The Weakness of the West
For the most part, however, our leaders are like lower-class Hamlets, the proletarians of impotent rumination. Unable to decide upon a rational and meaningful reply to unfolding events, they continue either to vacillate or to remain numb and torpid, engaging in one or another form of self-justifying evasion. More committees must be struck, more “talks” must be held, more time is needed, and more “resolutions” must be compiled and passed whose words die on the page and vanish unmourned. Hamlet, of course, said it best:
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment…
…lose the name of action.
And William Blake crystallized the notion in The Proverbs of Hell: “He who desires and acts not, breeds pestilence.”
The West now finds itself the victim of its own essential and defining quality as a civilization. Unlike the civilizations of the Orient, Western thought at its best and most characteristic is engaged in the noble adventure to seek out truth, which accounts for the major scientific breakthroughs of the modern era, a stellar literature and grand historiographic projects that attempt to probe and comprehend the vast currents of world events. In the course of time the quest inexorably begins to undermine its own foundations, finding that truth is asymptotic, ultimately inaccessible or even non-existent on the one hand, or on the other, that it demands ever-prolonged investigation either because it is insolubly complex or because the seeker subjectively fears the consequences it entails.
The result is a kind of intellectual embolism, a clotting of the arteries of thought. The modern Oedipus concludes that the truth is that there is no truth—this is the nowhere land his inquiries have taken him to. His conduct is thus based on whim, appetite, fantasy or ungrounded hope and usually culminates in disaster. The modern Hamlet refrains from proceeding in order to avoid compromising himself or losing the perquisites he may have to surrender by committing to a distinct and irreversible course of action. His condition of lassitude or paralysis also tends to culminate in disaster. And this is pretty well where the West finds itself today, between the Scylla of nihilism and the Charybdis of passivity.
If I am not mistaken, this is the brunt of Mansur’s thesis. And he would likely agree that, barring a far-reaching cultural reorientation, there is no way out of this dilemma—in the “true” etymological sense of the word. What would be needed is a genuine educational revolution, a neo-Enlightenment, in which the twin vices of hubris and lethargy are eradicated and the twin virtues of humility and courage could take root: the humility to acknowledge that there is such a thing as discernible truth existing outside the narrow and confining circle of rampant subjectivity, and the courage to act decisively when circumstances leave us no plausible alternative.
Perhaps only a profound crisis or debacle, a calamity we cannot escape in which our lives and our society are threatened with collapse or military defeat and we are brought to the brink—perhaps only this can issue in the restoration of common sense and a determination to retrieve what made us great. Perhaps only the advent of catastrophe can rescue an Oedipus gone awry or a Hamlet gone rogue, one having gone too far and the other not far enough.
wow! Really a lot of great big words and stuff I never heard about. Color me as an ignorant garden maintainer…Now. The simple problem we have is that we don’t believe we can demand that OUR people’s tax dollars NOT be spent on regimes that don’t support our foundational documents. There are boojillion examples but Gaza works. Why are we sending any money to a regime that does not support the First Amendment? Using that bright line almost all our foreign aid (to corporations?) would expire today and only our friends in freedom would be eligible for our aid. NO AID, NO VISAS for ANY country that will not enshrine the First Amendment!!! Spend your time answering that and I think we’ll wind up with a better world but I predict you won’t.
Right as far as it goes, but the underlying reason, IMO, is an inability to apply logic and common sense to governmental matters, such as domestic and foreign policy. Somehow our education system has gone over to the side of feelings vs logic in the so-called social sciences and the fine arts. Because we live in a republic, this was a catastrophe. I saw it all happen, even in my early years maybe helped it happen, but I still don’t have a good grasp of why. If it will ever be explained, it will take someone like a Victor Hanson to do it.
It is worse than that: we now have a couple of generations whose education has taught them that logic is just a patriarchal, oppressive concept used to constrain creativity and that there is no such thing as “common” sense, what is sense to me is sense, what is right for me is right. You cannot build a society that not only has no shared ideas but rejects the notion that ideas can be shared. Post-modernism pervades our political thinking and is destroying us.
Our Lord, Jesus Christ, explained it, Jn.8.31-32- If we live in obedience to Him, we will know the Truth, and that Truth will free us from sin. Those who promulgate the false notion that one cannot know the truth are, in effect, calling the Son of God a liar. They may find that troublesome on Judgment Day.
In the interim, if one cannot know the truth and/or if there is no truth, then we cannot know that we cannot know that we cannot know the truth. The reductio ad absurdum is that no one can know anything. So, lets close the institutions of learning and all go out and get laid and stay loaded.
Subjective existentialism, by whatever name, is mental diarrhea. Real people don’t waste their time on it. Loadies and the promiscuous use it as a copout for their sinful ways. But even such really know better.
“Perhaps only a profound crisis or debacle, a calamity we cannot escape in which our lives and our society are threatened with collapse or military defeat and we are brought to the brink”
Very insightful. I hope you are wrong, but my gut tells me you are right. The best of our youth are in our military whereas the other 95% are parasitic hobgoblins sitting on the couch and cursing thier mothers. You can glimpse these 30 year old adolescents at the current “sit in” on Wall Street.
My fear is that the pipeline is full of this human flotsam and will be for a couple of generations but for a calamatous die off.
Western civilization is consuming itself at warp speed and we are to blame.
Don’t lose heart, Vindico Libertas. There is no one strand to “Western civilization” and David Solway pointed to the grounds on which our most cherished liberties (the right to think and seek the truth) may be preserved. For a different view, coming from the extreme right, see my piece on anti-intellectualism in the thought of a popular writer, who is not on our side.
See http://clarespark.com/2011/10/04/coulters-demons-melville-john-adams-on-the-late-18th-c/
There was a short period when we all realized the truth.
I wanted to say in 1939 but that must be incorrect.
No, it was after the attack on Pearl Harbor that suddenly we all woke up to the truth.
WE ALL KNEW WHICH SIDE WE WERE ON.
(for those confused after half a century I will spell it out)
Good was the Allies.
Evil was Hitler and the his allies the Axis.
Then the war ended and we all went back to being confused.
(Im sure the atom bomb also played a part in causing confusion. Killing innocent people was never the West’s strong side. And paradoxes are much too much for the MSM. Every thing has to be simple. So the bombing of Hiroshima was either good or bad. And MSM is quick to cast doubts on how good it was. After all, killing innocents is against all of our values.
And that’s the end of the story. Never mind that it was a question of us or them.)
We became confused again because of the leftist “long march through the institutions” – which we failed to notice and oppose in a timely manner. Only now are we starting to wake up.
But that’s not all. The public is only now, and only very slowly, becoming aware of the menace of Islam. See Ann Barnhardt’s video lecture, Islamic Sexuality: A Survey of Evil for more. Most of that isn’t about sexuality so much as it is about Islam itself. and how we must respond to it.
The Frankfort School members who were granted asylum here in the 30s, were the vanguard of Cultural Marxism. They should have been turned back to Germany or executed. The death of Western/Christian civilization began with a mistake — the Enlightenment idea that humans were not animals, but angelic creatures who operated only by reason and had no instincts. Although I’d say history teaches otherwise, the Enlightenment thinkers were not operating on the basis of fact. They were seeing humans as they believed they ought to be, not at all as they are. Once you believe that man is born with a blank-slate mind, then they beleived they could manipulate human behavior in any way they wanted, just by altering man’s environment. This is Leftism and Libertarianism, and it is wrong. It is also the justification for the mass murder that Leftist regimes always end up with. Can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. But they’re breaking eggs and trying to make a unicorn.
Thank you #3 (A) for knowing some Amerian history.
The decision to bomb Japan after Germany had surrendered was leveled directly to save our American military personnel lives, in the thousands.
If we had to invade Japan, thousands more American military would be murdered.
