‘CIVILISATIONS die from suicide, not by murder’, said the British historian Arnold Toynbee in his magisterial 12-volume A Study of History, in which he asked why once thriving civilisations enter a period of decline and eventually collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.
Central to his understanding of why civilisations rise and fall is the concept of adaptability, the capacity to accommodate changing circumstances and unanticipated challenges. When what Toynbee called ‘creative minorities’ – ‘political and managerial elites’ in modern parlance – lose their ability to devise creative solutions to the problems that beset their societies, civilisational decay and even collapse ensue.
Few read A Study of History today. Published between 1934 and 1961, and at around 7,000 pages and more than 3million words, it is a daunting prospect for the modern reader, although highly readable abridgments do exist. Toynbee’s key idea that a civilisation is ultimately responsible for its own demise remains, however, a compelling one, an idea that surely resonates loudly in 2025.
For Toynbee, civilisational demise is accelerated by the incompetence and lack of creative energy among elites. But he places little or no emphasis on the idea that a great civilisation can be destroyed, not just by the mediocrity and enervation of those who rule over it, but by intent, malice aforethought as it were, what legal minds call mens rea, a guilty mind implying a conscious desire to do harm.
This is a deeply troubling idea to say the least. Still, how else can one explain the recent histories of the two nations I know best and love the most: Great Britain and the United States?
Sadly, the former seems increasingly like a lost cause. I pray to God that I am wrong – the recent decision of the UK Supreme Court on the legal status of ‘trans women’ suggests that not everyone there has entirely lost their reason – but no nation of which I am aware, with the possible exception of the Republic of Ireland, is so energetically pursuing its own eradication than the beloved land of my birth. However America, my country of adoption and where I now live, is not to be entirely written off – at least not just yet. There is still a glimmer of hope, however faint, for the nation I have grown to love and which Hegel called the land of the future.
As I have said before in these pages, America dodged a bullet when Donald Trump won the presidential election last November. Had it gone the other way, I would have been tempted to abandon any hope I still had for this country.
With Toynbee in mind, it is easy to see the presidency of Joe Biden as a blueprint for civilisational and national suicide. I am not able to see into the hearts or read the minds of people such as Biden and Kamala Harris, but judging them by what they did during their four years in office leads me to but one conclusion: that they, and many likeminded men and women in the legacy media, academia, professions, corporations, including some of the richest people in the land, enacted and/or supported policies that seemed designed to destroy America. Indeed, were I asked to devise a plan to bring down America, or any functioning nation for that matter, I would immediately begin doing what Biden and his team did during those perilous four years that harmed America possibly beyond repair.
First, I would open the borders, allowing possibly 20million unvetted, low-skilled migrants to enter the country illegally, many with little or no understanding of English, privileging military-age men and unaccompanied minors where possible. The more the merrier.
Then I would encourage those multitudes to settle in urban areas and so-called red states (which elect Republicans), flying them overnight from city to city, where they could compete with indigenous minorities for minimum-wage jobs, thereby placing unbearable burdens on social services such as medical care, housing and education. I would also ensure that as people of colour, which most of them are, they would be afforded the privileges that American largesse offers non-whites, Asians excepted, thereby incurring resentment, often unvoiced out of fear, among the native white population.
Let me see, what else would I do? Ah yes, of course, I would do all in my power to divide Americans along racial, ethnic, sexuality and gender lines, being careful not to discuss that great unmentionable of American life, economic class, the social category that dare not speak its name in this race-obsessed nation.
To further my agenda of dividing Americans, I would ignore the reality that men and women, regardless of race or ethnicity, are sacred individuals made in the image of God, encouraging them instead, as the late Christopher Hitchens put it, ‘to see individuals as groups, based on arbitrary markers like skin pigmentation’, what sociologists call racial essentialism, one of the great curses of the present age.
Then there’s the economy. How about printing trillions of dollars, uttering inanities such as ‘build back better’, and naming the key legislation the Inflation Reduction Act, a use of Orwellian language that surely passeth all understanding? Well, it worked for the Weimar Republic.
To be sure, I wouldn’t stop there. Let’s pretend that there are three or four or possibly more sexes, and that your sex or lack thereof is assigned you at birth and bears no relationship to the gender identity – and the list is long, very long – you may assume, on a whim, at some later stage of your life, even before you enter puberty. Furthermore, introduce gender theory through books and drag queen story hours into America’s schools, focusing especially on the lower grades. The younger and more receptive to this pornographic filth, the better.
It goes without saying that I would work to undermine the military and make America dependent on other nations for its energy, insulting and emasculating those currently serving and discouraging potential recruits in the case of the former; ignoring the fact that this nation is the beneficiary of some of the largest reserves of coal and oil, now demonised as fossil fuels, in the planet, and pretending that America can maintain its status as the world’s most powerful economy by resorting to the rhetoric and language of that most Popperian of pseudoscientific post-Christian secular religions, climate change, endlessly spouting on about the Green New Deal and Net Zero.
I could go on listing the myriad ways in which those associated with the Biden presidency undermined this country. Nothing, it seems, so stimulates the creative juices as the desire to destroy a civilisation. However, the above should suffice for now. I hope I have demonstrated that Joe Biden, or whoever who was pulling his strings, gave it, as we say in America, his best college try.
I wish I could explain why highly privileged and highly credentialled men and women, those who benefit most from the societies they despise and seek to destroy, are seemingly hell-bent on undermining the civilisation that enabled them to rise to levels of unprecedented power, prosperity, and prestige. But I am too simple and insufficiently educated a man to unravel the perverse impulses that are driving us and our beloved civilisation to the brink of destruction.
