes to mind when I think thoughts like these. It goes:

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem
in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.