I’ve written before on the topic of what I call the Third Dark Age, the hypothesis that our current Western society is on the same trajectory as those of Europe in the 6th century AD and the Mediterranean coast in the 12th century BC. I’ve also written about my belief that the only way to stop—or, at least, to cut short—the Third Dark Age is with a Second Enlightenment.
Both of those posts were written before the 2024 election. Now that we’re five months into the fallout of that election, the picture is becoming a little clearer…and a little darker.
It’s no secret that America is becoming increasingly divided. The fractures between political left and right have become gaping fissures that are busy swallowing all of us who profess allegiance to neither extreme. Battle lines are being drawn in the culture war, the race war, the war for control over hearts and minds for generations to come.
Truth is, both sides have a fatal flaw. This isn’t my natural contrarianism coming out. It’s not the fallacy of false equivalence, because—in this instance, anyway—leftists and rightists truly are equally bad. They both have the goal of dragging Western civilization into a time of darkness and regression. They just have different motives.
The left-hand path
The Left’s modus operandi is well known by now. The woke mind virus has long since taken root, and taken control of its host. Progressivism is dark and anti-human by its very nature: an erasure of all that makes humans, and human societies, unique and great. The idea that a man can become a woman simply by force of will, that anyone can become an American in the same fashion. A reduction of our status to mere numbers and the diversity boxes we check.
That sort of social rot has been in place for over a decade. We see its effects everywhere we look. We see the statues of our heroes being torn down because they were "colonizers" or "slave-owners", only to be replaced with nameless, shapeless figures who are exceptional only by virtue of being unexceptional. Monuments to mediocrity, an uplifting of those ugly in flesh and spirit. What better way to celebrate an ideology that encourages sterilization, than by creating something that lacks any sense of humanity?
In the progressive version of the Third Dark Age, we fall because we are dragged down to the level of the worst of us, Harrison Bergeron on the scale of a civilization. Whites and East Asians have higher intelligence on average, so we must not be allowed to use it. Men are stronger on average than women, yet we must only use that strength in service to the fairer sex. And even the word "sex" becomes a slur, because it implies the biological reality whose denial is crucial to the entire enterprise: if we recognize that there is an unbridgeable gap between men and women, what other innate barriers must we admit?
More than merely social, however, the woke darkness is one which transforms science into dogma, turning scientists into priests or heretics, depending on whether or not they toe the line of what the regime considers orthodox. We witnessed this firsthand over the past five years, watching as noted physicians, epidemiologists, biologists, physicists, climatologists, and many others were ostracized, fired, deplatformed for coming out—with verifiable evidence, in accordance with the scientific method—against the various tyrannies of the 2020s. Whether the tyrannical response to a mild flu, the pushing of a deadly genetic experiment in the guise of a vaccine, or the continued de-industrialization of our world in response to a fictitious claim of higher temperatures, people’s lives were ruined simply because they questioned the prevailing narrative.
This is the communist type of bad ending, an Orwellian Dark Age where the masses are kept sick and stupid, living in pods and eating bugs and being told that it’s for their own good. Rather than being denied the light, we are told that it’s bad for us. That we are creatures of darkness, and to aspire to anything better is offensive to those who lack the courage.
The right turn
One way to read the results of last year’s election is as a rejection of such progressive ideals. That’s not to say it’s necessarily the correct reading, but there is an element of truth. Enough people truly were tired of the status quo that they flipped.
Unfortunately, some are taking that to mean they would prefer the opposite extreme.
This is becoming an increasingly popular opinion among the farther segments of the Right. Rather than restoring our constitutional republic, the norms and values that made our nation great in the first place, they seem willing to reject it entirely. Worse, they’re ready to reject the Enlightenment itself.
Their reasoning, as much as there is reasoning involved, seems to be a case of mistaken identity. Progressives call themselves liberals, and actual—called "classical"—liberals are too few and too scattered to push back. Thus, these extremists consider those extremists to define what it means to be liberal. Following that twisted logic, they then deem that liberalism itself is at fault, and must be destroyed.
