We need to uphold the distinction between man and animal (Getty Images)
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The past month of American politics has been utter chaos. Former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt by a matter of millimetres. Joe Biden went to Las Vegas, reportedly got Covid, and disappeared completely from public view. A day after his campaign team insisted he would stay in the race for president, he dropped out via a letter posted to X.
These bizarre events are shrouded in mystery. Conspiracy theories abound. Did Trump arrange for the shooter to nick his ear with a bullet so that he could rise from the ground bloodied but unbowed? Did the Democrats blackmail Biden into ending his campaign? Who, if anyone, is in charge?
Unfortunately, Western democracies require high levels of trust to survive. It’s what distinguishes us from, say, Somalia, where warring clans settle disputes by bloodshed. But we seem to be devolving rapidly into our own warring clans. Trump’s opponents have worked for years to paint him as a racist, a bigot, an antisemite, and a Nazi. They’ve slandered and libelled his supporters, too, and the poisonous fruit of these concerted efforts is now ripe for picking. What is more, the opaque machinations of the Democrats to remove Biden from the ticket are strongly reminiscent of Shakespearean hugger-mugger, with Kamala Harris playing a wheedling Regan or Goneril to Biden’s King Lear.
Witnessing the ongoing collapse of the American polity, one tries to find words for what is happening. The catastrophic error of our time goes beyond nasty political partisanship, and is not confined to our shores. It is easily described, but almost impossible to fix. Put simply, we’ve forgotten what civilisation is, and who we are without its distinctions and proscriptions: wild and vicious animals.
Nothing captures our terrible obliviousness better than Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man. Timothy Treadwell, the film’s subject, spent 13 summers living among the bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Treadwell is a characteristically postmodern man. His is a story of self-promotion and heartfelt, boundless imitation; as one man tells Herzog: “He tried to be a bear” An actor who took to alcohol and drugs after he lost a leading role on the sitcom Cheers, Treadwell starred in his own production while in the wilderness. In almost 100 hours of footage, he presented himself as the heroic protector of his grizzly “friends” against the (mostly imagined) threat of poachers. His sincere and passionate devotion to the bears landed him on the Discovery Channel and the Late Show with David Letterman.
So compelling was Treadwell’s long-running drama that the ending wrote itself. One wind-whipped October night in 2003, battened down at their campsite against the storm, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by an ursine stranger, a hungry interloper from the park’s interior. That bear was later shot, and his corpse was eaten by other bears. (Cannibalism is a common practice among grizzlies, who will eat their cubs when other sources of food dry up.) Having failed at comedy and achieved modest success in action-adventure, Treadwell is remembered almost entirely for his role as the tragic protagonist of Herzog’s documentary.
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SubscribeEven if a ‘progressive’ was to read this, they would be too stupid to change course.
Ideology beats …. does anything else exist?
I doubt if it matters – the die is now cast.
Perhaps your ‘progressive’ doesn’t need to change course. They’re not the ones bogged down in the problems the author’s writing about.
And there we have it…
And the ones who are bogged down are…?
That is an anti-truth. The progressives are the destroyers of civilizations.
I don’t think the essay is “bad,” but I found the transitions to be somewhat jar ring. Timothy Treadwell and grizzly bears to Greek plays and gods to the cracks in Western civilization. I agree with much of what he wrote, but it’s rather weird.
And doesn’t lead where the author pretends.
I appreciated that connection because it points out that the root causes of today’s dysfunction are ancient. Had our universities not been subverted by neo-marxists, the elite now driving the west to its cultural self destruction, might have had the wisdom to reject the woke, post-modernist ideology. Alas, such was not the case and they are well on their way to realizing hell on earth in the west.
You left out the global warming deniers who think indifferent, heat-trapping CO2 is merely a socialist taxation plot. Just like bleeding hearts who let crime fester, they are lousy survivalists.
Yes, instead segueing into Treadwell it could have just covered the insults hurled at Trump rallies or Derek Chauvin’s trial by woke mob.
