The Great Liberal Death Wish

 From The American Spectator:

That background is crucial to understanding “Albion Agonistes” and its sentiments and diagnoses of the dangers the West was facing in the mid-1970s, a decade that Muggeridge had foreseen in a December 1970 piece for Esquire that he titled, “The Decade of the Great Liberal Death Wish.” There he wrote of “the process of death-wishing in the guise of liberalism, which had long been eroding what remained of Western civilization.” That erosion was “about to reach its apogee.” Muggeridge believed: “Systematically, stage by stage, our way of life had been dismantled, our values depreciated, our certainties undermined, and our God dethroned — all this in the name of promoting the health, wealth, and happiness of one and all. Past civilizations have collapsed through being overrun by barbarians from without; ours has the unusual characteristic of having nurtured its own destroyers at the public expense, and dreamt up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite.”

Ours was a society being overrun by barbarians inside the gate. These destroyers from within were being nurtured at public expense. An unusual characteristic indeed.

Writing here for the February 1976 edition of Tyrrell’s magazine, then titled, The Alternative: An American Spectator, Muggeridge picked up that theme of the liberal death wish; actually, more precisely, of the collapse of Western civilization. He began his article with this:

Of all the Great Issues which confront us today, none can be considered of greater moment than the manifest threats to the survival of our Western civilization. Spengler’s The Decline of the West made a considerable stir in my young days. Has the decline Spengler observed fifty years ago now, become an irreversible stampede to destruction?

In assessing the causes for the decline of the West, many men of the day would have focused on matters of survival ranging from economic to military decline. Malcolm Muggeridge acknowledged those things, but he then went straight to a diagnosis that would become vintage Muggeridge, especially in his pieces for The American Spectator in the years ahead. For him, the crisis was less political than cultural and moral and spiritual. He stated:

No, what is at issue, as I see it, is not the means to survive, nor even the will to survive, but the faith to survive. It seems to me clear, beyond qualification or equivocation, that our Western civilization was born of the great drama enacted in Palestine two thousand years ago, the drama of the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection, and all that flowed therefrom. This is what has inspired and nourished the art and literature and music and architecture and learning which are, and forever will be, the glory of our civilization, besides giving rise to innumerable lives of dedication to the love of God and of our human family. If it should prove to be the case that Western man has now rejected these origins of his civilization, persuading himself that he can be master of his own destiny, that he can shape his own life and chart his own future, then assuredly he and his way of life and all he has stood and stands for must infallibly perish.

In other words, the real crisis which confronts us is about faith rather than power, about the question “Why?” rather than the question “How?”—about man’s relationship with his Creator rather than about his energy supplies, his currency, his balance of trade and Gross National Product, his sexual fantasies, and his other passing preoccupations, with which the media interminably concern themselves.

This was the Muggeridge that so many conservatives were coming to admire, the former barbed skeptic-agnostic who was now waxing lyrical about fundamental questions of God and man. What matters, he asserted, was “the God we serve, the salvation we hope for, the light we live by in this world, and, when we come to leave it, the vista reaching before us into eternity—these concern the very fundamentals of our mortal existence.”

Such was being threatened. Again, these were self-inflicted wounds, and the West was inflicting them deeper than ever. Said Muggeridge:

The barbarians who overran Rome came from without, but ours are home products, trained and suitably brainwashed and conditioned at the public expense. In the light of these antics, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Western man, having wearied of the struggle by himself, has decided to abolish himself. Creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own strength; himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down.

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