Of course, liberalism is the foundation of America in the first place. It’s what led to the Revolution. Without the bedrock of the liberal Enlightenment, there is no free speech, no free press, no free religion. Without liberty, equality, and fraternity, we cannot have the Red, White, and Blue.
And some people genuinely don’t seem to care.
Right-wing Twitter, for example, is becoming crowded with people who would gladly trade our Republic for a theocratic dictatorship, as long as that dictatorship was whites-only. These are people who reject the premise of the Declaration of Independence, that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights. They reject the notion that there is room for debate. They even reject the verifiable fact—I can verify it myself—that it is possible to have a strong moral compass without religion.
The nationalist-conservative Dark Age, then, looks a lot more like the Medieval Dark Age: a land of kings using their subjects as pawns, of priests keeping the masses in check with nonsense such as "divine right" and "original sin". Of power unchecked, because people are taught to believe that power in itself is the goal.
On this road, we come into darkness because we reject the progress we have made, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Because the Left pushed mRNA "vaccines", we must toss aside germ theory. Because the Left facilitated an invasion of illegal immigrants, we must throw away equal protection for our citizens. Because Reddit-tier atheists convinced teens to question their biology, we must rip out secularism by the roots.
This, then, is the theocratic version of the bad end, and it’s Islamic in the literal sense of the word islam: submission. Here, we are not creatures of darkness, but creatures stuck in darkness through no fault of our own. We are not allowed to strive for the light, because that light is reserved only for the chosen few. But if we debase ourselves enough, believing all the right unbelievable things, saying all the right platitudes, we might be permitted a glimpse of that light as we die. For, in the world of the far right, a human is worthless when he is alive, but downright holy before and after.
The third way
I reject both extremes. To the Left, that makes me little better than a fascist. To the Right, it makes me little better than a progressive. And I don’t particularly care.
America was founded on liberal ideals. This much cannot be denied. We were a refuge for the oppressed from the start. We understood multiculturalism and diversity were important…within reason. On that, I must disagree vehemently with the nationalists.
Humans are diverse in many ways. Although theories like Sapir-Whorf have long since been debunked, we do know that cultures have differences that can be inscrutable, and nearly indescribable, to others. And some of these cultures are, to put it simply, incompatible with the ideals of the classical liberal. On this, I disagree with the progressives.
Some of the incompatibility does share its roots with religion, but only in the vaguest sense; even among the Christian nations of Europe, there are distinct variations between, for example, the Germanic peoples and the descendants of Rome. There have been closed or backward Christian societies and open, cosmopolitan Muslim ones. There is, for example, nothing innate about Hinduism that leads its adherents to reject modern sanitation. Tribal religions are not fundamentally opposed to technological progress. And a lack of religion does not imply a lack of spirituality or a lack of empathy.
Liberalism, however, is very much an ideology of plenty. When there are few pressing demands, when survival is largely routine, we have the ability to grow as a people. That is why the seeds of republicanism were born in the fertile period of Ancient Greece, and why the Enlightenment took root only after the Age of Discovery.
I believe it’s also why the liberal ideals are so foreign to the invaders in our country today. Sub-Saharan Africa is a dangerous place, as is most of South America. The Middle East is largely a wasteland. China, of course, is now a communist nightmare, though it wasn’t always so. The Indian subcontinent is so crowded and despoiled that a nuclear war might make things better.
In none of these places do we see the lack of scarcity that proved necessary for philosophical thought to flourish. Only with that sort of wisdom can we see beyond ourselves, to look at society and humanity from a wider angle and draw conclusions from what we find. That is why the time immediately following World War II, when there was such a push to reach a state of post-scarcity, gave rise to such rapid progress in America and Western Europe. We were on the cusp of a Second Enlightenment, even though we didn’t yet need it.
Progressivism failed us then, tearing down our lofty ideals, and we’re only now, a lifetime later, clawing our way out of that mire. But we must beware not to fall into the other extreme. The nationalist version of the Third Dark Age will serve us no better.