How quickly you forget that Trump set the nationwide tone for normalizing lies and insults. The far left followed suit when he threw dignity out the window.
Excellent.
If Treadwell had been given the part in Cheers, he could have ended up like Matthew Perry. Though I think I would rather have died in a hot tub than being killed by a bear.
This is sublime. Thank you.
There was a time when this deep darkness had a well known name – sin.
Imho not sin, exactly. It is nihilism. Destroy everything around you because all you see are its problems, none of its benefits, achieve catharsis, and just unthinkingly assume that somehow it’ll all be OK, or maybe it won’t, because nothing matters, anyway.
Watching the political and cultural Left and the global elites destroy their society, I find other explanations unpersuasive. Most animals try not to crap where they eat and sleep, but our Left and its supporting elites are unfazed as they ruin the society that created and that sustains them.
When Kamala Harris spoke approvingly of a future unburdened by the past, this horror show is what she advocated for. And when our idiot leaders contrive wars they have not prepared for, while destroying the social cohesiveness you need to fight a war (even setting aside whether said wars are justifiable by ANY metric), we see where they are taking us.
Yeah I kept on waiting for the author to mention Christianity, or at least Judeo-Christianity.
What a fantastic article! Thank you.
“Dionysus avenges himself on the rulers of his native city of Thebes, who deny his divinity. ”
Divinity is unerring moral superiority, just like the claims of the woke, DEI crowd. Hubris gone wild.
A bit of humble self-reflection is in order. After all, an unexamined life is not worth living.
‘an unexamined life is not worth living.’
I’ve heard this many times before, usually from philosophers or people who like philosophy but do we have any reason to think it’s true? Can we assume that all animals, along with many not-very-reflective humans, lead lives that aren’t worth living? For example, if I watch the World Cup final with my friends and am ecstatic that England have finally won, does this only become a worthwhile experience if I stand back and examine my ecstasy?
This essay is very thought provoking, but it is too bleak and left me rather disheartened, if not depressed. To lighten it a little, the author could have offered some thoughts on how to remedy these civilisational ills. Nothing is beyond repair. If we simply give up, then the enemies of civilisation (as we know it) will destroy us and everything we believe in. We owe it to ourselves and those who follow us to fight back in some way, intellectually and politically, not violently (unless we absolutely have to).
It’s worse than you think. The author believes he’s offered a panacea. Men have to protect like ‘men’ and women have to look to them to do that. You and I know that’s part of the problem rather than the solution, but the author hasn’t got there yet. That’s the worst aspect.
I don’t think the author meant to lighten, but to enlighten. Maybe there should have been a trigger warning? Yes, we need to fight. But if the enemies of civilization destroy everything we believe in, it will be because it was mistaken. Nature will always win in the end.
The chaos will allow us to kill off the destroyers of civilization. That’s what civil wars are for. If the progressives win, the Russians will nuke them or they’ll starve to death. I’ll take either one as a consolation prize. The people of today don’t deserve the world they live in.
Well said light a torch don’t just curse the darkness
What an excellent article.
Superb. The last few paragraphs perfectly summarizes the state of the West, and it’s decline.
Epitomises it actually, including the neo trad ‘cure’ which is actually part of the ‘disease ‘ . All we lack is Nietzsche.
I wonder what you think of the vision of civilisation that was beginning to emerge in the Athenian golden age and came to fruition, at least in the west, in Christianity: that there is a City of Man, requiring the careful distinctions you outline, but also a City of God, that fulfils the yearnings of the soul.
The latter can be detected in this world, but is not of it – a distinction between the immanent and transcendent that also needs to be respected.
The flatland of a secular age has forgotten how to, though, and the world has become too small: hence the threat of chaos.
Humans justifying their whatever by invoking ‘God’ is the root of all evil. At least Islam recognises the conundrum of ‘shirk,’ setting oneself as the equal of God. The trap into which most religious endeavours fall most of the time.
