Civilization Requires Having and Maintaining Standards
Decay and Degeneration are No Virtue
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![[AUDIO] Civilization Is Synonymous with Standards](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Cv2U!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F179567091%2Fbb886837-ed03-45bb-b91c-711626b60f59%2Ftranscoded-1763741482.png)
One of the near-universal features of our world is decay.
Proper and distinguished grammar has descended into abbreviation-filled slop and the near-Ebonics language of the internet.
Architecture has gone from reflecting a community’s taste, vitality, and wealth—a feature of the Victorian and Edwardian Ages—to being a way of depressing the spirit and rubbing our faces in the unnatural.
Statuary has followed a like trajectory, as have other forms of public “art”, namely billboards and other advertisements. Those have descended to the point of reveling not just in sloth and gluttony, but in perversions and rejections of nature.
All of that, from architecture to art, is horrifying and a sign of decline. As J Chase Davis put it, “Healthy civilizations have standards and norms of beauty. The degradation of beauty or even worse the celebration of ugliness is a sign of civilization [in] crisis and decline.”1
Then, of course, there is the clothing people wear, which represents a similar level of decline.
In the past, clothing was meant to project power, dignity, and social graces; how you presented yourself to the world was a sign of inner order and respect for those around you. As my friend Johann Kurtz wrote of John Hancock, the Boston aristocrat integral to the Revolution, in his fantastic Leaving a Legacy, “The purpose of fine dress and living is to project taste, beauty, order, care, and hierarchy out into one’s community, that they might be inspired to pursue the same virtues.”
That, of course, is long gone. Now we have a clothing environment better characterized by the picture below: the sullen and surly grimace of the third world glaring out from behind layers of fat, a mop of unkempt hair, and spandex that seems to be serving the purpose of a plastic wrapper on a sausage. It is certainly not an aspirational look, nor a way of inspiring virtue, and it is exceedingly prevalent.
What we have seen, in short, is a drift from the high civilization for which our ancestors fought so hard and the civilizational vitality represented by a world of refinement and cultivation to a world defined by its vulgarity, in every sense of the term. Such an attitude matters for more reasons than aesthetics.
For one, it has made every public space nearly uninhabitable.
Take, for example, airlines. It’s now trite to say, but men used to wear suits, or at least sport coats, when taking the plane. The meals served were relatively good. The passengers behaved with dignity and manners appropriate to the civilized men and women they represented themselves as being. It was a civilized experience befitting the civilization that had conquered gravity and could send hundreds of people at a time hurtling across oceans and continents at nearly the speed of sound…or, if they paid for the Concorde, faster than it.
But that was then. In the here and now, air travel is defined by fist fights, prickly flight attendants, a total absence of manners (such as a recent incident involving a woman playing videos out loud on her phone for the flight2), and scammers trying to take advantage of accommodations offered thanks to our better nature. The Concorde is long gone. And so frumpy third-worlders shrink-wrapped in spandex trade blows and rip off each other’s wigs while taking the civilizational marvel that is air travel entirely for granted even as it falls to pieces around them.
Such is what Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy noted in the video below, which was posted to his official account, saying, “Traveling has become more uncivilized!”3 Indeed.
The same story could be told of any public space. Who today would go to Six Flags Over Georgia in Atlanta? Malls imploded for obvious reasons during the George Floyd national flagellation. A visit to Costco often feels like a trip to a street market in New Delhi,4 and it is probably the least degenerated of the grocery stores.
Even white tablecloth restaurants, if public, are now likely to feature kids on iPads, male patrons wearing hats indoors and graphic tees rather than anything with a collar, female patrons in inappropriately revealing outfits topped by a mound of makeup, and the great throng of them rudely shouting at the wait staff. Golf, too, is declining as it becomes more popular with the type of person who sees no problem showing up to the course obviously drunk while looking slovenly and behaving abominably; the gentlemanly nature of it is, outside of certain private venues, long gone5 and quite replaced by “Barstoolification”.6
There are exceptions, of course, but high civilization is most likely the term that would be used to describe the world that has vanished rather than the world that is our own.
The reason for our world of slop7 is that we have forgotten one of the key things our ancestors remembered, as it is something we have been taught to forget: having civilization means having standards.
The natural state of man is not building great cathedrals, building roads and rail that cross continents, or even behaving politely. All of that requires immense willpower and cultivation over centuries. It requires an intentional effort to learn and embody refinement,8 though doing so is far more difficult and burdensome than drifting into slovenliness.
Without that effort, we drift toward our natural state: life as mere biological matter, growing like yeast—without purpose or direction—while packed into some version of the favela or mud hut. That favela and its horrors are the opposite of what was once our world, and, as we refuse to maintain our standards, it is toward what our world is drifting.
That is not to say one is to be overrefined or overmannered. The limpwristed, wilting flower of a dilettante is about as bad as the gaggle of Formerly Undervalued Americans engaging in a spandex-covered fistfight on Spirit Airlines. Neither is a picture of civilizational vitality and high culture, though the two fail in different ways.
