WHEN THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION (via Tom Morin):

Borrowed time in the botellón (Michael Carlin, May 2004, New Criterion)

I don’t remember having smelled so much hashish in the streets of Madrid on my last research trip here three years ago. This time it seems that there are few sixteen- to twenty-year-olds on the street who are not either rolling or smoking a joint. I happen to live in one of the better neighborhoods of central Madrid, less than a kilometer from Atocha Station, and about five minutes’ leisurely walk from Lope de Vega’s house, the Royal Academy of History, and the convent in which Cervantes is interred. And all of these sites are perfumed by the less than pious odor of the teens’ oily Moroccan weed, usually in full view of the municipal police. That these stoned adolescents are in many ways the principal actors in the political life of today’s Spain was one of the many truths that emerged in the days following the March 11 catastrophe that, as of this writing, has claimed 192 lives.

Of course, not all of Spain’s 1.1 children per fertile woman are smoking dope atop the rubble of the siglo de oro, but such behavior is an integral part of the social matrix within which the youth of Spain interpreted the mass murder of 3/11. [...]

Unlike the U.S., Spain failed to grasp the civilizational importance of its first national tragedy of the twenty-first century. Because of this failure, there will surely be more such tragedies visited upon Spain. At the moment when Spain most needed vigorous national discussion, her intellectual class failed her, and the students allowed themselves to be used as the proxies of demagogues. A frightened electorate had no power to resist the loudest solution on offer. All of this suggests that the terrorists did not err in selecting the weakest wildebeest of the herd. In decrying the attacks, not a few commentators have argued that the Spanish electorate allowed terrorists to become actors in Spain’s political life. This is to miss the forest for the trees: the terrorists saw in Spanish society the volatility and fractiousness that is the precondition for terror’s effectiveness, and they took advantage of it with the foreseeable political consequences.

The brittleness of Spanish political culture, such that it broke when put under the stress of terrorism, cannot be attributed to either terrorists or political opportunists. Such as these can only devour already moribund carrion. It must have been immediately apparent to the terrorists that Spain was living on borrowed time. With one of the lowest fertility rates in the known world, Spanish couples have created a hollow society united by the weakest of links. As Alasdair MacIntyre has so carefully argued, this substitution of sentiment for the more organic societal norms of faith and family straitens all forms of discourse, rendering impossible any substantive moral discussion within society as a whole. What blandishments can such a contraceptive society offer to the only children of Spain’s eco-vanity to make them come in from the bottelón and join in the search for a common good beyond the earnestly felt emotion of the moment? Little in the way of immediate gratification or collective high can be offered to compete with the fraternal thrill of calling a sitting Prime Minister a murderer to his face. The sad fact is that we cannot rely on Spain or the rest of Western Europe for anything but continued moral failure while its citizens are still too self-obsessed to replace their own populations.

No wonder EuroDisney is going under, how can it compete when the entire continent is a fantasy world.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2004 10:55 PM