Grim, perhaps, but quite true — Entropy is physical law. The simple loss of heat and energy and the dissipation of physical and biological complexity is death’s ineluctable writ — and it will claim all things. From trees to sea urchins to bluejays to your own best friend, the simple reality that all of them will die is not a comforting thought to most. And no doubt, entropy’s indefatigable hand unravels not only living creatures, but structures, mountains, and even the machinations of man and his many-faced anthropologies. Indeed, it claims even the greatest of civilizations, swallowing them whole with all of the finality of gravity. The cyclical birth and death of civilizations is a relatively common theme throughout the study of history — found in its most unfiltered form in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and in Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and more recently in Peter Turchin’s 2009 book, Secular Cycles — and yet it is seldom an element of our everyday philosophy of life.
But perhaps it should be. For just as in the life of an individual man, the recollection and admission that he will some day die — an idea known to Roman Catholics as “Memento Mori” — serves as a yardstick against which to hold his daily activities. In the case of religious souls, it is often the fear of judgement and hell accompanying death that reminds a man to banish sin and to treat his fellow man with fraternal compassion. These feats might not be able to be mustered without the daily contemplation of the soul’s ultimate fate that the great world religions so readily inculcate in their adherents. In this sense, the remembrance of death and the physical laws underpinning its own warrant can drive a man not only to piety, but to holiness and brotherly love. In some cases, it can even drive a man to greatness.
For even outside the realm of religion, a man’s idea of his legacy can also unlock in him a drive that is essentially underpinned by the acceptance of the undeniable truth that he will someday die. An immortal has no need to build great citadels, nor and desire to plant luscious orchards or bear strong children — and a young buck who has not yet contended with his own mortality is not liable to to any but that which suits his immediate fancy. And so it is that the Memento Mori of the old Catholic mystics — and similar ideas regarding entropy, breakdown, and mortality as they are found in other faiths — has not only driven men to strive for God, but for legacy and greatness. The sum total of their efforts, all in tandem and alongside one another, has been the creative force underpinning civilizations for time immemorial.
It is critical to note, however, that acceptance and fear are not one in the same — in fact, they are diametrically opposed even where they appear similarly on their surface. Quickly, the stoic hunger for virtue and heavenly edification in death can bleed over into the territory of fear. Once one’s drive for legacy, greatness, and piety take on a life of their own outside death, they languish, and are as toxic water to a sapling tree. Almost without notice, if a man is a sluggard or inattentive, the drive in him to leave a legacy of greatness in death can become divorced from death, measured instead against the imperatives of this life and this world. One finds, in constructing his citadel, that his neighbor’s is larger, more elaborate, more impenetrable — and so it is that a man’s fear of inadequacy against his neighbor may lead him to anxiety which is rooted only in the concerns of this world and its life. Or, for the subject of vastly complex bureaucracies, the everyday worries that these instutitons generate in man’s spirit can distract him, eclipsing any concern but that of the immediate fulfillment of his earthly obligations.
So seriously can this cancer distort and pervert a civilization that entire societies can be remade in self-negating form inasmuch as the fear of death is no longer central to its drive. Gauche races for pure profit at any cost, feverish striving for excess and status, even open revolt against God and fantasies of immortality and permanent youth, all of these are the true drivers of war and strife on the grand scale, and likewise, of despair and suicide in the biographies of men. Indeed, so seriously can such anxiety give rise to a nihilistic, suicidal impulse in men that it can level even the greatest civilizations; leading them to ruin, decay, and death.
This is quite clearly the case with Western civilization in the contemporary era. Unmoored from the mystical traits of the one who remembers and reflects on death, the Western ideal fades into an endlessly boiling cauldron of stifled effort and ambition sapped of any ultimate consequence or meaning. In mere generations, we’ve gone from possessing the jewel of death’s memory and the bracing tonic of entropy’s dark truths to forgetting them entirely, denying them, straying from them — and therefore it is natural that the youngest generations of our era are in so sense optimistic about the West. In fact, most of them seem to find it cruel, dark, ugly, and not at all worth saving. They are, in my estimation, not to be blamed for this at all — it is the generations who departed from the simple acknowledgement of death who set this ugly turn of events into motion. And it seems unquestionably true to me that any iteration of the West worth preserving will involve all of the stoic benevolence that men to whom Memento Mori is central possess.
Such a mentality is not machinic — but fundamentally romantic. And nothing kills romance quite like machines and their social corollary — bureaucracies. Etched into both, there is an assumption that man could in theory be all-knowing and infinitely capable of gratifying his urges as he pleases; this is the radical opposite of the romantic, who knows nothing but the natural truths of his mortal life, celebrating them when they shimmer with beauty — and reflecting soberly upon the inadequacies of his mind and form as he humbles himself before God and death.
For ultimately, though the oak tree ages into a rotting hunk of ancient wood and bark after so many decades, and indeed becomes soil — the basic genetic plan of the oak’s essence remains written into every acorn. It is a time-tested plan, crafted by God, weathered by years unto the thousands on virtually every continent. And in similar fashion, the myth, the saga, the poem, the Scripture — these are our plans, and those that have failed to withstand the test of the ages have withered. One can clearly see, with an eye for historical and literary study, the sorts of ideals which tend to outlast the feverish winds of mankind’s many eras. It is our duty to embrace them and hold them at the forefront of our everyday efforts on earth.
This ‘essence’ is at the heart of every worthwhile thing a human being can engage in. The stultifying and worldly pursuits, the vapid anxieties of the unmoored heart, the constant chase for ends which will leave no mark nor contribute to the mythopoeic and divine truths of mankind and his progeny — these are the things which are to be left behind by any thinking person. Or, where they are simple corollaries to one’s larger, more essential ambition, they are to be contended with as the payment of a toll is — summarily, quickly, without fanfare or excessive worry. To focus on them is to take the first step into sputtering madness; it is the first landing on the unholy staircase to nihilism and civilizational death.
These turns of phrase may seem dramatic, and yet when one takes either course to its logical conclusion, they are liable to find some truth in this analysis. Whatever a man does without memory of his death is liable to be a triviality on the ultimate scale — wherever he has acknowledged his own mortality and has endeavored to formulate a wise, beautiful, and hopeful response to it, a man is liable to propel the essence of his world onward in a most dutiful and even beautiful fashion. Without this, not only does a man die while still living — a civilization does the same in rather short order.
Therefore it is not expansion nor prosperity nor political reform that is capable of shoring up any civilization that lists and heaves ever downward — it is mythos, romanticism, divinity, and the furious face of a man who hurtles toward his own death as one who is a living, walking poem. Such a disposition cannot be composed of ossified mythological artifact, nor can it be borne of dispassionate, detached study of the essence of faith and civilization’s pillars — it demands that they must be lived with abandon, and taken to their mythopoeically maximal form in the everyday lives of men.
This — and to my mind, virtually nothing else — is the central task of our era, and we ignore it at our peril. To accept death, to weep for what will be lost only once — and to then fly into the world of creation, legacy, virtue, and beauty with complete abandon, insisting upon it over and against all worldly niggling and legalism. Without this, the West will not only die — Westerners now living today shall lead their own children into the worst of wildernesses.