In the Claremont Review of Books, England's best conservative journalist reviews the latest book by Canada's best conservative journalist: "The Gelded Age--Theodore Dalrymple on Mark Steyn's America Alone".

Very much apropos of the territory that both of the above men frequently explore, James Lileks recently wrote:

I drove home listening to Bob Davis on KSTP; he was revisiting one of his favorite topics, one that mirrors exactly something I’ve felt for some time: the lack of any prominent cultural direction, and the strange incoherent sense of anticipation that lack produces. It’s as if the culture is treading water, with nothing truly new to give it focus and purpose. That’s not exactly a good thing when you’re competing with cultures that have both, in large quantities, and a sense of historical momentum the West has lost. I grapple with this from time to time, usually in the morning; it’s the odd suspicion that the West is exhausted. Not done or over or dead or resigned, but simply exhausted. We live in the end stages of the application of the Enlightenment, at least as applied to our own culture; what now? If you’ve ended debate on the great issues, you’re left with smaller ones, like 720 vs. 1080i; you concern yourself with indistinct dreads and assign to them a moral component; you luxuriate in the hot springs of partisan politics and redefine the issues so the gap between left and right looks like Gog v. Magog territory.

Near the end of his review of Steyn's book, Dalrymple has one response:

The welfare state has sapped all will to what is often mocked as la gloire; but without a notion of glory, without a notion that there is something in human life more worth striving for than universal central heating and television, no great thing is ever achieved. That is one of the reasons why the public architecture in Europe is now so awful: once you have lost the habits of taste, taste itself disappears even when money is available for its exercise.

This is a very urgent book, but I am unsure whether I want to be around to see whether Steyn's pessimism is entirely justified.

Given that Steyn's forecast is surprisingly short-term, I'd like to think I will be around then. But unlike earlier glitteringly technology-oriented forecasts by Clarke and Toffler, I'm also not sure if I'm looking forward to checking how closely Steyn's infinitely gloomier profile of the future ends up becoming reality in a couple of decades.