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Concerning the discussion at a recent thread about non-judgmentalism, a VFR reader wrote: discussion at a recent thread about non-judgmentalism, a VFR reader wrote: Non-judgmentalism, rather than necessarily always being a principled thing, can be sort of the lazy man’s or the obtuse man’s or the man-who-lacks-moral-fiber’s easy way out…. People like that obviously will fail to see the absolute inappropriateness of calling Hitler a “tragic” figure. Did you see that 1960s film, “The Time Machine”? Remember how the Eloi were—unable to feel emotions, or to care when someone fell into the river and was drowning? Clearly, H.G. Wells must have observed, at the start of the 20th century when he wrote that, the beginnings of what we are witnessing today in this regard, because he feared that the weak, emotionless Eloi were what people were evolving into. In reply, I sent him the following excerpt on the same theme from an unpublished manuscript written in the mid 1990s: In reply, I sent him the following excerpt on the same theme from an unpublished manuscript written in the mid 1990s: America’s White Middle Class as the Eloi—

as human cattle waiting to be eaten by the Other by Lawrence Auster What are the practical results of this pervasive nihilism on white, middle-class Americans? What does the human product of a nihilist culture look like? As white America has progressively lost its belief in God, in objective truth and morality, in law, in nationhood and in race, whites have acquired an increasingly bland, complacent, pacific aspect. This seems to be true not only in the United States but in the white West as a whole. One is especially struck by this enervated quality in contemporary whites when observing them at their leisure, on Sundays, or on their innumerable vacations, or when they are shopping. In the all-white or predominantly white pockets of society, the environment is orderly and peaceful and aesthetically attractive, but something vital is missing. I have noticed it when strolling in downtown Chicago, or on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on a Sunday afternoon, or watching on tv the audience of a July 4th concert of Broadway show tunes (not traditional patriotic songs) held on Capital Hill in 1996. Even the relatively refined whites (i.e. those who avoid the aggressively nihilistic “grunge” look of today’s pop culture) have their own, passively nihilistic style—dressed down, neat but nondescript. There is the predominance of t-shirts and shorts, the absence of clothing that conveys dignity or a large sense of self, the vaguely unisex fashions that deny the true scale of man and woman. Whites seem have lost the energy, confidence and leadership qualities that once created a civilization. Absent is any sense of the long views and great plans, the intensity and faith that once bestrode a continent. There is no look of destiny, or even of character, in the faces of contemporary whites. Even the “WASPy” upper-class types on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, for all their supposed elitism, do not have the aspect of leaders of society, but of an enervated clique maintaining a residue of manners. It might be said that they have declined into a mere ethnic group; but even that would be an overstatement. What they are is simply consumers. And in this peaceful, orderly, and insipid aspect of today’s middle-class white people, they bear an eerie resemblance to the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine—those pretty, passive, dimwitted creatures in the distant future who laze about peacefully in the sun waiting for the night to come, when each night the beastly Morlocks, coming up from their underground hiding places, seize and eat one of them. The graceful and attractive Eloi, whom Wells’s protagonist at first believes to be the masters of this future world, turn out to be the mere sheep or cattle of the Morlocks.





Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 20, 2003 02:18 PM | Send

