As you noted a couple of posts down, Islam erases the pre-existing culture of the lands it conquers, and does not provide the seeds for an expanding and innovative culture in future. It is a trap, giving way to an endless cycle between fundamentalism and decadence. In this, it is not dissimilar to the Western left who today offer us nothing but politically correct fundamentalism and hedonism. This means that we must be governed by something akin to the Eurabian elite because we can have no independent national culture on which government may be based. Today's people are lost, not even their families can provide them with values if there is no publicly shared sense of the common national good, the transcendent forms, on which to base their family's claims to know right and wrong. In the words of Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987):
"The moral education that is today supposed to be the great responsibility of the family cannot exist if it cannot present to the imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonists in the drama of moral choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such choice, and the despair that results when the world is "disenchanted." Otherwise, education becomes the vain attempt to give children "values." Beyond the fact that parents do not know what they believe, and surely do not have the self-confidence to tell their children much more than that they want them to be happy and fulfill whatever potential they may have, values are such pallid things. What are they and how are they communicated? The courses in "value-clarification" springing up in schools are supposed to provide models for parents and get children to talk about abortion, sexism or the arms race, issues the significance of which they cannot possibly understand. Such education is little more than propaganda, and propaganda that does not work, because the opinions or values arrived at are will-o'-the-wisps, insubstantial, without ground in experience or passion, which are the bases of moral reasoning. Such "values" will inevitably change as public opinion changes. The new moral education has none of the genius that engenders moral instinct or second nature, the prerequisite not only of character but also of thought." (60-1)
In other words, the Eurabians who in the link above call for an end to teaching "values" that will only pit an Us against Them, One against the Other, and who instead think a regime of human rights where every individual is treated equally, but cannot apparently join with others in communities with membership terms and borders (to minimize - but how is this really possible? - conflicts that must be arbitrarily resolved from above by the EUrabian elites), are constructing an empire of lost souls that will serve Islam perfectly. Those ladies in your picture may not be so much lost but the vanguard for the latest Western Utopian project. And they may be thrilled to be in it. They get to wear the full mask and sack, provide the sons for the revolution, all on the Welfare State dime, and not have to work in the fields, uncovered, like their grandmothers did. They may look like unappreciated nothings to us, but compared to the nihilists I see all about me here, they can actually appear to be something. That is the dangerous appeal in an age when our young men and women don't even know how to dress and carry themselves like men or women, but slouch about in sexually unattractive nothingness, coffee mug in one hand, marijuana cigarette in the other.
When I think along the lines you present above two writers come to mind: Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, and Dostoyeski, The Underground Man. Eahc tries to be someithing because he is nothing, and nothing because he is nothing and doesn't want to be particular but only a part of something else, something great. Schiller, nto a bad person, not an evil man, still writes horrible rubbish that leads to violence and insanity: that every one is only a part of the whole, a sliver of the large, and nothing without it. But everyone is someone, the difference between a lost man in the mob and an individual who has spirit and community within being someone who doesn't need the large to exist as a decent person, who can stand alone against an evil culture because he is someone anyway. One has to learn that personhood and work at it and become good at it. Without an innate seed, which is doubtful, one must rely on family and community. God help us here in the West. Being someone by being no one is hardly a good option.
I have to sit and rewrite that comment above, it being done in such haste I didn't have time to realize how far from good sense it was. That's a problem with the Internet: it's too easy to post my stupidities. (Or is that a problem with me?)
4 comments:
As you noted a couple of posts down, Islam erases the pre-existing culture of the lands it conquers, and does not provide the seeds for an expanding and innovative culture in future. It is a trap, giving way to an endless cycle between fundamentalism and decadence. In this, it is not dissimilar to the Western left who today offer us nothing but politically correct fundamentalism and hedonism. This means that we must be governed by something akin to the Eurabian elite because we can have no independent national culture on which government may be based. Today's people are lost, not even their families can provide them with values if there is no publicly shared sense of the common national good, the transcendent forms, on which to base their family's claims to know right and wrong. In the words of Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987):
"The moral education that is today supposed to be the great responsibility of the family cannot exist if it cannot present to the imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonists in the drama of moral choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such choice, and the despair that results when the world is "disenchanted." Otherwise, education becomes the vain attempt to give children "values." Beyond the fact that parents do not know what they believe, and surely do not have the self-confidence to tell their children much more than that they want them to be happy and fulfill whatever potential they may have, values are such pallid things. What are they and how are they communicated? The courses in "value-clarification" springing up in schools are supposed to provide models for parents and get children to talk about abortion, sexism or the arms race, issues the significance of which they cannot possibly understand. Such education is little more than propaganda, and propaganda that does not work, because the opinions or values arrived at are will-o'-the-wisps, insubstantial, without ground in experience or passion, which are the bases of moral reasoning. Such "values" will inevitably change as public opinion changes. The new moral education has none of the genius that engenders moral instinct or second nature, the prerequisite not only of character but also of thought." (60-1)
In other words, the Eurabians who in the link above call for an end to teaching "values" that will only pit an Us against Them, One against the Other, and who instead think a regime of human rights where every individual is treated equally, but cannot apparently join with others in communities with membership terms and borders (to minimize - but how is this really possible? - conflicts that must be arbitrarily resolved from above by the EUrabian elites), are constructing an empire of lost souls that will serve Islam perfectly. Those ladies in your picture may not be so much lost but the vanguard for the latest Western Utopian project. And they may be thrilled to be in it. They get to wear the full mask and sack, provide the sons for the revolution, all on the Welfare State dime, and not have to work in the fields, uncovered, like their grandmothers did. They may look like unappreciated nothings to us, but compared to the nihilists I see all about me here, they can actually appear to be something. That is the dangerous appeal in an age when our young men and women don't even know how to dress and carry themselves like men or women, but slouch about in sexually unattractive nothingness, coffee mug in one hand, marijuana cigarette in the other.
When I think along the lines you present above two writers come to mind: Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, and Dostoyeski, The Underground Man. Eahc tries to be someithing because he is nothing, and nothing because he is nothing and doesn't want to be particular but only a part of something else, something great. Schiller, nto a bad person, not an evil man, still writes horrible rubbish that leads to violence and insanity: that every one is only a part of the whole, a sliver of the large, and nothing without it. But everyone is someone, the difference between a lost man in the mob and an individual who has spirit and community within being someone who doesn't need the large to exist as a decent person, who can stand alone against an evil culture because he is someone anyway. One has to learn that personhood and work at it and become good at it. Without an innate seed, which is doubtful, one must rely on family and community. God help us here in the West. Being someone by being no one is hardly a good option.
I have to sit and rewrite that comment above, it being done in such haste I didn't have time to realize how far from good sense it was. That's a problem with the Internet: it's too easy to post my stupidities. (Or is that a problem with me?)
You could fill in a logic gap or two, but it's not wrong to say that the need to restore personhood is one of the most pressing of our time.
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