The Japanese military culture against all international rules of laws, policy was TO TAKE NO PRISONERS. They systematically tortured and murdered thousands of cilivians in the Phillipines and throughout the chain of islands they occupied. They tortured and murdered thousands of Aussies, British and American POW’s. One of the best researched book I’ve read recently on this difficult subject, on the N.Y. Times, top ten best seller list, for months is, “Unbroken.”
History has recorded many confrontations when a peaceful society with order governed within its own jurisdiction assumed other cultures to be risks of collapse to their own status quo from fear of comparison to some faction of filtered agenda propaganda.
Truthful information crossing the Pacific via Hawaii mixed with Japan’s paranoid intelligence fomented their fear of failure following the fall of their island hopping expansion toward the Philippines. Democracy became problematic, because Japan’s powerful military was semi-independent and overruled or assassinated civilians in the 1920s and 1930s.
This fear phenomena exists alive and well in all advanced world societies today with the sole threat of internet information dissipation fueling its demise. The exposure of the many tentacles of an international world class box jellyfish already in control of 85% of total world wealth is at risk of exposure demanding explanation.
In the past all that has been required in third world societies was hazy rumors provided by those at the top of the pile assuming wealth as equivalence to wisdom without question. Islam has spread solely on this basis to support their intimidation for 1350 years. As with all propaganda based entities, they also fear but out of sight of those anchored in their false unquestionable doctrine.
Propaganda control of populations has worked well for over a hundred years in the US to the the advantage of those that monopolize both weaponry manufacture distribution and international bankers totally isolated from the ravages of war while those accepting undefined half truth without question pay the price in blood.
Created crises and internet organized demonstrations for purely political purpose now cultivate public division for biased media dispensation spiced with party innuendos while incumbents organize yet another backdoor atrocity.
Uncool as it may be to my fellow boomers, but once you reject the notion of good and evil, all else cascades to destruction. Dare I use the Name? … God has been rejected, and we reap that whirlwind. Oddly enough, it is our churches that have demonstrated the greatest insecurities about their underpinnings, my Catholic Church leading the way. the cardinals and bishops having instituted I’m okay, you’re okay-isms in place of solid belief and truths. No aberrant or deviant behavior is too grotesque for this generation of leaders-from-behind, who have embraced it all without comment. A commenter above is right about the military being the final institutional bastion of duty, honor, country … by the way it constitutes less than 1% of the population … but it is now being used as a social science experiment, a foil for the more abhorrent notions that have been conjured up by the boomers and their college professors.
My fear is that the do or die crisis won’t come soon enough to provide an opportunity to save ourselves from ourselves.
There’s another reason why a lack of faith in a higher power precedes decline, and that is because if there is no God, then we lack that imprint of the divine and are therefore no better than animals. In fact, many people would say we’re worse because we’re “destructive”.
Once society cedes that there’s nothing special about us, then really, what’s the point? Not only is western civilization not worth saving, NO civilization is worth saving. And no individual human is worth saving, either, which explains pretty much everything from abortion to why the greenies don’t give a damn about jobs.
Interesting essay. I think it may fundamentally misread Nietzsche, but it’s certainly consistent with the view of Nietzsche currently in vogue among postmodernists who crave some sort of intellectual legitimacy. Post modernism is arrant nonsense and, it seems to me, the coward’s approach to the deeper problems of (1) whether absolute truth exists, (2) whether truth is knowable, and (3) without really answering (1) or (2), whether the continued asymptotic pursuit of truth valuable in itself as a sort of science – that is opening our opinions simpliciter to potential falsification based on available (and – it is supposed – ever increasing) evidence.
An interesting question of intellectual history to explore would be the extent to which postmodernists, who derive their views from Continental thinkers, have ever actually read the thinkers of the English-speaking enlightenments (Scottish, English and American) themselves, and, more importantly, whether the Continental thinkers on which they rely have read them. My bet is, other than a bit of Hume and less Locke, the answer is pretty much “no”, and, I would further bet most of those Continental (mostly French) thinkers still consider Rousseau an enlightenment thinker (though his thought was the antithesis of the enlightenment IMO) and are perfectly comfortable with both the French Revolution and Marxism. Ironically, I doubt most of them actually read German, or that they have really read Hegel in the original (really heavy-going in English, and almost worse in German) or Marx.
Most academics, I fear, are only middling smart (125-135 IQ). Especially in the humanities and social sciences. Consequently, they are easily impressed by complexity: just smart enough to fell like they can follow the complex arguments but not quite smart enough to understand them. Hence the ease with which they are converted seriatum to the latest nostrums, and the joy with which they embrace the simplistic conclusion (no such thing as truth, so say whatever you like) that make their lives easier.
One is reminded of nothing so much as the eminently English (and therefore commonsensicle) librettist W.S. Gilbert’s satire on the late 19th century esthete in the form of Bunthorne in Patience, who sings about false complexity in If you’re anxious for to shine…. The classic line in this context: If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be….
“Most academics, I fear, are only middling smart (125-135 IQ).” Whereas, if their IQ’s were lower, what then?
If they were significantly less bright, they’d consider it nonsense because it made no sense whatsoever to them, and they’d know they couldn’t even pretend to understand it.
If they were significantly brighter, they’d actually understand that it was nonsense because it actually did make no sense whatsoever.
Same result. It’s the near bright we have to fear….
Agree – Solway misreads Nietzsche and interprets him within the standard postmodernist perspective.
Or, perhaps a few generations of 2.5 level will result in a religious resurgence of hope in honest humanity “under God”, not under a neo-king nanny gov’t.
One of the truths nobody wants to discuss is that some ethnic groups have, on average, lower IQ scores than other groups. A related truth is that capitalism and Christianity are both related to individuals, not groups — one is judged based on individual choices, rather than on group membership.
Too many elites want to support policies based on group identity and reward, rather than individual based policies.
Although even so-called conservatives cringe from this understanding, you are correct on all points.
“…the greatest single factor driving whites to national suicide is their false guilt over black inferiority.” Lawrence Auster, View From the Right
A necessary, essential first step whites must realize is that blacks are NOT part of Western civilization. By extension this also applies to other groups, e.g. Moslems. They never helped to create our civilization. Any ostensible contributions have either been minimal exceptions, or dysfunctionally negative. Due to inherent differences, they will never be able to make anything but the most minor of positive additions, and otherwise will simply tear it down directly or by sheer inertia. These groups are here on sufferance, and have a responsibility to conform accordingly. In all cases, they should never impose a burden on us, the inheritors and owners of Western civilization as to what we must do to keep it thriving.
To those who react in kneejerk fashion by calling this politically incorrect, I say to you that (1) reality is racist, and (2) your delusional refusal to accept reality is what dooms our society. After all, if even you can’t take a stand and support it without niggling reservations, how can you expect the leftists to do anything other than continue to destroy it?
In re Hamlet, my favorite joke:–
A centipede was asked which of his hundred feet he moved first. He never walked again.
parchellan ipse fect
“…needed is a genuine educational revolution, a neo-Enlightenment…and the courage to act decisively when circumstances leave us no plausible alternative.”
All else is navel gazing.
But it ain’t gonna happen. The Beaners and McCon-ers of the only institutionalized opposition dither and sputter at the Bolshevik bombing of Frank-Dodd-Schumer while the Obama back room gang run the presses and the cameras for a mouth-breathing undereducated and brainwashed public.
Here’s what needs to happen but won’t because of the self-absorbed cowards.
1. Decimate the Civil Service by firing 9 out of 10 sniveling servants (not 1 out of 10, the Roman way).
2. Sunset all laws and regulations. Test all rewrites for constitutionality by a Robespierrean Council .
3. Limit elective office terms and institute capital punishment for service disloyal to the constituition.
4. and institute drug testing of all public servants, elected or hired, immediately.
None of that will happen. The FALL, despite dips and pauses like a falling leaf, remains unstoppable.
It must be pointed out that while the “post-modernists” see themselves as being involved in this never-ending quest for “truth”, they deeply resent anyone questioning THEIR “truths”. In fact, they tend to attack like rabid weasels.
