“Eddington” and the Death of Civility

 From Brownstone Institute:

Eddington doesn’t give us clean villains or heroes; but something worse: a world where good men are corrupted not by ambition, but by exhaustion, betrayal, and the slow evaporation of meaning. Joe Cross doesn’t sell out per se {et tu, Fauci}, but he does become the kind of man he once had tried to stop.

In its final act – without giving too much away – the film descends into a chaotic, hellish unraveling. Violence erupts. Messaging overtakes meaning. Competing outside factions, each claiming moral supremacy, tear the town apart. Cross is pursued, hunted, undone. And no one – not even the man I chatted with after the film – could quite explain what he had just seen. But that’s the point.

This isn’t just about Eddington. It’s about all of us. When civility disappears, when God is forgotten, when personal morality gives way to mass messaging and digital spectacle – along with solipsistic self-victimhood worship, we lose not just our mooring, but then our communities. When we lose agency, we become actors in someone else’s script; speaking slogans not our own; building someone else’s babbling to tower over you. That tower of babble infallibly fails and falls. (Read more.)