https://spectator.us/end-history-george-floyd-civilization/
Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters:‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’
The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous. Political posturing is everywhere. At first it seems effete and merely silly; then it grows muscles and claws. The posturing now comes with bricks, baseball bats and Molotov cocktails. Grievances blur and lose their specificity. Every slight becomes a pretext for boundless rage. The ‘system’ — ordered liberty and the rule of law — is rudely shoved into the dustbin of history. Civility itself — the social compact that makes society possible — is tossed aside as an impediment to justice.
Is this the precipice upon which we now are perched? HBO has pulled the movie Gone With the Wind because the classic Civil War story is a ‘product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society’. And while you get your mind around that nugget of politically correct virtue signaling, note that Cops, a TV show that depicts the police in a positive light, is being summarily canceled ‘amid nationwide anti police protests after Mr Floyd’s killing’, according to the Wall Street Journal.