Whether the subject is AGW, Keynesian economics, or the alleged “superiority” of some other culture (or a certain Messiah- not the one in the NT), our “enlightened elite’” believe that the “quest for truth” must stop when it involves contradicting their worldview.
So, exactly how does this differ from, say, the medieval Catholic Church on the subject of a heliocentric vs. terrocentric cosmology? Or indulgences? Or the reality (or otherwise) of witches?
Far from being “open-minded” or “critical thinkers”, the “intellectuals” of today are little more than hidebound ideologues, piously parroting everything that was ever spouted by one or more of their college professors in a classroom or faculty lounge. Said professors being mainly motivated by a desire to watch the world burn, because every time they demanded to be given absolute, total power, everybody else said, “no”. With extremely good reason for doing so.
We are dealing with people who are the high priests of a pseudo-religious belief system that is dedicated to the destruction of our civilization, so they can build Utopia on the ruins thereof. Any statements of “truth” they may come up with should be judged with this firmly in mind.
clear ether
eon
Eon
You are right on. I would love to hear you elaborate on this.
When I was a child in school, I knew many students who wished to become teachers. In later life, they would state that they desired to share wisdom. When they were children, I could see that they sought the respect, the status, the idolization of the authority position of that teacher. Later, they learned to dress it up in the loftier terms, but it was all about the status and authority. Very few sought to teach for knowledge’s sake. (I also noticed that NONE of them were the truly brilliant kids. They were generally the average kids.)
I was oft rejected by my peers, for I would challenge the teacher. It was lese majeste. The teacher became merely human. (Yes, I was/am an ass.)
These experiences were common throughout my life. Often in my teachers, I could see these same children all grown up. Nothing had changed, except some cynicism added.
I also see the same trend in those who bandy about lofty knowledge/topics. They seek not to exchange knowledge, nor even just entertain. They seek attention and status. When challenged to support their statements, they are flummoxed. All the usual nonsense begins. Ad hominem. Arguments to authority. Dismissiveness or irrational rage. Everything but rational discourse.
Government schools only reinforce this sense of authority, for we are forced to attend. The authority is “official”. Thus, it appeals even more to our basest natures. We all seek to seem fit to breed. Government is a way for the not-so-outstanding to seem exceptional. See the lofty titles. Witness the respect, even awe, accorded such individuals in such lofty positions. And anyone can attain such… such… STATUS! (mental drool) Credentials are the best refuge of the mediocre.
I was always a pink monkey. The antics and posturing of the brown monkeys were always obvious, puerile, and generally offensive. The pink monkeys had the upper hand for awhile, but the brown monkeys have regained control of society. Primitive, tribal thinking is now dominant.
Exactly. The postmodernist defines ‘truth’ as ‘my view’ and becomes quite dogmatic and rigid about its sanctity.
Without such self-idolatry, they’d have to adopt a belief in total anarchy. And a regime built around anarchy has no Kings; the academic elite would refuse to operate without the privileges and deference due to their status as Kings.
I noticed that. The conflict between truth and doctrine is, of course, inherent in Western civilization. Politics, like theology and – for that matter – the military, gets into trouble when its doctrine is based on political expediency rather than reality. Modern Progressives are just as or even more relient on faulty doctrine than the Roman Catholic church (I’m speaking from a Lutheran perspective) or the WW I military (using Civil War or even Napoleonic tactics with 20th century technology) ever was.
Have you ever tried to discuss matters with a Progressive (much less argue a point)? They always default to doctrine: Bush is bad, corporations are bad, global-warming is human-caused, large and powerful government is good.
This piece could have easily been written in one sentence. Enlightenment is to question truth! The several authors you mention see questioning truth as intelligence; but that only leads to a reality that is but perceived truth. Truth is truth, and will always be truth, regardless of an individual or a society’s perception of reality. The “Twilight Zone” show is a good example of perceived truth being anything but truth! Some may be able to convince some that truth is not truth but that doesn’t in any way make truth not truth; it only makes some idiots from knowing the truth.
David Solway,
This is the first piece of yours I’ve read. I am not so afraid as you for the end game. NC Ken has it right, but how can a lover of language not be entertained by ‘phlegmatism of the mind’? I’m still giggling. Well done.
There is an inherent conflict between individualism and collectivism. This problem has always existed, but is far more acute today. At one time it was simple. People in your tribe are respected as individuals under the command of one patriarch, but in war, a tribe is a single collective. Its members are a single unit and enemy tribes are to be killed without mercy. This logic carried through to the era of empires and later nations. Your nation is your family, and enemy nations are treated as collectives to be killed without mercy. The problem today is that the logic of individual rights that has made the USA so successful internally, has carried through to the world, under the guise of “human rights”. It is no longer considered OK to treat enemy nations or peoples as a single collective, to be killed without mercy, at least in the thinking of the West. However, our enemies have no such compunctions. Liberals are particularly prone to the view that enemies have to be treated as individuals and prosecuted in a court of law, instead of simply being slaughtered. This conflict is the most apparent in the Terror War, where the enemy is a global political movement that aspires to global Islamic empire, but currently lacks sovereign control of territory.
This conflict of values has only one ultimate resolution – world government. Only under a world government is the nation equal to the broader collective of humanity. And a world government that reflects the values of Western Civilization is only possible if the Islamic civilization is totally destroyed and if Islam itself is eradicated and outlawed forever.
This is why ‘advanced’ sophisticated societies devolve into dictatorships. All the collective of whimps needs is a sociopath to come along and rule them. Stand by.
I suppose the following thought may be the simpleton’s approach to reconciling a search for truth with the revisionist and deconstructive conclusions of the authors you cite:
My thought is that there are certain “truths” that flow intuitively from culture based on collective experience as to what concepts have seemed to make things “work”.
As inquisitive man proceeds past those basic truths – of what is “right” and “wrong”, what is “reasonable” and what is “unreasonable”, what time has proven to be “realistic” and “unrealistic” – man arrives at the crossroad where intelligence and intuition intersect. There thinking man begins to think silly thoughts, such as those cited above.
Or, to put it crudely, if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their behind when they jump.
Having hopefully communicated my point: I now move to – in the eyes of some attuned to the heat of political argument – destroy it.
I have just read Dick Cheney’s biography. Here is a person who seeks and discovers the basic rights and wrongs, the basic good and evil, the difference between what will work and what will not — all based on disciplined observation of the present and past. Then he applies his discoveries with little flexibility and lets the remainder of the philosophical questions fall where they may.
Such behavior puts one on a consistent and forward path to better outcomes.
Along that route lies mans’ rise from primordial muck.
“The question arose as to why the most advanced and preeminent civilization the world has ever seen appears to be imploding”
What is the criteria to make this rather bold judgement..? Western European civilization is just over a thousand years old, unless we are basing this on the Roman, which was based on Etruscan, or Greek, which borrowed heavily from the Mycenaean, otherwise we are barely newborn in timeline of recorded History. There are past civilizations that make us appear as little more than fools merrily drinking our way into oblivion.
This article came close to answering its own questions by comparing civilizations of the East, but never explored fundamental differences between east and west. Had this been more fully explored it would have better served the reader, also there needs to be a point of reference for what a truly great civilization represents. Looking around us, it is certain this is not it.
As a point of reference, Babylon was one of the greatest civilizations…Minoan , Egyptian, the Indus Valley, the Olmecs that developed a calendar and astronomy unmatched until invention of computers 3,000 years later, or China which achieved greatness while Europe was still floundering in the Mediterranean.
Truly we are fools to squander all we have, should be so lucky to survive the next 50 years.
“Many reasons have been put forward for what is plainly an inward decline, from the natural inevitability of civilizational decay to the loss of religious faith and moral conviction to the apathy and narcissism of a flaccid and materially pampered citizenry.
