Farewell party for the dying West

Marcello Veneziani on Olympic spectacle

Commentary on the the destructive hybris of Dionysianism, nothing sacred and profound.

First the blasphemous farce broadcast worldwide, then the rapid and choral indignation, finally the silence and everything swallowed up in routine, in the game of roles. Next one, and on at this pace towards nothingness. Once the clamor and the indignation for the grotesque vernissage of the Olympics have passed, and while we wait for the next “transgression”, let's try to say something beyond the contingent fact and the insult, deserved, to its creator and its promoter, from whom we can mockingly take away the final and reduce him to Macrò.
What is it that depresses and outrages in this repeated outrage to common sense, to religious and civil tradition, to sport and to the family?
First of all the anxiety to amaze and to rape the inherited reality, consolidated by the experience of long generations and long shared in the civilization from which we come. Cupio dissolvi , the pleasure of dissolving everything that had been consolidated over the centuries, that represented the popular basis of a shared vision and the foundation of every society. This tendency to invert and subvert reality and common perception is precisely the nihilistic seal of our time. To overturn everything that has been believed and thought so far to reaffirm our superiority and our autonomy with respect to those who preceded us. To disrespect, to ridicule to show the abysmal difference between us contemporaries who have the absolute privilege of living in the supreme and final Time, of the infinite global present, and them, the prisoners of blind, infamous eras. 
Secondly, the perverse desire to rage against those we know will not make you pay. It is the syndrome of the donkey that kicks the dying lion, once the feared sovereign of the animal kingdom; the same thing happens to the Christian religion, which has been in decline for some time and is sometimes inclined to cultivate its euthanasia in the generic universal love for oneself in place of God. If Christianity surrenders, it is easy to mock it, parody it, pillory it even in its highest and most dramatic aspects, such as the Last Supper. Offering, in addition, an insult to Leonardo, who in France is jealously defended at the Louvre with his Mona Lisa. Neo-paganism is only the alibi of a cultured disguise: there is only the destructive hybris of Dionysianism, nothing sacred and profound. There is no Dionysus, at most Ozpetek, with his films about trans families.
Easy and cowardly to mock a religion that does not react; as many say, try doing it with Muslims. Those who have tried, like the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, have paid with their lives. Hitting Christianity, as has been done for decades (I remember Madonna's blasphemous concerts but they were not the first nor the last) is like shooting the Red Cross; you do not incur any kind of sanction or reaction, no fatwa, except the short wave of indignation that then falls within the promotional bubble of the event, helps to make people talk about it, to multiply the publicity. In short, it benefits the event.
Thirdly, there is the replacement of the family, from the Holy Family to the natural family, with gay pride, transgender society and the universal declaration of new rights: I am not what nature, reality, history, tradition say but what I want to be, that is, I am what I feel, indeed I am what I feel now, then I can change again. It is no longer a question of respecting everyone's choices, accepting one's own and others' inclinations or simply recognizing the private sphere of freedom, on which one can agree; nor even of protecting minorities from any abuse, mockery and aggression, because there are laws, courts, and police forces to do so. But replacing reality, nature, history, tradition with subjective desire and its way of seeing. Therefore not the acceptance of diversity but the affirmation of a pre-eminence of that diversity (to the detriment of many other differences) over the family, identities, the natural diversity of the sexes and procreation according to nature. Gay supremacism. That is the present and the future; everything else is the past, to be erased, reviled and ridiculed. 
And this ideology is ultimately packaged in a rainbow wrapper in which fiction prevails over reality, the show over real life, the circus over human relationships, the carnival over everyday life. No longer the proverb semel in anno licet insanire, that is, once a year it is permissible to go mad, but semper in anno licet insanire; in fact that licet is not right, because it almost implies a concession, a special temporary permission, when instead it is a peremptory right. It is the affirmation, also on the level of gender and human nature, that the virtual replaces the real, as already happens in other areas of our technological and global society. The fictitious, the surreal, the hallucination drive out the authentic, the genuine, the truthful.
No one has the courage to seriously transgress by pillorying or questioning the global capitalist system, its power relations, its absolute predominance. It is easier to rage against the fixed and defenseless target, because it has already been crucified.
Adding these factors and their circus-like representation, the result is a kind of farewell party to civilization, an ostentatious, euphoric, sometimes hysterical declaration of civilization dead and its legacy joyfully scattered to the winds. Not only accepting, hastening and dramatizing the decadence of our civilization, but reading it as a relief, a liberation, an emancipation from atavistic chains and obtuse pastisms. As if nature were only a convention, an ideological shell and a primitive stage of the past. And not as the substratum of our presence in the world.
One can even come to accept the decline of one's own civilization, the sunset of the West; but that one should celebrate on its ruins and toast its death, is the most idiotic, infamous and self-destructive thing there could be. 

The Truth – July 30, 2024