“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.”
- Lord Kenneth Clark

I apologise for the Bill Whittle style title, and I promise this post won’t be nearly as long as any of his much weightier tomes, but I believe I may have something to say beyond the standard pointing at our political opposition and laughing. Right and good and pleasant though that is.

I’m in the middle of watching the BBC documentary series “Civilisation: A Personal View” by Lord Clark. He made a point in the first show so devastatingly true that it struck me with almost physical force.

He was doing a peice to camera, while standing in front of, and underneath, a Roman aqueduct, and talking about what makes up a civilisation. Now Lord Clark was raised in the British academic tradition, and would have been constitutionally incapable of beginning any work without first defining his terms, and so this was in a sense his coda for the whole series.

He said that one of the most important features of a civilisation, if not the most, was confidence. Confidence that it would still be around next year, that it was worthwhile planting crops now, so they could be harvested next season. Confidence that soldiers wouldn’t suddenly appear on the horizon and destroy your farm. Confidence that an apple seed planted in your backyard will provide fruit for your grandchildren. That if you paint a fresco, the wall its on will still be standing in a century. That if you write a book, the language you use will still be understood half a millennia in the future. And that if you hauled stone for the great cathedral which had been building since before your father was born, and which your baby son might live to see completed if, the good Lord willing, he lived to be an old man; your efforts would be valued by subsequent generations stretching forward toward some unimaginably distant futurity.

And above all, the self-confidence that you are part of something grander than yourself, something with roots in the past, and a glorious future of achievement ahead of it. When the Romans lost that self confidence, when they began doubting their own purpose, they began to die.

When the Rhine opposite Cologne froze on the last dying day of the year 406CE and the motley horde of Suevi, Alans, and Vandals charged across the Imperial border into the privince of Gaul, that was the beginning of the end merely in the physical sense. They were simply taking an axe to an already rotten tree.

And that is precisely what Osama Bin Laden believes he is doing to Western Civilisation right now. Those planes being rammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were to instill in us the same fear felt by the centurion in charge of a pitifully small garrison in a lonely fortificationas he looked out across the ice at the thousands of savages who were about to overrun both him and his entire world. Osama, and the Islamist movement he represents, have calculated that we are the modern Rome, and that we are bored, decadent, and have no faith in ourselves.

[Please note: The full essay is 2,375 words long! I don’t know what happened, I started writing and couldn’t stop! I would actually hope that people read it, it means a great deal to me. If you think it’s worthy, I’d appreciate a link. Bloggers may freely quote as much of it as they like.]

Lord Clark told a story, with the still impressive bulk of the brilliantly-engineered aqueduct behind him to underscore it, of a Roman city whose citizens had learned that the barbarians were coming to sack them. They waited and waited, doing nothing in their own defence, for what defence could defeat such savages? And in the end, the barbarians did not show up. The citizens were disappointed that their boredom would now not be broken after all.

Can anyone, looking at the freak show parade of loser ideologies on display in Washington this week, seriously doubt that the languidly bored, comfortable Roman citizens, feeling vaugely guilty about their domination of the world and the violence that had to be employed in maintaining it, waiting with a secretly exciting anticipation of their own destruction, have their counterparts in Western Civilisation today?

There is a sense in which Osama may in fact have calculated correctly. Much of the public face of the West, the academic, media and political establishment at any rate, have in fact lost all confidence in their own civilisation. The West is excoriated for being uniquely evil, for promoting racism, war, environmental damage, the persecution of women, and for being structurally violent. Its great men are sneered at as “dead white European males”, and its works of art and literature snubbed as “elitist”, and “alternative” sources of enlightenment are artificially manufactured and promoted for polemic purposes.

These are people who believe that Rigoberta Menchu is actually superior to Plutarch. One can only imagine Lord Clark’s response to that obviously false assertion.

These people who are supposed to lead the West are not “reforming critics”, but are in fact dedicated, some knowlingly and openly, others without quite realising it, to it’s utter destruction. Partly it is because they have become well-off thanks to the incredibly wealth creating dynamism of democratic capitalism and they are embarassd by their own riches and wish to feel better about themselves, and so identify with the opponents of the very system they themselves are part of.

Hollywood movie stars who will get in their private jets and fly halfway around the world to participate in a rally opposing excessive fuel consumption are a case in point. Liberal guilt is a perfect example of a civilisation lacking self confidence.

And partly this lack of faith in the West, it’s history, it’s institutions and the Christian faith which helped sustain it, is caused by jealousy. The final collapse of Communism destroyed the last hope of many western leftists that they might one day seize power and inherit the entire West for themselves. The Soviet Union is never going to rescue them from their powerlessness with it’s tanks and secret police now, and so rather than admit defeat, what remains of the Left is determined that if they will not gain control of the West, then no one shall have it. Like Samson, they have grasped the pillars of the Temple and are trying to pull it down on all our heads. They know they’re dead in the long run, and want to take the rest of us with them.

And we can clearly see in their attempts to hobble anti-terror measures in Western nations that they have fomed an alliance of sorts with the Islamists. The Western Left is giving Islamism as much political covering fire as it can, seeing it as a useful tool in bringing down democratic capitalism. They are of course fools for believing they can control a crusading religious faith, but the Left has never been able to understand the Western peoples, so why should we expect them to grasp the motivations of the infinitely more unfamiliar world of Islam any better?

Which brings us to our enemy. Do not be lulled into a false sense of security by the technological superiority of our weapons. Faith can destroy anything physical, and it can only be opposed successfully by an even stronger faith. Not neccessarily religious in nature, but strong, confident and unyeilding.