Yes, that’s it. Everything else in this article is pointless. This is it in a nutshell. All of the great empires or civilizations probably succumbed to the above problems, and we have them all. Unless we toughen up in the next few years, unless we get our financial house in order and stop allowing the government to pay for just about everything, and unless we stop thinking that we’re entitled to everything while producing very little (let alone being totally independent), then we will go the way of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the British Empire. Perhaps they all collapsed not only because their citizens became weak and lazy, but also because their governments became too big for their own good. Either way, we don’t have much time to change before it all comes crashing down around us.
The deconstructors are representatives of a particular class of hyper-intellectual: they who claim that “all is theory,” because, after all, the only things that happen in a man’s skull are ideas, and ideas aren’t quite real, are they?
Lao-tzu and C. S. Lewis knew them for what they are. The only people who don’t know them for what they are are themselves — and possibly not all of them, either.
Elegant piece, as usual, David.
My homespun theory is this:
Western Society is now controlled under “Eastern” Pavlovian training techniques. The West is controlled by leftists, who have handlers in the East.
We have become an incurious lot, replacing the digging for facts, evidence, “truth” with a salivating need to gain “approval”. Our pellet, for which we hit the “approval” bar repeatedly (or hop on one foot, or dance in circles, or vote for Democrats), is peer pressure removal.
We won’t be called racist, homophobic, greedy, warmongering, jingoistic, not nuanced, stupid, ….we will be called “elite”, “progressive”, “liberal”, “mainstream”, ….all our traits will be goodness and light, all our flaws and frailties scrubbed from existence, all our blame and responsibility transferred to the “other” side.
Properly trained as a lemming, each new leftist has the burden of original thought lifted from his shoulders. (or hers, for womyn). OUR science…as leftists…is already settled. We simply need to listen for the result we seek…the handlers will fill in the details later. This becomes a useful tool for leftist administration’s legislative techniques as well. Don’t bother reading what’s in it…we will fill you in later.
And…your news is already pre-packaged. The facts matter not one whit. Only the “message” that you take away. Which is always the same.
Western culture is being taken for a nice long walk by their leftist handlers.
DINK’s (double income, no kids) have become FIDO’s. (Freefalling income, Democrats for Obama)
Dogmas on a leash.
This is an outline of the academic theory of postmodernism and I’d submit that its rejection of objective reality and its rejection of reason and the capacity of reason to understand and know this objective reality…is defunct. It began in the ’60s, and for 30 years was a drunken delight among academia, who could say and write anything within its non-existent perimeters. It’s over.
Objective reality exists and no imaginative and tortuous verbal games can escape from its kinetic interactions with us. We may say, as did an Islamic imam, that earthquakes are caused by scantily clad women, but those same earthquakes are indifferent to our beliefs about women. Or men.
The facts of scientific research ignore our subjective words. The facts of economic reality ignore our subjective words. No matter how many times Obama says that he created jobs, or that IF he hadn’t done such and such, THEN, it would be worse – the facts are that there are no jobs and a negative hypothesis is unprovable. Reality is far stronger than fiction.
About cultural relativism:
The Pope, writing while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote of an epidemic of relativism in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, 2006:
“Europe is infected by an epidemic of relativism. It believes that all cultures are equivalent. It refuses to judge them, thinking that to accept and defend one’s own culture would be an act of hegemony, of intolerance, that betrayed the anti-democratic, anti-liberal, disrespectful attitude toward the autonomy of other populations and individuals. Pp.85-86.
Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate and co-author of Without Roots, on page 11 says:
The notion that the judgment of cultures or civilizations constitutes an invalid mode of inquiry has been put forward, most notoriously, by the school of thought known as relativism. Various names have been given to this school today: post-enlightenment thinking, post-modernism, “weak thought,” deconstructionism. The labels have changed, but the target is always the same: to proclaim that there are not grounds for our values and no solid proof or argument establishing that any one thing is better or more valid than another.
Anthropologists need a way to evaluate a culture that is not their own. To do this, they cultivate the ability to see a cultural artifact, attitude or event from the point of view of someone in the culture being studied. This avoids the problem of ethnocentrism—“That’s not the way we do it at home.”
The attitude required by this professional technique has been adopted by many of our elites, unfortunately and improperly, as the only enlightened way to view other cultures. In the worst examples, it has become an excuse for self-loathing. The reward one gets is to feel superior for having the sensitivity to denigrate one’s own culture. No one can accuse such a person of being an ethnocentric yokel.
Thanks for a brilliant exegesis on Mansur’s work. As far as the relativists, deconstructionists and other useful idiots of change for the worse, as Samuel Johnson said in regards to Berkeley’s theory of immaterialism, “I refute it thus.” Relativity, quantum mechanics and non-traditional thinking are useful for space travel or on the quantum and/or theoretical level but Newtonian “reality” serves us best at the human level. It looks like it’s irrefutable. We could use more sensible Johnsons and less “there’s no here, here” Berkeleys.
The Oedipus and Hamlet scenarios you mentioned are both the product of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on human reason as the only means to find truth. The Enlightenment dismissed God and elevated human reason over diviine revelation. Enlightenment advocates emphasized the perfectability and rationality of man and saw no need for God. In essence they cut loose the anchor that had held western civilization since the rise of Christianity. Instead they ran quickly to embrace abstract theories constructed upon human reason in hope of securing their thought and building a foundation for society. What they found were their feet planted firmly in mid air and a philosopihical paradigm that changed every generation. Until the west returns to the foundations of God and Christianity, it will flounder around and continue to decline.
“…the twin vices of hubris and lethargy …”
Brilliant, as always, David. There is a third vice, the the recognition and confrontation of which offers a way out. This is the vice of intentional obfuscation and masquerading. We saddle ourselves with a mask of goodness. Culturally that means we identify ourselves as good. Just look at how good we are — we even ‘fess up to how evil we are, and get to feel guilty about it! What we (the west) secretly want is everything. What we secretly feel is superiority. What we secretly wish we could do is that the Other would cease to exist. What we secretly cannot acknowledge is everything. What we do to ourselves, to prove to ourselves, the world and our mommies and daddies is to suppress the recognition of our intentions in favor of the masquerade… which means we just act dumb. The Islamic world, living via a different, more triumphalist myth, does not have this inner dilemma.
Here’s the unmasked TRUTH: We are mammals who eat meat. We want what we want — including wealth, progeny and pussy. We will do what it takes to get it. Since Newton and Bach and Shakespeare and Darwin (i.e., THE WEST) we have learned that intellect matters. It only took us about 2,000,000 years to figure this out.
Here’s the mask: We are nice, just, and good.
Here’s why we obfuscate/pretend: We are afraid to be who we are, recognize, be revealed, to be seen.
@ David
I enjoy your posts immensely.
“Unlike the civilizations of the Orient, Western thought at its best and most characteristic is engaged in the noble adventure to seek out truth..”
I used to think so, but amongst my contemporaries I hear people claim that truth is found in concensus between opinions, not as an independent entity. Truth then becomes, apparently, nothing but subjective rhetoric to bludgeon your opponents with.
“…amongst my contemporaries I hear people claim that truth is found in consensus between opinions, not as an independent entity. Truth then becomes, apparently, nothing but subjective rhetoric to bludgeon your opponents with.”
They say that because they either do not know the difference between fact and opinion or want to confound them for their own purposes. Consensus is how morals are arrived at because a culture has to have a standard with which to judge right from wrong.
Facts are the result of independent observation confirmed by similarly independent observations. As such,they stand outside of cultures and are, to some (many?), an inherent threat.
So what is truth? Surely it is neither moral consensus nor objective fact but rather a system which allows the emergence of facts to inform the cultural consensus. Easy to define. Bloody hard to implement.
The most searing attack against the deconstructionists, et. al., might be the statement: “What is it about NO that you do not understand?”
Big column, thank you.