No, the ideal is that described by CS Lewis in The Necessity of Chivalry, as my friend Chivalry Guild has noted: “The important thing about the chivalric ideal is the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or a happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth."
Such is difficult. It takes a great deal of effort, intentionality, and time. It is, as such, only possible when standards regarding everything from dress to manners, social expectations to one’s duties as a citizen, are maintained and enforced. Slackness in maintaining them—to allow the prole drift and similar types of social degeneration to occur—is what leads to our present drift to the favela and tendency to accept behavior once only exhibited by favela world inhabitants. The sort of behavior exhibited on Maury, as Fischer King recently drew attention to on X,9 is a good example: what’s shown in the video below would never have been tolerated in the old America, yet here we are, and the Third Worldification of our country is to blame.
That is something that even many on our side struggle to admit, as can be seen in the “discourse” surrounding matters like Home Owners Associations, or HOAs. Are they ideal? No, they are an attempt at replacing a functional community with a list of rules so as not to run afoul of the Civil Rights Act.10 But to call them “tiny tyrannies”11 that serve no purpose flies in the face of reason.
Social shaming no longer works, for society as once understood has been destroyed; the alternatives are rules exercised by organizations like HOAs, or degenerate anarchy…as shown by the sort of grotesque Halloween displays in which the tasteless now indulge. As Auron MacIntyre put it,12 “The natural policing mechanism for community standards used to be the ugly look you got from Mrs, Smith when you let your lawn go and allowed your paint to chip. Now you need a council of aggressively litigious pedants to keep chaos at bay.” Indeed.
This is a recurrent problem. Take the recent outrage over health inspectors shutting down an illegal, unsanitary taco stand by pouring bleach in the food so that it couldn’t be sold.13 Such is the obvious thing to do. The taco stand wasn’t licensed, wasn’t sanitary, was dodging fines, and was otherwise doing all things one might expect of a business that shows a complete lack of respect for the law. Yet further, it was doing so at the cost of law-abiding businesses that do as they ought: as Don Shift noted on X,14 “These illegal food vendors not only are a potential disease vector but make our streets look sh*tty and take business away from restaurants that pay rent, taxes, license fees, etc. End the third worldization by any means.” On the other side, the usual suspects crowed about how it was unfair to force people to follow the rules when they don’t want to, though such people will also likely be horrified when their pretty little neighborhood turns into the red light district covered with Congolese and Gambian street peddlers that is AOC’s filth-covered NYC district.15
That is the choice. Either we can have a flourishing, high civilization characterized by ordered liberty and cultivation, or we can get the Third World and the refuse-covered, anarchic favela by which it is characterized. If we want the former, that means we need to enforce the standards that create and maintain it.
Civilization does not come from nothing. Civilization is order. It is standards, and the enforcement of them. If we want to keep it, if we want to keep the encroaching favela at bay, that means embracing those standards. As I’ve said before, be the hierarchy you wish to see in the world. Represent it with every fiber of your being.
Our enemies want to smash civilization and replace it with the sullen and surly, grimacing face of the cult of the Stone Age that is the Third World. We can still defeat them, but doing so will require immense force of will, and mean resolutely sticking by civilizational standards.
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I thought this was noted well here: https://x.com/Bowtiedplayer/status/1991560858460397905
A great book on this is The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities by Richard Bushman
A few of my peeves:
People putting the f-word on their car.
People advertising their depraved sexual fetish(es) on their car; I'm looking at YOU, "Spankerbell."
People using profanity in front of/around children.
People dressing like homeless mental patients while in public.
People smoking pot in public/driving while smoking pot.
Hookers wandering street corners in less clothes than strippers.
People who assume owning a larger vehicle means they get the right of way, no matter what.
People waving guns around because another drove in a manner the gun-waver didn't like.
Loud, rude, and obnoxious people shouting at everyone. I'm looking at you, blacks.
People buried so deeply in their phones, they walk into you.
Worse yet, people buried deeply in their phones while driving.
People who have to play their music so loudly, everyone else HAS to hear it.
People using 'handicapped' as an excuse to be rude to others. Looking at you, WalMartian fatties riding your battery-powered scooters.
Homeless people shitting, pissing, and exposing themselves in public.
Homeless people drinking in public.
RV squatters living on other people's land.
Homosexuals insisting their 'lifestyle' be 'normalized.' One cannot force the abnormal to become normal.
And so on...
There are a lot of things done nowadays I would never have seen as a child. I recall public intoxication netted you three days automatically in Lynnwood, WA, where I grew up. Profanity in a window of a car? They'd pull you over and write you up. No, we've degenerated badly in just the years of my lifetime.
Inexcusable.
You should add a tip jar. That was a moving exposure of the decay of our civilization.
There's no graffiti in a righteous city.
**Update** I upgraded to founder subscription. I want to support this blog. Excellent.