Our Fragile Civilization

As partakers of Western civilization, we enjoy amenities that, throughout history, have been hard to come by—stability, relative prosperity, domestic tranquility, and, above all, personal security. We don’t enjoy them absolutely; but we do enjoy them relative to what people have had to put up with in the past. And the world even now is full of places where those amenities are not enjoyed: because they don’t come naturally to human beings lumbered with Original Sin.

Civilization is fragile. It has to be envisioned, it has to be planned, and it has to be worked for; and once achieved, maintained. Otherwise you wind up with a lost civilization. The great Indus Valley civilization, for one, flourished mightily circa 1500 B.C. but today is so lost, we don’t know the name of a single person who lived in it, nor a single word of their language.

Our civilization that we take for granted was a long time getting to be what it is now. We should take care to keep it going. But we seem not to realize that.

Galloping culture rot has set in; and we can see no more shudder-worthy example of it than was on display last week at the Gucci FallWinter 2018/2019 Full Fashion Show. Watch the video and judge for yourself.

Director Alessandro Michele, who is the poster boy for what’s wrong with Europe and why it won’t survive, had his models parade around a hospital bed in what looks like an operating theater. There was a message in that. Inspired by some absurd “Cyborg Manifesto”—every pile of driveling idiots seems to have a “manifesto”—Michele was saying there is no more “natural” anymore: we are only whatever we carve and drug and mutilate ourselves into being, only whatever we say we are. No more “Male and female created He them.” In fact, no more “male” or “female” at all: only “constructs” proceeding from our own debauched imaginations.

Well, that’s what the “transgender” movement’s all about, isn’t it? So Michele gives us “genderless” models. Lucky us. One of his models carries a severed head that looks like her own. Very nice vision for the future, Al.

Even more striking is the facial expression worn by all the models, all the same—a kind of petulant glower, reminiscent of Sonny Liston at a weigh-in. Remember when fashion models used to smile? These don’t. They look like they’d like to bite your face off, only they’re too dispirited to do anything quite that energetic. They remind one of a line in an ancient Sumerian poem: “The dead shuffle under their black plumage; their food is clay, their only drink is ashes.” With that vision to inspire them, the Sumerian civilization went extinct.

The audience applauds when Michele comes out to take his bow. Maybe there’s going to be a clay and ashes buffet afterward.

As for the garments—some of which don’t even fit, but appear to be several sizes too large—it would be remarkable to see any real person actually wearing one.

So we’re going to create ourselves into anything we want to be, going to take God’s place. Why, then, all the glum expressions? Why aren’t those models deliriously happy?

Instructed by the Bible, Europe spent some two thousand years struggling out of barbarism. The history of that struggle makes for grim reading. Our own country’s founders thought so, and did their level best to try to avoid the cruelties, the perpetual war, the violence that moved our ancestors to flee across the Atlantic to a new world. It was not until after two world wars, and after the collapse of communism, that it was morning in Europe.

But the night is coming on fast.

Both the rise of civilization, and its fall, originate within the human heart. If that fashion show is any indication of what’s in Europe’s heart today, the demise has already begun.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in and visit. A single click will take you there.

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net