But I do not believe that the nihilist thinkers truly represent the Western culture today: the nihilist propaganda wants to present them as THE intellectuals, but their works have little value when compared to the immense Tradition of the West.
The point is political, not cultural: there are forces at work in the West that aim at the total destruction of any trace of the Tradition, and in so doing they destroy the West,
We have to stop those forces and we have to speak against the idiocies of nihilism.
I find that the expression “the blind faith in the nothing” depicts exactly the attitude of the pseudo-intellectuals propped up by the subversives.
They want to impose their blind faith to everyone, and they are the true obscurantists of today.
We save the West by denouncing the pseudo-religion of the nothing, the deep ignorance that wants to assert that sheer nothing can produce something.
The prosperity, freedom and direction of the West all grew out of the Reformation and every nation in which the Word of God was embraced individually in large numbers (the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, etc) prospered in every way. The driftlessness of the West today and the recession of freedom and hope, lies in our loss of faith and the way in which we have embraced with vigour every sinful practice that God decries and have trampled the blood of Christ underfoot. Were we to turn from our sinful ways and repent, God would have mercy on us and heal our lands.
It seems that we have largely ascertained the problems that we face, but the question is what are WE conservatives going to do about it.
The obvious starting place is to take back our education institutions, from K through post graduate. Defund identity politics studies departmens with are political and intellectal attack centers on ourselves and our heritage. Let people hostile to Western Civlization fund those themselves…For Christ’s sake!
End the Multicultural zeitgeist and Diversity Promotion which serve to disempower ourselves and our culture and heritage and promote all “Others.” End mass immigration of hostile cultures and peoples. Axe diversity czars and departments….quit funding these balkanizers of our society. Which leads unavoidably to colonization.
Infiltrate and march through the institutions.
When calamity comes, the Left and their gaggle of minority identity politics greivance groups will only say, Chickens Coming Home to Roost, you deserve it.
We on the right control over half the state governments. Those state governments appoint and confirm members of state boards of education and boards of regents who set educational policy and curriculae in those states. Those state legislatures control the pursestrings to every public school and college in the state. If you control an agency’s budget, its heart and mind will follow.
But we don’t do this ANYWHERE. These appointments are afterthoughts. Conservative Christian governors appoint leftist academics to boards of regents and Republican legislators confirm them. We shoul look at who gets appointed and confirmed to those positions with the same ardor we look at who runs for legislatures, governorships, the Congress and the Presidency. And then maybe we can start taking away some of the local school boards that are wholly owned subsidiaries of the National Extortion, er Education, Association.
“why the most advanced and preeminent civilization the world has ever seen appears to be imploding”
Because we haven’t been executing the leftists that subvert it
A young man came to my home to repair the furnace. He claimed no special academic achievement. He was full of energy. Seemed to love his work and understood the working of the HVAC system perfectly. We chatted about the upcoming deer hunting season which he enthusiastically anticipated. He seemed comfortable with his occupation and hoped he could expand on it in the future. “Sure hope the economy improves”, he said. He is a family man and spoke of working with his church. His only negative observation was when he spoke of Obama. “This guy has gotta go”, he observed.
On the other hand there is the case of my very bright niece. She did very well in college as a languages major. She works internationally. She is multi-lingual. She hates Republicans. Hopes for single-payer health care. Will vote again for Obama. Thinks that the rich need to be more heavily taxed and that the “tea-baggers” are insane, etc., etc.
All that is needed to stop the “implosion” that the author refers to is to return to our spirit of individual accomplishment and our Constitution and allow both to work miracles by encouraging and enabling the success of folks like the HVAC guy and just tolerating my niece. Then society will prosper and the implosion will cease. Simple enough but possibly too obvious. No deep delving into the thoughts of the great minds required.
We dont need to tolerate you neice. She is poison. We need to actively discriminate against your neice and work to disempower her….while simultaneously actively supporting and promoting the HVAC guy.
Tolerance for those who support your disempowerment, tolerating evil, only allows evil, those who support your and Western Civiliztaions disempowerment to flourish, while you simultaneously weaken yourself and the HVAC guy.
What we need is more discrimination, not less. We need to disempower those who support the deconstruction of Western Civilization and its disempowerment, and the empowerment of all “Others” over and within it.
There just isnt any other way around it. All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to tolerate it.
We should tolerate your neice in the original sense of lack of legal proscription of those views and ideas.
However we certainly shouldnt tolerate it in the new sense of legal and material aid to those ideas.
And we should freely discriminate against people who hold those ideas, evil ideas, bad ideas, and ideas hostile to Western Civilization, informally and formally within governement and non government institutions…private and public sector. They can hold those ideas, but they will be tolerated as ostracized disempwered outcasts of society….not embedded in our power structures promoting their poison as policy.
“We should tolerate your neice in the original sense of lack of legal proscription of those views and ideas.”
Correct! That was my intended thought.
Then we need to start dramatically “de-credentialling” our institutions, especially governments. So many government jobs have an MQ of “a college degree,” any degree, no experience, no demonstration of competence. What that does is provide sinecures for all the leftist “studies” graduates. I’ve watched my state tortured by the natural resources and biology “professionals” employed by government, especially the federal government. Well, when you look at the regulatory staff of the ministerial agencies, you’re looking at GS-9-11s with non-specific degrees, but very specific indoctrination. Almost all the resources related degree programs are nothing more than indoctriation camps. Then the government cooperates by allowing those degress to qualify the leftist sleeper cell members for government jobs.
I agree Art. The Left and its gaggle of minority identity politics groups has made it profitable to hold these views….high paying jobs and carreers for those who hold these Anti Western views, adulation and awards.
We need to make holding those views have negative economic, professional, and social consequences in the public sphere for those who hold them. Outcasts, few job opportunities. Defund the Leftist NGO nexus which uses our money to agitate and militate against us. Get them out of the instiutions.
Let them pimp their hate and negativity on the street corner in between begging for handouts.
Even in states with longtime Republican governance (like mine) we continue to feed the hand that bites us because all too many Republicans simply don’t know anything about the nuts and bolts of running a government. They throw a few of their buddies in the high profile appointments try to make a few policy changes and otherwise leave the government in the hands of Democrat holdovers and lefty sleeper cells. They they wonder why they’re leaked, thwarted, and sabotaged at every turn.
High Five, Art!
There needs to be a concerted push to enter the institutions and to hire discriminatively against the Leftists. We need organization to do this.
Sorry, not buying it.
The progeny of 15,000 years of warrior cultures aren’t going to roll over and become slaves, no matter how loudly the self-proclaimed elites insist on it. It’s genetic. you can see it in British football fans, in America’s union thugs; you can see it regaining root in Germany; in growing belligerance in France; and you can hear the echo in the American conservative movement right now. We aren’t giving up and we aren’t afraid of a fight, if that’s what it has to come to. We may be stronger about it than Europeans, but this nonsense of it’s all over for them is just that as well. Nonsense. They have nuclear weapons and 15,000 years of relentless conquest. That isn’t washed away in a few decades.
The west has the technology, the organizational skills, and the courage to flatten any other culture in the world. Barack Obama, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, and the British aristocray may think that they are going to sieze absolute power and rule the world by convincing 99% of the populations that everything is now too complex and rigged by the joos for the west to succeed without their Oxvard trained brains, but out here in the sticks, we ain’t buying it.
If there is one thing that history shows it’s that we can be pushed but we can’t be rolled. It didn’t happen in 1914; it didn’t happen in 1939; it didn’t happen in the 50′s; it didn’t happen in 1990; and it didn’t happen in 2001.
Just because they say it over and over and over and over like 8 year old stomping their feet doesn’t make it true.
Mark Steyn is wrong as well. He just can’t see the time and place where the Western culture will finally have enough of the Oxvards’ crap and say no way Jose. The reversal will be quick when it comes.
Of course, as Steyn says, no one writes a doomsday book because they want it to come true. For one thing it makes it hard to collect royalties.
