|
By William S. Lind
March 6, 2006
During the Cold War American conservatives
faced an easy choice. On one side was the United States and
the free world, which represented good. On the other was the
Soviet Union and world communism, which was evil.
The next conservatism must deal with a
more complex grand strategic context. On the one hand are
the forces of the Fourth Generation, which I described in
the previous column; al Qaeda is an example. We easily recognize
these forces as evil.
But on the other hand we find not a force
for good but another evil, Brave New World. And while the
old United States did represent good during the Cold War,
the new, post-1960s America, or at least its elites, is the
global leader of Brave New World.
When I was in high school, which was sometime
ago, students everywhere had to read two books that laid out
two alternate totalitarian futures. One was 1984, which described
a future similar to Stalin's Soviet Union. The other book
was a short novel written in the 1930s by a British author,
Aldous Huxley, titled Brave New World. I suspect few public
school students read Brave New World today; it might lead
them to question the direction in which America is heading,
led in part by the public schools.
Brave New World presents a totalitarian
future where the first rule is, "you must be happy."
Happiness comes from a combination of materialism, consumerism,
electronic entertainment and sexual pleasure. The world is
ruled by a global government, which controls all culture and
subjects people everywhere to endless psychological conditioning.
Does this begin to sound familiar? It should because America
has already gone far down the road Huxley envisioned.
Even reproductive processes are becoming
much as Huxley foresaw them; in his Brave New World, children
were born from bottles in laboratories, not mothers, and were
genetically conditioned for their later roles in life. Sex
was purely recreational, and everything was permitted except
long-term relationships such as marriage. Soon enough, genetic
engineering (one of the technologies of which the next conservatism
should be extremely skeptical) will give us the genetic conditioning
Huxley foresaw to add to the already ever-present psychological
conditioning. Together, they will create an inescapable prison
for the human will. At that point, we will face what C.S.
Lewis called the Abolition of Man.
America's elites have added to Brave New
World one element Huxley did not foresee, the ideology of
cultural Marxism, otherwise known as Political Correctness.
Cultural Marxism has as its goal the destruction of the Christian
religion and Western culture, two obvious obstacles to Brave
New World's total control over the human will. Cultural Marxism
now holds sway over all Western elites; to deny or contravene
it (without groveling apologies) is to cease immediately to
be a member of the elite. Ordinary people are psychologically
conditioned, especially through television and the public
schools, to be unable to contravene cultural Marxism. Its
marriage with Brave New World is mutually convenient.
Just as Brave New World is correct when
it says that the forces of the Fourth Generation represent
a return to the Dark Ages, so the Fourth Generation is correct
when it calls Brave New World Satanic. Yet as I said at the
outset, the collision between these two vast forces will define
the grand strategic context in the 21st Century.
How should the next conservatism deal with
this situation? Choosing the lesser of two evils is not an
option because if there is one thing Brave New World and the
Fourth Generation agree on it is that "Western culture's
got to go." Western culture defines who we are as conservatives.
Rather, we must do what seems impossible.
We must rally the remnants of the Christian West to fight
the Fourth Generation and Brave New World simultaneously.
The next conservatism must strive to keep the old faith, the
old morals and old ways of living alive as, hopefully, Brave
New World and the Fourth Generation destroy each other. Will
that be possible? With God, all things are possible. But it
certainly is not going to be easy.
William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural
Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation.
| 
