Article by David Solway in "The American Thinker":
The medieval Christian conception of the great chain of being, so ably described and analyzed by Arthur Lovejoy and E. M. Tillyard,
has been one of the most resonant concepts addressing mankind’s unique
position in the cosmos. Situated between the divine and the earthy, the
angelic and the bestial, the spiritual world and the physical creation,
the human being is understood as a hybrid being consisting of a “higher”
nature and a “lower” nature in perpetual conflict with one another. It
is a metaphor that makes good explanatory sense.
Thus,
we are tugged in two antithetical directions, toward reason, order and
imagination on the one hand and envy, resentment and malice on the
other, toward the tablets on the mountain above and the calf in the
wilderness below. The gravity of degradation, alas, is always stronger
than the upward flight of intellectual clarity and moral commitment.
This will never change, but the choice and struggle between the angel
and the animal within us, between logic and appetite, is what
constitutes the essence of human identity, and the intermittent victory
of the former over the latter is what constitutes the essence of human
potentiality -- that is, of the truly human.
What
applies to the individual person may also bear on the political
dynamic. It is, for example, the explicit theme of Shakespeare’s Macbeth
in which the proper hierarchy of the state is reversed and order is
supplanted by disorder, rule by regicide and social convention by
political anarchy and moral disarray. The established hierarchy of the
given order of things represented by the chain is overturned: hawks are
hunted by owls, tame creatures run wild (II, iv). And as Banquo remarks
when he sees the witches:
What are these,So withered and so wild in their attire,That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,And yet are on’t? …You should be women,And yet your beards forbid me to interpretThat you are so.” (I.ii)
The
restoration of community and decorum -- the climb up the chain --
begins when Birnam Wood marches toward Dunsinane Hill, deposing the
usurper and reclaiming the moral heights.
Today,
one might say that the fraught experiment in republican governance is,
on the grand historical scale, a collective effort to ascend toward a
higher form of social organization than that initially represented by
the state of nature as Thomas Hobbes depicted it in Leviathan, where “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In the terms of the 2nd Century B.C. Greek historian Polybius in The Histories,
who developed the concept of classical republicanism, we would say that
democracy is a higher form of civil and political order than oligarchy
or autocracy. Democratic and republican governance represent an attempt
to move up the links of the political chain of being toward the ideal of
civic responsibility and individual flourishing.
Decadence
is a staple of the human condition, but there are times when the forces
of debasement and corruption seem far more conspicuous and irreversible
than at other times when they are in approximate abeyance. And this, I
believe, is one of those times, especially when observing the cultural
and political scene in our own advanced and presumably enlightened
countries.
We
have remarked the gradual, now accelerated encroachment of the
socialist nightmare on the American dream, the rapid breakdown of public
order following the COVID pandemic so egregiously mismanaged
by our political and medical classes, the destructive riots of various
groups of domestic terrorists joined by the unproductive elements of
society, and the racist hysteria leading to the eruption of social
violence and hatred of whites. We have watched good people being
“cancelled” by their moral inferiors. And we have seen our political
authorities either foment the mayhem or retreat into their bunkers of
silence and inactivity. These are the people descending the chain of
being into the terrain occupied by the rabble, sinking from the realm of
communal order into the realm of turbid misrule.
Heather Mac Donald speaks
clearly and acerbically about “the current tolerance and justification
for vandalism and violence” and “the elite betrayal of the principle of
law,” deplores the “high-volume delegitimization of American justice and
the incessant drumbeat about white supremacy,” and concludes, “These
are no longer the warning signs of a possible breakdown of civilized
life. That breakdown is upon us…Unless new leaders come forth who
understand their duty to maintain the rule of law, the country will not
pull back from disaster.”
She
is obviously right but is anybody listening? The precipitous plunge
from lawfulness to indiscriminate turmoil, from structure to chaos, from
civility to barbarism is indeed upon us. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
wrote back in 1969-70 of “the credulity, even the vulgarity of the
supposed intellectual and social elite of the country,” and added, “I
know there is an authoritarian Left in this country, and I fear it.” He
had every reason to.
The
corrupt politicians polluting Washington, D.C. and many blue state
executive branches, the raving mobs infesting Twitter, the domestic
insurgents, including their subsidizers and political enablers, laying
waste the nation, the professoriate that has indoctrinated two
generations of students with leftist twaddle and deprived them of a
legitimate education, the academic fellows and media experts
signing virtue-signalling petitions against their betters who have
offended the idols of mediocre conformity, the race hustlers, the
Democrat vote-riggers, the lying journalists who have betrayed their
mandate and write and report only to misinform and propagandize, the
censors who operate the digital platforms, the radical feminists who
control the university, the civic institutions and the public square,
the scientists who betray the rule of objectivity to ensure government
grants, transgender advocates pushing sex-reassignment surgery (worthy
of Banquo’s befuddlement), the “whole sick crew” to quote Thomas
Pynchon’s V
-- these are the dwellers of the feculent swamp, or in common parlance,
“bottom feeders.” I do not have the Christian forbearance to regard
these people as just sadly deluded. In my mind, they are complicit with
evil. Or at best, they are hurtling down the chain of being toward the
feral depths and taking a culture, nation and civilization with them.
If
they are allowed to drag us down into the moral and intellectual rot
that is their natural home, democracy will have given way to ochlocracy
(mob rule) or to despotism, republicanism to tribalism, the bestial will
have overtaken the angelic, and the shining city on a hill will have
become the fetid marsh of political decay. “Stars, hide your fire,”
declaims Macbeth, “let not light see my black and deep desires.” The
great chain of moral integrity and political order is disintegrating as
we watch and the question now is whether Birnam Wood will march toward
Dunsinane once again.