Good for you for saying it so clearly. I agree, though I approach the problem from a different perspective. My view is that:
1) We have the capacity for reason; this is genetic. Certainly, culture can forbid it – as in Islam and postmodernism, each using their own tactics, but it’s genetic and can’t remain restrained.
2) Demographics. The world population is too large for the brain-death of dogma and the tribalist collectivism. We need entrepreneurs, we need scientists, we need engineers, we need people who recognize objective reality and its requirements of us – whether it be to produce more food, clean water, more energy etc…and this means that we need individuals-who-live-in-reality and can think, objectively, about it.
Therefore, I reject the notion of the demise of rationalism, and the Western mentality based on it.
The funny thing is, Bernard Lonergan solved the underlying problem of “objective” knowledge in the late ’50, presented in his “Insight: A Study of Human Understanding” (originally published in 1957). In this work, he lays the grounds for an effective metaphysics and ethics that is not based on individual believe but can be affirmed to have a common base.
It’s a hard read, not because of the difficulty of the content, but because of our bias that we bring (seeing is looking; there is no such thing as “objective” truth). As part of a biased culture, it is hard to escape this bais.
There seems to be one idea that multi-cultis and postmodernists overlook. If one culture or society is as good as or as valid as another, if they’re all equal, then we should be back at the bedrock of tribalism: survival.
Ultimately, we stick up for ourselves because we want to live and prosper. If we can do that cooperatively with other cultures, fine. If we can’t…those other cultures have to GO. They don’t “deserve” what we’ll do to them. We don’t “deserve” to win. Nobody “deserves” anything more than anyone else because we’re all just as good/bad. So we’re back to faux-Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” The winner is the one that wants to win badly enough.
Does that make sense? It’s nihilism, I think, but isn’t that the logical conclusion to relativism?
Commonality is not truth.
Fail.
Put it another way: If everybody’s equally right/wrong, then it doesn’t matter who wins. If it doesn’t matter who survives, I want to make sure the survivor is ME. That’s baseline biology.
English is not my first language or my second and my sympathies for the English are limited but I love the language no less than you do, David, and I devote many hours to it. That’s why I wouldn’t think of wasting precious English letters the way you do. Your writing advertises you love of the language but it’s Onanist.
Worse yet, your headscratchings are shallow, and your conclusions, though elegantly achieved, are purest drivel.
The horns of Western Civilization’s dilemma, are good and evil. Truth and falsehood. And though our politicians and policy-makers be tone-deaf,color-blind and myopic, the issues are black and white and plainly distinguishable. That they are benumbed demonstrates a failure of courage, not perception.
(Disclaimer: I am untraveled provincial living on a small island at the mouth [or the anus, depending on the direction of the current which, Fun City being Fun City, runs both ways] of the Hudson River. When I speak of Western Civilization, I speak of the United Stated of America which, in the native language of my ancient and venerable people, spoken on Ethiopia street in the Holy City of my nativity, is called The States of the Covenant. I know nothing of Europe save what I read and see in infinitesimal snippets on screens in various media.)
Western Civilization is Judeo-Christendom. Grateful heir to the ancient civilizations of the Greeks and the Romans and the Hebrews. We are a peaceable and cleanly civilization with a high regard for human life at large and free moral choice for every individual. We generally hold our classical literary and visual records to be true and reliable.
This distinguishes us from Muslims and Communists and other predatory and malicious and entirely alien Civilizations and Cultures. Muslims fundamentally impugn the historicity and accuracy of our Bible and reject it along with the letter and spirit of British Common Law and American law which flow directly from Bible Law and are profoundly infused with its spirit as encapsulated in the Golden Rule. We celebrate freedom; Muslims celebrate submission.
Communists (ie. The Chinese) reject our reverence for the individual. Theirs is a determinedly secular, statist, slave culture that is directly at odds with human rights we hold universal, dear and divinely bequeathed.
The civilizational horns of dilemma don’t exist, David. Our clueless and static politicians and policy makers are entrenched opportunists who need to be pried from our body politic like bloated leeches from healthy flesh.
Our myopic politicians are conflicted only by their own selfish interests and that of the voters who elected them and the nation they serve, seeing both for one fat cash and career cow to carve. Our bureaucrats are concerned mainly with their benefits and pensions. Our foreign policy establishment is a closed club presided over by Wise Men; crusty old eunuchs blindly devoted to negotiation, ever ready to bargain away the store to any extortionist and thief who knocks at our door. They nearly gave it all away to the Soviets. They stand ready to give it all away to the Muslims.
(Our foreign policy eunuchs are somewhat more reliably hostile to the Chinese but that only because the old bigots recall the rough treatment of American missionaries a century ago when those good and holy Christian men and women were heaved out on their asses for corrupting and undermining the culture and traditions of their Chinese hosts. Our reverend Department of State is, of course, rooted in the American missionary movement. The entrenched bigots in Foggy Bottom were directly complicit in the Holocaust for firmly closing the American door in the face of Jews fleeing certain extermination in Europe; fierce American opponents of the founding of the Jewish State who have worked tirelessly ever since to undo President Truman’s error.)
Moral horns of dilemma, David? Moral confusion? Choosing between right and wrong is a challenge? A century and a half after the civil war and fifty Years after the Civil Rights act and affirmative action in place for thirty years and African Americans still have a gripe against “White America?” The “Palestinians” have an “equally legitimate” claim to the Holy Land and a thousand and one “legitimate” claims against the Israelis?
Get a grip, David.
Pot, meet kettle.
It is still early afternoon in New york City. Usually at this time of year I am at home in Yerushalayim but for a variety of reasons my wife and I had to remain here for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Since I enjoy reading Solway I am making this comment and I will check back on Sunday to see how folks react, if at all.
I have done a fair share of world travel in my life and I want to say that United States stands head and shoulders above the rest. No citizen of any country is more fair and open minded than an American. No country donates as much charity, takes risks to help others, or defends freedom as much as the United States. When Americans reflect they should realize how blessed they are and what a blessing they have been to the world.
We stand in bad times not because America is flawed but because American leadership is flawed. Even the finest car in the world will not stay on the road with a terrible driver. Americans who believe the best is behind them are making a serious mistake. The best is yet to come. New leadership, intelligent, motivated by patriotism not paternalism, will turn things around. We must not give up precisely because that is what the America haters are counting on. What scares them the most is the motivation of good citizenry to do well and improve the country.
Yom Kippur, The day of Atonement , is about Hope. That things can always change for the better. That is true for the individual and true for a Nation.
May the Almighty write you and your loved ones down for a Healthy, Joyous and Prosperous New Year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTexPl4BPI8
I agree.
God bless.
Amen
“Even the finest car in the world will not stay on the road with a terrible driver.”
Love the analogy, but you should have used it for Carter.
This driver is deliberately driving the car over a cliff.
This “Weakness of the West” sounds like the latest rerun of Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” (which he wrote in 1918-1923). Which inspired a lot of declinists during the 1930s, as the Great Depression continued and the Axis powers started on their march of conquest.
And you could have found similar books on Western weakness during the 1950s (as the Soviets took over Eastern Europe and China, and launched Sputnik).
And again in the late 1970s (as stagflation combined with Soviet advances made us question our staying power).
Every single time the U.S. has a bad decade, we start to see these sweeping claims about how the West is weak. Somehow, you never see those claims or those books during a period of Western triumph. (AFAIK, no pundits were pontificating about “the weakness of the West” in the months after the Allied victory in World War II, or in the months after the U.S.S.R. collapsed.)
You would think that after having triumphed in two world wars and the Cold War, folks would start to get the message that we really must be doing something right–something that works over the long term.
And we are. We move slowly and deliberately, examining a problem from all angles first–because reflexively lashing out with sudden action can do more harm than good.
One more point. Those who decry “the decline of our culture” invariably have a sanitized, romanticized version of what our culture was like in the past.
