Submission

Michel Houellebecq's Submission poses a way back from the misery of enlightened progress to a more sensible society that we desire, where the good are rewarded and able to enjoy happiness, allowing parts of civilization to continue upward.

He begins by astutely painting a picture of modernity where our energies are wasted on ideological fantasies and illusions, first with silly education programs and then unrewarding jobs that spend our youth earning trite accolades. We search for interesting things in our communities and big cities, finding only intoxicants and trivial entertainment in a routine that leaves us isolated, lonely, exhausted, and with little prospect of a way out to a better situation because we've developed society into a sickly, low grade contraption.

We accept things have gone wrong, but don't really look for historical inflection points and a way out of the mess. Though the West defeated Marxist governments, Marxist believers gained control of culture and education, teaching their philosophy, word choices, canned debate phrases, and value judgments in place of tradition and critical thinking.

Feminism has triumphed and openly encourages hostile independence from men with predominance of female whims to prevent relationships and families, replacing companionship with a hookup culture that gives welfare for single mothers raising damaged children, paid for by people with jobs.

But all of this is barely held together by systems that are complicated, and thus fragile and doomed to eventual collapse. Because these schemes are artificial, sustaining their fabrication requires great public cost, making them subject to self-destruction when they become exposed as absurd or being quickly dismantled when their vast expense is necessary for redirection towards useful aims.

The grinding strife from lack of commonality with one's neighbors opens opportunity for a new third way to burst through. In Houellebecq's story, an election comes due with low interest in the parties of the day proposing lackluster candidates with an unenthusiastic reception, while a new Islamic party offers a respectable and charismatic leader with moderate views. To form a compromise government, the Islamic party gains support from a minority leftist party that wishes to weakly share power, and the democratically triumphant party institutes Islamic law and begins rearranging France into a European-Muslim hybrid model it intends to replicate across Europe and beyond into a new high civilization everywhere its population is surging.

Wealthy Saudi donors are used to fund a prestigious replacement of higher education, paying teachers substantially higher salaries, though requiring them to convert to Islam to keep their jobs. This has the side effect of allowing them wives and families, as is traditional in Islam but increasingly rare in the West.

This leaves the reader wondering about the recent undesired changes that imposed multi-culturalism and third-world immigration as a replacement population, with the ominous Orwellian slogan "diversity is our strength" aggressively asserted as a bluff to prevent rational consideration that its opposite is true.

Multiculturalism ends shared values, standards, agreement, heritage, and community.

Our previous standard of high culture has been replaced by entertainment and normal lives seem out of reach. For all this misery, dysfunctional civilization, and corroding society, we were promised tremendous benefits not available to undiverse generations, yet we have nothing to show from these promises and the massive losses pushed on us. For everything taken away, we should at least have servants, concubines, palaces, and more money than we could ever spend, no longer needing jobs but choosing to spend our days and nights on our interests and with our large families.

Instead, social integrity was destroyed and intelligence is in rapid decline, indicating a transformation to a third-world future where at best a few remnants might preserve themselves and their wealth while the remainder turns into an identical copy of the rest of the failing world.

Overall, we realize that we gave away our high civilization and the riches we worked many generations to create in exchange for nothing. Our descendants will only be bequeathed tales about what we once were, had, and could do, before we changed everything and watched our society fall apart for the sake of delusional ideology we could not stop from spreading.

Houellebecq shortens the cycle of despair with a quick electoral chance to Islamic rule instead of a long Western decline that sees the consequences of current ideology taken to its logical conclusions. Not just for stylish reasons is this a good choice, as it's easy to argue that their appearance is proof that the foundation is already diseased or dead, for in no healthy system could such ideas appear and not be ruthlessly savaged for their short-sightedness.

A benevolent Muslim takeover is an unusual route to get past modernity's enfeeblement, and indisputably would create flourishing households. Though this method is not much different than wishing for visiting space aliens to impose enlightenment and a kind dictatorship, we know Muslims are real and have households. Continuing further in the current direction of society offers little hope and more darkness, especially given the power of politicians whose motivations are not aligned with the interests of citizens.

How bad could Islam be? It's a well demonstrated method by which we could once again have wives, families, homes, and stability. A deliberate implosion to allow conversion and takeover seems from a distance to be a wild Hail Mary pass waging everything on a lucky outcome. But sometimes a Hail Mary works, and at least shows we still dream about a few of the good things all previous generations were able to enjoy before we gave them away for nothing.