A permanent risk, yes. And is reflected in the Christian western tradition. For example, in English law, the reason why you can remain silent so as not to incriminate yourself before the secular authorities who have god-like powers over you, is that the secular justice system is recognised as bound to be flawed and not of God, before whom no-one will remain silent – in the next world, not this.
One doesn’t need to partake in the next world stuff to appreciate the acknowledgement of human limitations here. Literally, humility..
Seemed quite interesting until it strangely got bogged down at the end. Jumbled up list of dysfunctions not evidently connected with the classics revisited before or the supposed solutions proffered afterwards. Maybe that’s why it’s a weekend special? Go out somewhere and then glad to get ‘home’.
Well that left me feeling better.
I don’t know…the Euripides joke is just a pun and ‘so many of us’ actually aren’t reverting to the nasty and brutish condition of nature.
Sounds like a lot of doomongering rather than the reasoned, informed analysis the author says is being lost.
I think the author is rather too concerned with demonstrating his erudition.
Hands down the best article in Unherd this year. A perfect essay
We’re at odds with the natural order of things for sure. But our problem has not been that the natural state of things is chaos, it’s that the human impulse is to chaos, that we are incapable of divining what order [some might call it God] is, and that we ultimately render chaos on everything we touch. We are, perhaps, an exception that proves the rule. And the natural order will, sooner or later, prevail over us and our great vanity. It always has, no matter what stories we tell about ourselves. At any rate, the author takes certain texts and thoughts and proceeds from them as if they were givens when they are not. He nevertheless sets them out as proofs of his own world view and simply reveals his own chaotic biases in the process. Western civilisation was never that civilised – it’s usually been barbaric beyond its own boundaries, and frequently psychotically so out-with its own internal elites. But something important has been abandoned almost entirely. Humility in the face of our vast incomprehension.
It’s clear that the two world-views in the US are competing. And that must constitute some kind of ongoing civil war. The same continues between the Westen promotion of democracy via aggressive nationalism in the post-Soviet states and the Russian’s defence of their perceive international community and its interests.
But I don’t think in either cases we’re quite there in terms of direct de-civilisation. There, the key example for me is instead the brutal pogrom committed by the militants of Hamas in Israel, and its subsequent defence, justification and promotion by what we call their supporters in the West: the post-Marxist Left.
There the Left have embraced de-civilisation as a radical idea paired with their idea of historical justice. It’s this complex that I believe matches up with their other disturbing desires to have children alter their bodies according to gender/Queer orthodoxy, to promote terminations of pregnancies as widely as possible and to create new liberal states that provide euthanasia on demand for young or relatively young people suffering from mental illness or poverty.
If this is post-liberalism within the contemporary worldview we have called left-liberalism then it is transhumanism as a current of de-civilisation of formerly Western Judaeo-Christian values.
Excellent.
You have got transhumanism completely wrong, unless I’m misunderstanding your final paragraph. Transhumanists are not progressive. Well, some are but they are latecomers and abusers of the philosophers. Transhumanists want progress — scientific, technological, economic progress — but most of us favor free markets and voluntary interactions and oppose coercive, centralized direction. I favor adults being able their bodies as they see fit but oppose the ideology of trying to change the “gender” of someone too young to consent.
I think part of the problem here is that you see only “the two worldviews in the US.” There are multiple dimensions on which to array visions of the world and they lead to more than two worldviews.
What a thoughtful and erudite essay! I suppose there is some consolation that civilisations rise and fall and that the world did not end when the Greeks fell, or when the Romans fell. But the shame is how much avoidable suffering must come with that fall! The rotting carcass of our late stage decadent techno-society will perhaps contain some useful fragments of knowledge as well as lots if salient warnings for the civilisation that will surplant us – in the next 100 years or more. I like the idea of the Grizzly Man story morphing into a tragic myth or “fairy tale” that future parents will pass on to their children.
