https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/sanity-banished-standards-cast/
Western societies no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded the genuine article for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter. They no longer yearn for excellence. They do not seek truth. What we have witnessed is a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions.
That great culture warrior and conservative, Douglas Murray, recently observed, following a visit to Australia:
I cannot think of a time when more people have lost their minds — opponents and erstwhile allies alike. I am a minimalist in my expectations for this era. I think our main job is not to be driven mad. Or at least not to behave in ways that will make us feel shame in the future.
Well might we feel broad and deep shame for our era. Conservatives, many of us, have all but given up on the party of Menzies, as it lurches from crisis to crisis, unseats elected leaders at will, sidelines just about everybody to the right of Clive Hamilton, and engages in systemic fixing, branch-stacking, the career-destruction of enemies and lining the pockets of mates.
The once great Labor Party, the party of Curtin and Chifley, has upended its old, honest, defensible, socially conservative policies and embraced holus-bolus the core ideas of the post-1968 generation of post-modernist ratbaggery.
Those once trusted organisations, the banks, have their criminal acts and corporate idiocies paraded before us on a daily basis.
Sporting codes embrace cloying political correctness, especially as it relates to race and sex, and enforce it with sanctions.
Corporations bully employees who dare to challenge the party line of big (social liberal) brother.
Fake news abounds. The very term, newly coined to describe old, old practices, is itself used as a weapon. The media, once able to differentiate news from opinion, no longer does or can. The ABC is no longer the network of James Dibble, having adopted activism and partisan advocacy as its virtuous mission.
Institutions of higher learning stop (certain) people from speaking on their campuses, lest someone be offended. The universities accept money from all comers — save those who simply wish to teach literature, philosophy and history as they have been taught for a millennium. Police forces now charge (monetarily) the innocent while failing to charge (legally) the patently guilty.
Scientists, those supposed exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, have in large measure opted for groupthink and venal grant-troughing even when this means the abandonment of scientific method.
That foundational institution, the source of all others, the family, now cannot even be defined without bastardising its core characteristics. The family is now, to borrow from Paul Keating, two gays and a cocker spaniel. Or whatever we want it to be.
Institutions across the whole of Western society no longer have standards. They no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded that for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter. They no longer yearn for excellence. They do not seek truth. What we have witnessed is, in effect, a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions.
Melanie Phillips, in one of her excellent books, describes a world “upside down”. Murray talks of the “shame” of our era. The traditionalist Catholic rag The Remnant – no fan of the current pope, of course – featured a recent, “Vatican going bonkers”.
