by Anthony Esolen.

One of our neighbors in Canada, where we live for part of the year, is thinking of buying the cottage next door, the homestead of an old man who isn't in good health and who hasn't been to that house in a long time. In 2005, when we were new to the neighborhood, I helped him and some men he had hired to shingle his roof, knowing that I'd learn from the job and that I'd have to do the same for my own house soon.

Up there, you have to "butter" the shingles on the inside with tar, or else the winds off the bay will lift them off. Even so, they wear out quickly, as they have done with this house. Water has gotten inside.

When I asked my neighbor whether he was going to fix the house, he told me it had become impossible. "There are ants inside," he said. "The anthills reach from the floor to the level of a sofa, more than two feet high. Everything has rotted out. There's nothing left to work with."

It's got to be cleared away. So also for the property behind it, gone wild with an invasive and pernicious strain of hogweed. That too has to be cleared.

I suppose it is the same with other inventions of man, including cultures. Here is how the ants infest. First, you cannot do what needs to be done to keep things in good order, though you try. Second, you no longer bother to try, though you still know what might be done, had you the strength and the will. Third, you no longer even know what might be done; not only have cultural habits fallen into disuse, but the knowledge they were based upon has gone. Fourth, you fall into a taste for the falling and the fallen; you cannot rebuild, but you no longer want to, though your conscience is uneasy about it.

Finally, you celebrate the corruption. You revel in the rot; you coat what is left of your floors with honey, to help the ants to increase and multiply, and fill your house and subdue it.

I say that the West is in that condition, at the end of the end. Of course, I know very well that there are stirrings of life and health even in the darkest times. Theodoric had Boethius, the greatest scholar of his age, executed on a false charge of treason, but Boethius had planted seeds that would sprout up in a fine harvest long after Theodoric was gathered to his half-barbarian fathers. I am describing a general condition.

Consider a few measures of cultural oblivion. We have college graduates who have not read a single book in their lives. We are not replacing ourselves with children. Marriage is not on the rocks; it hardly gets out of port to begin with. Churches are closing. Ignorance of Scripture, in part bound up with a general ignorance of history and the cultural heritage of Western civilization, is endemic.

Formerly Christian nations, awash in that ignorance, have embraced death as a right to be pursued, as doctors have been corrupted as healers, making money by killing human beings at either end of natural life. Even young people who do remain in the faith hardly know what is to be expected of them as men or as women. And the Internet, a glut of distraction, information, and disinformation, bids fair to overwhelm us in the subhuman.

In this state of widespread breakdown, of natural organs losing their function one by one, what do the leaders of our Church do? Young people don't know what their own sex is, so - let's increase the confusion by smiling at sodomy. People have lost the sense of the sacred, so - let's sneer at a few of the faithful "throwing themselves down" to receive Communion, and suggest that they are hypocrites, which the spiritually sluggish are ever eager to believe.

Almost no great art or music is produced in our time, because we have smothered their wellsprings under trash, and we have done it too as the reflex of ideological contempt for the past, so - let's commission a big modernist chocolate egg to be the altar at Notre-Dame de Paris.

Boys are languishing, and the life expectancy for men has begun to shrink, so - let's play patty-fingers with th...