Perhaps they’re unaware of the rampant child prostitution in the early 19th century, or the age of consent for girls to marry being as young as 13. Perhaps they’re unaware that careful studies have shown that in the 18th century prior to the Revolutionary War, some 40% of women gave birth to their first child less than five months after getting married.
And many other examples.
We’re doing all right.
What we need today, just as in those past bad decades, is leadership that can rally the nation to fix our problems.
That’s all.
I love this essay. I am a student of western civilization, raised a baptist; am not very religious now. But I have the ethical background. Fortunately and unfortunately, the article made me realize that I am more of a Hamlet than Oedipus, and along with my western civilization/religious (plus add 3 years of law school and 20 years of practice) “training,” I am often in a “double” Hamlet position on some issues. As I get older and read your essay, I have recognized my inaction in a number areas of my life. Hmmm, you have me thinking on a personal level. (UH oh the centipede continues).
I have tried to explain the facts of military stuff related to UBL/OBL, Iraq and Afghanistan to a progressive. It was amazing! This person had no clue about the reality on the ground.
Lastly, I think Plato was the first “hamlet” and “Oedipus.” He not only contemplated everything but questioned reality!
I believe that there is such a thing as Absolute Truth.
And it is well expressed in a quotation from Matthew Arnold:
“The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a
plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The
love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.”
Our Constitution and this Republic, founded on the notion of a human being’s inalienable rights, are the best known organizational configuration to this date of serving that Truth.
Any group of micro-managers that wants my impulse to expansion, my liberty, to be a subject to their own ideologies and personal decisions (American Leftists and Islamists are no different in this regard) should not survive.
Here is what the Universities are pumping out, a neighbor recently told me Hitler did what he had to do given the circumstances and that their are no moral absolutes. He did what was right in his mind.
He reminds me of this woman and these people are prime for rolling the bulldozers over writhing people in pits as they did in the camps. If you think it can’t happen again your head is buried deep in the sand.
Amazing isn’t it. I wonder if someone came up to her and slashed her with a knife or took all her belongings if their would be any “truth” in that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZYaYEyNpuI&feature=related
The West is not a culture; it is a civilization. So the anthropologists’ generalizations and proclamations are irrelevant to the state of Western civilization today.
All civilizations have contained several or even many cultures. In fact, a civilization arises ONLY when several cultures come in contact. It is the clash of the values and practices of the cultures that causes the arising of a civilization because the clash of cultures forces people to think abstractly. Normally we take all of the values and practices of our own culture as “natural.” It is only when we discover that what is natural to us is quite unnatural to others of a different culture that we begin to think philosophically and thus begin to invent such things as politics, ethics, and natural science.
The clash of cultures in Ancient Greece arose when the people of the 3rd and 4th c. BC discovered that their foundational myths based on the Iliad no longer had meaning for them because the actions described in the myths seemed so violent, unreasonable, and barbaric to the urban Athenian of the newer age. They dealt with the conflict by inventing philosophy, fact-based history, and ethics.
The clash of cultures in China was long-standing and reached peaks just before the founding of each major civilized dynasty. For example, just before the Han dynasty was founded, the Xiongnu (Huns) and the Donghu, both nomad tribes in the north, were invading China. Like all civilizations, the invaders, although bringing new blood and cultural ways into the civilization, the invaders eventually adopted the political norms of the Chinese.
A quick glance at Ancient Rome reveals the presence of places of worship of peoples from all over the Mediterranean world, from Phonicia and Syria and north Africa to present-day Spain and France. Whether barbaric or polite, these cultures existed together because they adopted the political norms of Rome.
Diverse cultures can live together not because they have the same daily practices, but because they all accept the same political norms and goals. The more that a government intrudes itself on people, the more likely it is that it will cause conflict among the groups in the polity because it is interfering too much in the daily practices of people and it is these cultural practices that need to remain “private” because if they do not, then they become the subject of cultural conflict within the civilization.
Once Obama is thrown out of office and there is a sweep into office of people who understand that the government should not be exacerbating differences between cultures, then America will be restored to herself and we will be at peace with one another again. But we have to ignore the proclamations and claims of the stupid anthropologists who don’t understand the difference between a culture and a civilization.
I’d appreciate it if you would define your terms: culture, civilization. I’m not sure that I follow or agree with your argument.
You seem to be implying that a culture lacks politics, ethics and natural science. Do I have that right? I’d disagree but, of course, I’m using a definition of culture with which you might disagree. I’d define ‘culture’ as a set of normative beliefs and behavior of a collective population. Usually, a culture develops over time and within a particular ecological environment (local plants, animals, climate, methods of food production etc) and a particular experience of other peoples.
I would therefore consider that these normative practices would include a political standard, understanding such as defining ‘who has the authority to make rules’; and a set of ethics, understanding such as defining normative practices of interaction with others; and an understanding of the reality of the natural world, i.e., herbs, poisons, animal husbandry etc.
I have no definition of ‘civilization’!
However, I do consider that our species, homo sapiens, which is universal on this planet, has some basic attributes which are therefore found in all cultures; namely, the capacity for reasoning and logical thought; the capacity for morality and ethical standards; the capacity for symbolic and imaginary thought. Some cultures may repress reason, eg, Islam, but this is only possible in a no-change, no-growth stable environment. As soon as the objective world intrudes – reasoning is required.
In reply to ETAB. Anthropology is not sociology, political science, history, or evolutionary biology. Anthropologists study culture, which is defined as the everyday ways and concepts that people use. Within Ancient Greek culture, anthropologists would distinguish between the Spartan way of life (rural and a militaristic society) and the Athenian way of life (urban and highly intellectualized). So even in a quite small civilization, anthropologists would see significant differences.
In the U.S. today, a number of quite different cultures co-exist. They can co-exist despite profound differences because their members all subscribe to a social and political compact that accepts the rule of American law. Similarly, across the English-speaking world, Australia, Canada, and the UK are all culturally diverse according to anthropology, but the particular nations exist and survive as political entities because the members of the diverse culture all accept and acknowledge the type of political and economic system created that integrates them into one society.
It is important that we understand the role and limitations of each scholarly discipline’s findings. When scholars make proclamations we need to understand the differences in application of an historian’s vs an anthropologist’s vs a sociologist’s vs a political scientist’s vs an economist’s statements.
That’s a very narrow definition. Your definition of anthropology, which you seem to define only as ‘the everyday ways and concepts’ of people excludes a great deal of normative behavior and seems to exclude causality, eg, why do these people behave/believe in this manner. Your definition is vague: ‘ways and concepts about what’?
Surely these belief and behavioral systems include understandings of ‘who has the authority to make rules’ (that’s the political and legal systems); and understandings of ‘how do we sustain ourselves (that’s the economic system); and understandings of ‘what’s knowledge’..and yes, understandings of ‘the environment we live in (that’s the ecological reality)…and all the rest of a societal infrastructure: gender relations, kinship, interactions with other peoples..
Your focus only on ‘culture’ – which you still haven’t defined, ignores that a belief system (is this what you mean by culture?) has to be a belief system about SOMETHING. And this something, these concepts, include the political infrastructure, the economic, the knowledge system, the ecological realities we face. They also have to be realistic; a people can’t live in a fictional world.
Anthropology is not confined to an examination of ‘beliefs’ or ‘concepts’. I won’t refer here to ecological or physical anthropology, but to societal anthropology, where analysts such as Levi-Strauss, Radcliffe-Brown, Lee and Devore etc studied societies as, not simply everyday beliefs/concepts, but as an integrated set of operational systems (economic, political, legal, religious, kin, knowledge) that enable a population to live and continue on as a society, ie.a collective of shared beliefs/behavior within a specific domain.
You still haven’t defined ‘civilization’.
