Deconstructing Our Civilization.

• Author: Harrigan, Anthony

Those who are embattled and struggling against the grain of social and cultural forces in their time bear enduring marks on their mental constitution imprinted by life. The twentieth century offered many examples of this phenomenon. This is particularly true of the generation that lived through the bloody horrors of the first world war and the nihilistic assault on Western values which preceded and followed the great civil war of the West.

At this remove it is hard for people today to comprehend the bloodletting that took place at Ypres, Passchendaele, and the Somme. The three battles for a muddy tract at Ypres took more than 600,000 British lives. This carnage is beyond comprehension for a generation that demanded an end to U.S. intervention in Somalia after fifteen soldiers were ambushed and killed. The amazing thing is that revolution didn't break out in Britain and France. The then-existing social structure in Britain was so deeply embedded that it was able to withstand the shock of mass deaths without exploding anger and disgust. And British society survived a second outbreak of death and large-scale killing within twenty-one years of the World War I armistice. Only after World War II did the reserves of resilience completely dissipate and society begin to unravel to the point where it is today--that is, to the point where the inherited constitutional system is being dismantled.

What has happened in England also has happened in the United States and other Western countries. The vision of the good life imprinted on the minds of Westerners through the experiences of the classical world and the world of medieval and postmedieval Christianity has diminished in force. As my friend Stephen Bertman pointed out in his brilliant paper "Greek Epic and Moral Imagination," the received wisdom of the past has become an alien wisdom. The world of classical and Christian civilization, he writes, "comes from a world that is not ours, a culture very different from our own.... We live in a technological society driven by speed.... [S]peed discourages us from thought and reflection by denying us reflection." The forces influencing our minds are very different from those that shaped the minds of our ancestors of even a few generations past. The authority of the past has been all but eliminated in a technological and therapeutic culture which denies the existence of non-technological absolutes.

It is hard to conceive the end result of this new American culture: a culture without any fixed bearings, a culture in which anything goes. This is something new in the world. Other cultures have suffered decline and spun into disarray; witness the decline and fall of the Roman world. But even in decline, the Roman leadership gave lip service to the old Roman ideals.

Depravity was widespread at the top, as were corruption and disloyalty. But there wasn't a systematic attempt by those in control to undermine the ideals of society as there is now.

A case in point is the effort by the political powers-that-be to undermine the moral leadership that has been a time-honored feature of education at the United States Naval Academy. Rear Admiral Ned Hogan (USN, Ret.) has pointed out that a new ethos is...