If by “drawing the line,” you mean proscribing wokeness or left-wing political correctness, I’m not doing that in this article. I mean to be ambiguous about whether this decadence is good or bad. All societies have their advantages and disadvantages. The question is whether the trajectory of civilization leads to something like Nietzsche’s “last men” or the infantilized consumers you see in the animated movie WALL-E. Whether that kind of babying is overall good or bad is a separate question.
I do object to political correctness when it turns into censorship because that would interfere with art’s sacred mission, which is to act as a counterforce to nature’s monstrous mode of productivity. So that’s a line I would draw, but as I recall, I don’t get into that in this article. I’d also object to hypocrisy based on a principle of existential authenticity, so if virtue signaling is superficial because it gives consumerism a pass, that’s another line I’d draw.
I’m fine with punishing crude, overt acts of racism and sexism. Indeed, secular humanists should focus on our common personhood, and existentialists would likewise prefer that we recognize our common predicament of being precious minds in nature. But the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction. That doesn’t mean both sides in the culture war are equally bad. I repudiate that kind of lazy centrism, and there’s no such thing as a harsher criticism of conservatism than the one I’ve made in my long series on that subject. I deny that conservatism exists as a legitimate concern for intellectuals (because conservatism reduces to social Darwinism which can’t be advocated without demonstrating some progressive features of personhood).
I understand the point about double standards that maintain White privilege. Certainly, White have gotten away with murder over the centuries, but they’ve also been the imperialists who have invented the Western civilization we take for granted. As Yuval Harari says, empires are always both horrendous and miraculous: they usher in appalling injustices and marvelous innovations. So they’re ambiguous. Targeting the Western culture that was dominated by Whites may seem necessary on egalitarian principles, but that overlooks the fact that not everyone contributed equally to that culture. Some led the way and others were exploited. Great wonders of science, philosophy, art, and industry were produced by wholly unjust means, such as slavery, patriarchy, military conquest, etc.
I don’t think my talk of decadence is arbitrary. I have in mind something like Spengler’s point about the necessary, independent decline of all cultures.
No, left-wing decadence looks more like the automated consumerism of myopic adult babies, such as you see in WALL-E, not the elimination of a double standard that protects rich white males so that the latter, too, are finally prosecuted for crimes. Politically incorrect speech, however, isn’t a crime in a free society. You can take offense at certain speech, if you like, but then the question is whether oversensitive, antisocial young folks who live by their computer screen still have a sense of humour.