This article provides an ideal excuse for pontificating, so here’s my two cents…
We are trying to understand the essential dysfunction of Western intellectuals, and their rejection of Western civilization. This exercise is much like peeling an onion layer by layer, in an attempt to arrive at the innermost core. What I believe the core to be is the following:
The instant you attempt to grasp truth by symbolizing it, it is changed and thus slips away. The act of symbolizing automatically changes that which you attempt to symbolize. It continually eludes you. Upon realizing this either directly or intuitively, you can choose to react in two different ways.
(1) You can accept that truth is still the underlying cornerstone of reality, and take each next step in life on such faith (without having to grasp/symbolize it), as a means of automatically bridging the gap in time between the eternal now and the imminent future.
(2) Alternatively, you can reject the inability to grasp/symbolize truth as a built-in failure of reality, thereby damning reality, as well as creation itself and most especially the Creator. You thus reject All, but meanwhile must depend on your continued existence in life as a necessary hypocrite, wilfully blind to most of what you are really doing, but fixated on decrying it with nihilistic theories about unfettered subjectivity.
Our Western elitist oligarchy and their useful idiots the intelligencia, have with destructive pride opted for reaction #2.
Nice analysis.
With the added understanding that ‘truth’ is objective reality, not our subjective opinion of that reality, and that we, as reasoning beings, must keep trying to get closer and closer to this objective reality with the awareness, akin to that of Sisyphus, that we can never fully grasp the full nature of that external reality.
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It is possible that there is no such thing as truth, but there is definitely such a thing as false. Progress is the continual identification and elimination of that which is false. The problem with the West is that it has stopped doing that.
I’m sorry, these explanations, Hamlet/Oedipus, the Frankfort School, all seem like a load of dung, designed to explain away the obvious.
If it’s Hamlet, then why now, and not say in 1648 after the Thirty Years War, or 1918, or 1946? If its the Frankfort School, then why is Multiculturalism and PC so divergent, absent a great deal in Switzerland, found most abundant in Sweden, and completely absent in Korea and Japan, and non-existent also in places like Bulgaria, and Romania, and Poland, under the actual rule of actual Communists?
No, the Weakness of the West is the greatly enhanced status of women. Period. The biggest strength also being the biggest weakness.
When there was a bit of social distance, gap, and social/cultural power between men who had just the tiniest bit more, and women having just the tiniest bit less, Women in the West found their men sexy. And thus their civilization worth defending, kids worth having, a family worth forming, and marriage a goal not some fabulous wedding.
Make women not just equal, but above nearly all the men around them in the West, and they will have nothing but contempt for those men, and the civilization that surrounds them and produced the men. Women will not, and have not, abided unsexy men. It is the thing they hate the most. Western society made women slightly above most of their male peers, and no wonder they despise Western Civilization as a result, having far less kids, marrying far less, having more sex (with fewer men) and despising their native culture to “Eat Pray Love” in someone else’s.
No wonder mass immigration, third class status for Straight White Men (permanently), enhanced hereditary privileges for non-Whites, and the toxic brew of PC and Multiculturalism found so much adoption. It perfectly encapsulates the disgust and hatred most women find for a society that produces unsexy men.
“No, the Weakness of the West is the greatly enhanced status of women. Period. The biggest strength also being the biggest weakness.”
You said what I thought when I first read the essay! Cherchez la femme.
Eggheads-did any of you over-pedigreed i.q. masters attempt to read Mansur’s screed? His was telling all readers that the submission (Islam), forcing(s) of behavior control at all costs, beats your fancy-pants free choice/No Death For Apostasy crowd, and will CONQUER YOUR FINE REFINED REAR-ENDS because of the mind-control employed be the Moslems has not changed since ol’ Mo rushed to slaughter that caravan of his former Hebrews he was banished from..less you break out the nukes and vaporize some of their stuff. Of course, may want to develop all tose new oil sources out in Williston first..just sayin’
We will be fine…after the fervor brakes.
China in it’s current form is unstable and non-innovative.
India is in a dream. South America is asleep.
As for Islam it is the most backward and retarded major social system the world has. Islam is 16 centuries of stagnated stupidity and is no real threat.
I thank all on this amazing thread. I thank PJmedia for running the entire text of some of the longer replies. My own experience has been steeped in Asian physical culture as well as western values. A running comparison of the two modalities lived out over the course of a lifetime leads me to think that the irreducible Truth upon which all our other rational truths are accumulated is itself, not irrational, but simply previous to mentation. You see the difference? Obviously, awareness of something must come before the something can be thought over rationally. But, for example, the color blind, tone deaf and god dumb, through no fault of their own, cannot think soundly about certain irreducible human circumstances. The postmodern mind lusts to be implicit in ultimate human reality in a way that it simply isn’t really. But, in its pride, it will not admit to being handicapped, so it turns, finally, to politics, to prove it is all us others who are the cripples.
Whew! Anyway, what a GREAT thread!
Everything we are seeing in the West is a symptom, so the question is, a symptom of what?
Mr Solway’s point that we have the twin vices of hubris and lethargy becoming stronger than the twin virtues of humility and courage is true, but it doesn’t explain much.
It seems to me that the difficulties we are seeing in all Western societies took root during the nineteenth century with the rise of materialism and with the so-called death of God and, of course, of the devil. And those roots were sunk most deeply into our intellectual elites. These elites drive this world view, and they drive in into the hearts of the multitudes who try to resist it, but are mostly defenseless against the overwhelming force that has enabled it to penetrate into the entire culture. Certainly one defense against this malevolent force is to recognize that the devil resides there. In other words, people will have to learn again that these polarities are existent spiritual forces. Recognition is the first needed step if we want to get that courage back. We live in a battlefield, and the battlefield lives in us.
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What Hath Obama Wrought?
Okay, let’s give the man some credit, but not too much.
President Barack Hussein Obama is claiming his drawdown of America’s forces in Afghanistan enabled the capture and summary execution by Navy Seal Team Six of Osama bin Laden and he has announced the complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by year’s end.
The former is a stretch but plausible even if then-CIA Director Leon Panetta actually gave the order to get Osama while Obama went to bed. At least the president didn’t obstruct the operation.
The Iraq bug-out will constitute an accomplishment only if our departure doesn’t send a signal to neighboring Iran to fill the vacuum, a distinct possibility that terrifies many Iraqis and may make them long for the good, old days of Saddam Hussein and his sadistic sons.
When Obama concludes what he called the “necessary war” in Afghanistan and withdraws our troops from that sorry land, a comparable disaster could ensue.
Demonstrating his contempt for the nation that put him in power, Afghani President Hamid Karzai has already declared an alliance with another former U.S. friend, Pakistan, and when his government implodes under the weight of corruption, America will find itself back to square one in the region.
Yet another questionable plus in the Obama column is his non-interference with the drone that took out the terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. Obama hasn’t boasted much about that action since al-Awlaki was an American citizen and killing him is widely interpreted as an unconstitutional abuse of power by our constitutional-scholar president.
None of those accomplishments-by-inaction will endear him to peaceniks in his Democrat Party nor to members of the committee that awarded Obama a Nobel Peace Prize but that’s a whole other story as is whether they will help him win re-election with the American economy mired in the doldrums.
After the plaudits for those questionable coups subside, the most immediate issue on Obama’s foreign policy table right now is, What has he wrought in the Mideast?
What comes to mind is the age-old aphorism that the devil you know sure beats the devil you don’t. America’s current president has rescued a number of devils at the same time he has sent some to Hell.
What hath Obama wrought?
In the Libyan non-war, the euphemestic “kinetic military action” Obama swore would last days not weeks and went on for seven months, our Tomahawk missiles and drones softened up the defenses of Col. Khadafi’s loyalists and put him on the run until rebel forces trapped him in a sewer drain and executed him.
Libya thus rid itself and the world of the mad dog, a man who had called Obama ”our son” and whose friendship was reciprocated by our president before he turned on his “dad.” In turn, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, who used to address Obama as “brother,” then asked his bro, “Who the hell do you think you are?”
More pertinent questions now would be, What have you done, who and what are taking Khadafi’s place, and what now? . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5779.)
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