Dreher on Decline, Fall, and What Then: the Habsburgs and Today

Rod Dreher has a thought-provoking post reflecting on Joseph Roth's 1932 novel The Radetzky March, which narrates the decay and collapse of the Habsburg empire and society, culminating in WWI, through the story of one doomed aristocratic family:

      What makes Radetzsky resonate so deeply is that the story it tells is a universal one, though it happens to be set in a particular time and place. It is a story about the effect of time on all human institutions and ways of seeing the world. It’s impossible to read Radetzsky without wondering if our own liberal democratic institutions and ways of ordering our experiences are declining as surely as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy — and we can’t see it clearly because we are caught up inside it, and we have powerful internal confirmation biases telling us that something this fine should be eternal....

      The problem is that the people who would have been capable of making the kinds of changes that might have saved the system in some form were incapable of thinking outside the system. Consider how hard this would be for anybody, in any place and time. As Kierkegaard said, life has to be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.

      Think about how the Republican Party, for example, could not see Trump coming, even though the signs were there.... Or think beyond the GOP, to the entire system. We can see that big, big changes need to be made, especially economically. But where is the will to make the changes? And who knows exactly what to do? We should also see, but many do not, that the way we are living in general is unsustainable. But we aren’t at the crisis point yet.

Much more follows: about Patrick Deneen's new book Why Liberalism Failed, and, as one might expect, how this relates to the "Benedict option."