Wrechard @ 132 “But I think the real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness.”

I’m not sure if we can be called a civilization any more, if by “civilization” you mean a sense of cultural continuity arising from the past and extending through the present into the future. Robert Pogue Harrison explores the theme more fully in his “The Dominion of the Dead”–civilizations, cultures, begin and are sustained by the sacral spaces of our interred ancestors; moreover, there is a deeply intuited identity between the dead and the unborn of our future. (Joseph Bottum has explored this theme as well.) To say that our elites have no sense of Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” is rather the understatement; more to the point, it means that they have no sense of the future, either.

That a mad profligacy would result comes as no surprise, but what really seems uncanny is the resulting lack of fear. I think that’s the reason why this generation has been so absorbed by the thought of future environmental catastrophes–it’s simply an effort to **feel** a future that their solipsism has put forever beyond their grasp. Despite the histrionics, it is play-acting, something to pass the time between womb and tomb. When the wall of water rises above Numenor they will count it a relief.