The new “civilisations” are already upon us. The Sino-Indian ascendency will be complete within decades. Western European society is old, exhausted and corrupted. I wonder if it will ever recover any vitality. Will the precepts that governed Western Europe survive in North America? I doubt it.
Will they survive in Western Europe?
Do parents still tell stories? Do children listen?
Yes, well some of us still do. I read to all my 4 elder children, and now I have a 2 year old and thanks to eBay I’ve been able to source and purchase the classic stories I grew up with, to instil a love of reading and listening without excessive exposure to screens
“The Bacchae exposes the darkest depths of the human psyche, where tenderness is inseparable from viciousness. ”
Nothing in the subsequent esaaying provides any clue as to how such a supposed inseparability might have first come about, least of all within what it is here calling “the psyche” The inseparabilty is retrospectively assumed from the play’s events
Blistering, concise, well written, and too true. If this is the kind of thinking is to be had at the new U. of Austin it bodes well for its future, and ours.
Only thing I would add is that we are not in total entropic decline but in the very first breath of a reorganization of boundaries that create our frame of existence. The kind of thinking here is a window to that becoming. It’s easy to destroy and deconstruct (and Dionysian, as per this post) but much harder to build. We’ve done the easy part, now it’s time to get to work.
Really excellent. The first and fundamental red line every civilisation until, let’s say, the 60’s has been paying attention to is the distinction between the Holy and the Unholy. Not the Good and the Evil, because these are too abstract notions, and somehow too personal, for a society to rely on. If everything is unholy, if there is « nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too » (great Olympic anthem indeed !) then man will keep on killing and dying like a greedy animal : so as to satisfy his needs and urges, should he eat his fellows and his children. Just like the grizzly bear. What is holy nowadays in the Western world ? Let’s face up evidence : nothing.
This is definitely on the right trail, and quite rare and brilliant, but I have a slightly different take.
The article jumps from the ancient Pagans to modern times. What’s left out is the Abrahamic religions. We are engaged, it says, in “the suicidal pursuit of some ill-defined vision of justice and equity.” It’s not ill-defined at all. It is defined by the Abrahamic traditions and values. Western civilization is falling apart due to the inherent contradictions between them and human nature, all of nature. They are quite impossible in the long run. And we are in the long run.
I also have a different take on the Classics. The author says that “Greek tragedy was from the beginning obsessed with the problem of how to keep civilisation from collapsing into the primordial disorder from which it emerged.” Well, yes and no. I would say that Greek tragedy was a stoic recognition that the “problem” existed, would always exist, and that the two forces were in a tenuous balance, and that was fine. The idea that civilization was superior and must triumph is actually an Abrahamic “filter” on the ancients.
I would say the eternal message is not to be found in the impossible optimism of the Abrahamic traditions, but in the heroic struggles of the Odyssey. That’s why modern civilization is falling apart.
Treadwell was quite nutty, but he fully recognized that the primary driver of the world was struggle and conflict, and not the quest for a harmonious civilization.
The ‘Abrahamic religions’ are themselves contradictory. In fact, mutually exclusive; if one, then neither of the others. And all are built on quicksand, melanges of mythology, folk history and folk tales, superstitions, embellishments, and invention, with no trace whatever that a ‘god’ of any sort, let alone an omnipotent and omniscient one, inspired anything in them beyond what a desert dweller of the time knew about life, the universe, or anything.
Spoken as one with little grasp of Judeo Christian positive impact on history
In college I read a great secular book ( not a Bible ) that compared the great ancient civilizations Persia, Babylon, Egypt and Israel. It’s not a close contest as easily shown by a non Christian ancient near east scholar. Title if I recall it correctly was: The intellectual adventure of ancient man. 1946 Henri Frankfort
Some kind of God exists by definition. No one knows what kind.
Christianity is a riff on Judaism, and Islam is a riff on Christianity.
Really good article. I was amazed to see that a writer with such sensible views also had a top post at an American university. I thought to achieve such a thing you needed to hold, or at least pretend to hold, completely mad views about society.