The Islamists have confidence to spare. We are raining radar and satellite-guided death on them, slaughtering them in batch lots, and still they keep coming. Why? Because they have faith. It is the most powerful force in the universe, and we must not make the mistake of discounting it simply because we think we have evolved past that stage. The “Mad Mahdi’s” forces damn near overran the British on the banks of the Nile a hundred years ago, and they were tribesmen going up against Maxim guns. They died, but they kept coming on. That’s all you have to do to win - keep coming on until the enemy gives up.

We could lose this war. Oh yes we could, it’s absolutely possible, and there are powerful forces within the West who want that to happen. We would fool ourselves that we weren’t surrendering. No, we are being intelligent, we are trying alternative approaches, we are reaching out, we are addressing the root causes, we are enhancing multiculturalism and showing respect for all faiths, we are making room for immigrants, we are helping them feel part of society, we are showing tolerance and understanding…right up until the moment when we realise we no longer have the power to insist on the observation of basic Western norms of equality, freedom and democracy.

And then we will have lost.

But who is “we”? If significant elements of our academic, media and political elite have lost faith in the West, who is left to defend it? Well, we may find our confidence returning from unexpected directions. Perhaps we never really lost it in the first place. Culture can be a surprisingly long-lived phenomenon, and it’s patterns can re-emerge after extended periods of being buried beneath an externally imposed set of circumstances.

I believe the Internet, especially interactive parts of it such as blogs, is playing a vital role in allowing ordinary people to breeze past the usual gatekeepers of popular opinion, the media and academic commentators, and speak directly with one another. The Internet, with it’s values of openness, directness and free exchange in which nothing is sacred, is the ultimate embodiment of Western culture, made technological flesh. Many people who might previously have kept their opinions to themselves, believing they were very much in the minority, are discovering that they are by no means alone!

There is also a cultural reawakening going on within the West, especially in the West’s current champion nation, the United States. When September 11th occured, many, many people (and here I include myself) seemed to hear deep within themselves, in the dark recesses of their genetic code, the far-off skirl of war-pipes, and clashing steel. Ancient impulses, long buried by comfortable prosperity, rose irresistably to the surface. Rust had been blunting the armour of Alba for long enough, the standard on the braes of Mar was up and streaming, the gathering pipe was sounding from Lochnagar, and the hill top beacons indicating that black Viking sails had been sighted off the coast were now ablaze. It was time to take grandfather’s claymore down from the wall.

And rather than regard this impulse towards violence as representing a dysfunctional emotional response, a sickness in need of therapy; many of us embraced it. The return of the old impulses was given serendipitous shape with the release over the three years subsequent to 2001 of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Ring” movie trilogy. It’s themes resonated deeply. Professor Tolkein stated many times, and I believe him, that the book was not written as a direct allegory of World War II. But much of that feeling of fighting back against great odds and an implacable enemy for the cause of freedom, which animated Britain at that time, was trapped in the words of the book, like electricity in a battery, only to be set free to raise the hairs on the back of our necks in movie theatres many years later.

I am reading two fascinating books at the moment, about American culture. One is “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America”, by David Hackett Fischer; and the second is “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America”. Both speak about how the Scots-Irish people, the folk from Scotland, Ulster and the English border counties (who incidentally were called “crackers” and “rednecks” and lived in cabins before they even set foot on an immigrant ship) came to America in large numbers, and finding the best land already taken by the snooty East Anglian Puritans of New England, or the class-obsessed Home Counties Cavaliers of tidewater Virginia and the Midlands Quakers in Delaware, were forced to settle further into the backwoods of the Appalachians and Alleghenies, passing through Big Moccasin Gap into the hollows, ridges and rills of the Blue Ridge, using their toughness and natural fighting ability to fight the Indians for the right to settle there.

They were notoriously fractious, a brawling people with a finely tuned sense of personal honour, and a tradition of following personally brave military leaders and never retreating. They fought, they drank, they sang and they prayed. And like the Celtic tribes who had camped by the Danube, they kept pressing ever onwards. This time they weren’t stopped by the Atlantic Ocean on the western fringes of Europe. They passed on over into the rich bluegrass country of Kentucky, to the fertile Ohio basin, the the mighty Mississippi and beyond to the Great Plains, taking to covered wagons as they did so, and as late as the 1930s arriving at the California state line as Okies and Arkies, fleeing the great dustbowl in backfiring old jalopies laden down with everything they owned.

Yes, they were Hillbillies. Yes, they were poor. But they have fought in all America’s wars, given it many great leaders (Andrew Jackson being the original from which all others are measured), and given birth to one of the nations’ two indigenous musical forms - Country. (The other one being Jazz and it’s descendants).

The Scots-Irish culture has become so influential that it is by now virtually the default setting for the American working class. The eastern elites sneer at them for their NASCAR culture, their accents, and their boorish belligerence. But then, they used to do that back in the Old Country as well. The Winthrops and Emersons have been sneering at the Calhouns and McPhersons since the 16th century! Blue states East Anglia, Kent and Sussex have been feeling superior to Red States Galloway, Cumbria and Antrim since before America even existed. Culture runs a lot deeper and stronger than many periple realise

But it is to the Scots-Irish culture, in it’s widely dispersed, American incarnation as “Southern” or “Backwoods” or “Bible Belt” or “Hillbilly” form, which now includes more than simply those claiming descent fromthe Scots-Irish people, that people are turning for inspiration. When the enemy soldiers appear over the hill, you can either sigh and accept it as your lot, as punishment for your sin of wealth and ease; or you can re-connect with a culture in which fighting to defend your hearth and home is the highest possible value.

The enemy is here, now. He believes in his cause and his God.

What do you believe?