The weekend's must-read

David Solway at PJ Media has a piece on why he continues to write.  It says pretty much anything I'd have to say about the matter.  The only difference is that I still teach, albeit on an adjunct basis.

That's how his piece gets started.  He talks about fielding the question of why he continued to write and teach given his view that Western civilization's situation was probably hopeless:

Well, I replied, there was the little matter of earning a living. But apart from that desideratum, pedagogy and writing were by no means anomalous or contradictory, since even though I knew the vessel was foundering and could not be saved or hauled back to port for retrofitting, I was intent on helping to keep it afloat for as long as possible. Teaching and writing, I said, were essentially pumping, or bailing. I felt it worthwhile to work to delay the inevitable; better to go down later than sooner.

Things have changed. I quit teaching some time ago, convinced of the uselessness of the profession in the brain-cramped intellectual environment of a nearly defunct civilization. Such plenary impoverishment is daunting and probably irreversible. The canard of “green energy,” the massive “climate change” scam that has co-opted vast segments of the Western public, the relentless advance of blasphemy laws putting a chill on freedom of speech and debate, courts declaring that truth is no defense in cases where offense is given, the campaign against the unborn (abortion on demand) and, in some countries, the elderly (selective euthanasia), the politicized university as a locus of indoctrination rather than learning, the sentimental empowerment of the transgendered and the two-spirited who must be accorded every social benefit as if they represented the quintessence of human progress, the successful feminist war against common manhood, the setting in place of redistributive economics as a form of legalized theft, open-door immigration policies for illegal aliens or members of primitive, antithetical cultures—all these developments are signs of rampant and likely terminal intellectual and social decay.

I confess that I sometimes feel like popular Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø’s protagonist Harry Hole, disillusioned, down on his luck, aware that justice is just ice and that nothing is ever really going to work out satisfactorily, if at all. Cases may be solved, but things invariably go from bad to worse. I go on writing, however—pursuing “the case”—out of habit, reflex, need, and the enjoyment of rotating sentences on a rhetorical lathe—in other words, out of self-indulgence, qualified, be it said, by an overlay of sobriety. I think of John Jay Chapman’s 1900 commencement address at Hobart College: “Never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose.…Speak out always.” I insist on retaining the power of speech but I have no illusions about the ultimate effect or influence of speaking out always. In fact, I have now come to feel profoundly that Western civilization is not worth saving; it has signed its own death warrant with a proud flourish. If I may paraphrase from Terry Brooks’ adventure/fantasy series The Heritage of Shannara, the elves have gone from Westland for good and we are at the mercy of the demons of Morrowindl.

"Retaining the power of speech."  There are things that at this late hour must be said, and there are not many willing to say them.

It costs more every day.  Those who have cast their lot with the great leveling enterprise of the Left may or may not be in the majority, but they are determined to wipe us out.  Making sure ideas and principles - honest-to-God ideas and principles, not faddish notions and cult creeds - get introduced into post-American societal discussion is up to us.  Otherwise, it's all Party jargon and state-sanctioned parameters on thought, speech and behavior.

So we keep the words coming.