It’s University of Austin. A new university formed (mostly) to fight back against the intellectual rot of the mainstream academic culture.
it is a thing of beauty to read the work of a mind that can think and write. Such a brilliant piece of work. Very grateful for this essay on a Sunday morning.
I’ve heard the Greek tailor joke as: “Euripides, Eumenides.”
“Little wonder that so many of us are reverting to the nasty and brutish condition of nature, and are behaving like wild beasts or psychopathic gods.”
I suspect Ian McGilchrist might have some thoughts on this article.
No great mystery here. Western civilisation grew from and depended on Christian teachings. Now that we have abandoned those teachings, a brutal and ghastly end is inevitable.
It’s far from inevitable. I’d argue that what we’re witnessing is the transition from a civilisation that relied on the untruth of the existence of god, towards one which will take time to adapt – psychologically and spiritually. Any civilisation based on an untruth is going to flounder when it discovers that untruth, but i remain optimistic we have enough within us to pull through this crisis and emerge into a more profound paradigm.
Yeah. Nothing brutal and ghastly happened when we were all Christians.
The Center, Center Right, and Center Left can all “Live and Let Live”. The problems come with the extremists. The extremists can’t allow the idea of “Live and Let Live”. The extremists are compelled to force their way, their ideology on the rest of us. The extreme Right, the extreme Left, and the extremist Islamists won’t or can’t allow any way but their way. And so it goes.
An outstanding artilce, thank you. Could just as well be describing the UK as the USA.
Yeah, except there aren’t any grizzlies in the UK, so it loses its resonance.
I’m sure there will be when the ideologues get their way on “re-wilding”
I visited Iceland not too long ago. There are normally no polar bears there, but every now and again, an ice floe with one on it comes close by, and the bear makes landfall. Back in the day, the bear was quickly shot. Nowadays, the bear is quickly tranquilised, and airlifted back to their point of origin.
We need to clean out the stables, if it takes the death of millions, that will be a small price to pay, the left are now a cancer that needs excising, they consort with the beast from the Middle East, they think it can be controlled, both need to be constrained to the point of obliteration, otherwise billions will be enslaved and brutalised by these obscene cults that belong in the worst eras of the past.
A deep and thoughtful article, it shows that there is very little time left to act.
I doubt my thougts on how to act are part of the solution he envisages, but what else will slay the beast.
If you’re going to present the horrific image of the raped Israeli woman, please consider adding the image of the injured Palestinian stapped to a jeep as a human shield.
Dionysus and Apollo duking out once again. Not the first time ecstacy and rationality clash. It’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
Western civilization has many more issues attached to it than the dissolution of its internal logic. This civilization is extractive, venal, and based on slavery. It’s breakdown is shepherded by the mining of the last shreds of profit from Nature and people. The center will not hold. This center of constructed and conservative norms and rules of Empires that have always fed on, preyed on the fringes, is now turned inward. The bear is feeding on us, and we are going mad.
While this resonates with me for the most part — and reflects a blog piece I just read emphasizing that the natural state of humanity is poverty, violence, and oppression and that civilization takes continued work — I take issue with one point: “trans-, post-, and anti-humanist philosophies, and the relentless advance of AI are progressively effacing the differences between human beings, animals, and machines.”
Ahumanism definitely does this. Posthumanists are too vague and postmodernist to make sense of.
But transhumanists do see the clear distinctions. Some want to extend the circle of moral concern more strongly to animals precisely because of some similarities between humans and other animals (the capacity to suffer). Transhumanists understand the possibilities for using technology to enhance the human condition. You cannot develop something that enables us to improve ourselves without understand that distinctions between technology and humans, by realizing that the former can improve the latter (or the opposite), and you have to recognize the ways in which biological evolution and technology are related and different.
