Last week, at his website -- “The Blade of Perseus” -- Victor Davis Hanson wrote about the nihilism that’s destroying our society. Hanson surveys the American scene better than any observer. The recent acceleration of that destruction may surprise us but shouldn’t. The dam holding back these deadly forces has been under relentless assault for decades. Hanson says that nihilism is the root of modern leftism. He is quite right. In fact, he’s frighteningly right. Yet, there’s nothing new about the connection between leftism and nihilism.
Nihilism is a school of thought – often expressed in political and social terms – holding that that traditional values are worthless and empty due to the meaninglessness of existence. The sole stance of nihilism is defiance, the sole goal the destruction of all that stands. Back in 1946, the great C.S. Lewis “warned that ‘post-Christian’ thought, a way of thinking that rejects absolute rights and wrongs, leads to nihilism.” In the mid-20th Century, existentialism was in full flower. It was mostly a movement among agnostics and atheists (Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus, notably) to urge invention of meaning to render a meaningless world livable. Fictions were needed to stave off the life-draining sense of purposelessness that atheists, in particular, are prone to. ............
Hanson opened his commentary -- “Civilization versus the New Nihilism” -- with this sentence: Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party. He closed with this thought: The old politics of right versus left, and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle: Americans must choose between civilization -- or its destroyers.
Yes, we must choose......... To Read More.....
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