There used to be an old trope of ragged and unkempt prophets of doom who occasionally appeared on city street corners bearing a placard that read “The End is Near”. They were objects of derisive humor, not to be taken seriously. A few decades later the “Doomsday Prepper” phenomenon appeared, likewise derided by sophisticated people who thought apocalyptic ideation to be the realm of paranoid semi-literates, also not to be taken seriously. And here we are now, erstwhile thoughtfully serious people, pondering the proximity of the abyss as we tiptoe through this foggy night. To all of you who sense how much is at risk I raise my glass and hope that we are all luckier than I fear we will be.
Nigh. The end is nigh.
Only, it’s not, and it never was; or even if it were, it’s not the “end” they envisaged.
Tell that to Ozymandias. There have been hundreds of “ends” in human history and more to come. Whole cultures and entire civilizations. Ever heard of Chichen-Itza, Petra, Angkor Wat, or Tenochtitlan? Babylonians, Assyrians, Carthaginians, Hittites, Minoans?
And it may be “nigh” in some places but it is also “near” as you can see here:
https://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/e/end_is_near.asp
Ok, the civilisation that built Angkor Wat might be gone, but it has left Cambodia a great tourist attraction!
Hurrah for new the University of Austin!! How lucky they are to have Jacob Howland!!
Hmm. Somehow the grizzly bears represent all that the author hates. Clearly something is wrong in society and politics, but remember that an analogy is not a proof.
Does anyone wonder when there are beasts among us, why we insist on owning weapons?
People think it can’t happen here but men are beasts and one party actively encourages societal breakdown in the name of “equity”.
“Put simply, we’ve forgotten what civilisation is, and who we are without its distinctions and proscriptions: wild and vicious animals”
Carefully read, the article should produce a different conclusion. Human is a divine creature that only fell from grace long ago, not a wild beast to be tamed. Civilisation is way to bring us back where we belong, not a straight jacket on the wild instincts.
Both interpretations have merit and truth to them.
It’s too expensive to have and bring up children because rentiwr Boomets have hogged the housing stock and are not prepared to help yong pe who want families via the tax system. That is why nobody is having any.
If we need to blame anyone or anything, I would blame the parenting style of Gen-X. People buy new iPhones on credit, if you really want something you will find a way to do it. This “we no have money” chant is quite boring at this point. Our culture used to emphasise the value and importance of having kids. We’ve let that go in the fear of overpopulation or who knows what, and now we are seeing the results.
An Xer here, one still crawling from under the wreckage of the financial disasters inflicted by my Boomer parents. I think our generation in general had to cope with the implications of the excesses of our parents. In my lifetime I have always done my best to exercise financial discipline and amass some wealth to pass to my children (a Z and an Alpha). For now they are coping well and happily accumulating money on their accounts. They do have iPhones, but cheaper models.
Childless Boomer here, living my best life as always. No iPhone though – I have never owned an Apple product.
It won’t be anything Kamala does. She is an out of control empty cart careening down a hill. Kamala will be whatever the cabal that controls her and the mainstream media create. The Leftist main stream media will tell us how great Kamala is and big tech will continue to alter Internet Search Results to omit and obscure the truth. No substance and no form, only slight of hand and bold face lies to make something out of nothing The Cultural Marxist march to 1984 Amerika continues.
A fitting description of the current state of affairs!
Much to think about. Thank you!
The premise of this article seems to be that without the perhaps fragile norms of western liberal democracy and political tolerance we will live in complete violent chaos like animals. But that’s not true – hunter-gatherer band societies were the norm for 99% of human existence, and they certainly had structure and social norms. They often rigorously repressed significant divergences from them (a lesson for libertarians perhaps!).
The Left are always talking about human beings being essentially peaceful and beneficent, and the Right that they are violent competitive, aggressive and violent. There isn’t any real paradox here; human beings can be remarkably cooperative within their in-groups while at the same time being typically suspicious at best and often hostile to outsiders. Such band societies are often at almost constant war with others in their neighborhood (killing the men and abducting the women – they were not a woke prelapsarian paradise!) But these people were (and are) as resourceful and intelligent as us – if not more so, and are a very long way from being like grizzly bears or other animals.