The age of being offended

Via Catfur:

Somehow, I think what follows is also relevant to understanding our offendedness in an age without much of a sacralized social order, i.e. an age of relatively free job, residential, and status markets where people fear no one knows his place, or where ordinary human respect for (un)acknowledged differences is lacking. And so instead of the formal offensiveness of past eras where signs of disrespect of rank and status were clear, along with the penalties for such offenses, we witness a not uncommon unwillingness to live in freedom, and hence a confused, hysterical offendedness, sign of an age that is perhaps clamoring for some way back to some kind of resacralized order (via Diana West):

As Paul Belien writes, in response to the monetary crisis racking Europe, and to Obama's snub of the latest EUtopia leaders' festival:

Messrs. Van Rompuy, Barroso and Zapatero all want to be the first to shake Mr. Obama’s hand and receive the deep bow which the American President is in the habit of making to foreign leaders. Because of the embarrassing intra-European squabble about who should have the honor, Obama has declined the invitation until the Europeans have figured out which of them is the most important.

Obama’s decision has come as an unexpected blow to the European leadership. It has upset them so much that they are considering postponing the summit to the autumn. Meanwhile, they have begun quarreling about who is to blame for the present debacle. The Europeans generally agree that the vainglorious Zapatero is mostly to blame, but others are damaged more. “The Spanish have made a mess of the summit but Van Rompuy and the post-Lisbon EU institutions will carry the can in the long term. The squabbling has damaged the EU in the eyes of the most powerful nation in the world,” a senior EU official said.

Although Obama’s snub hurts Europe’s pride, the euro’s monetary problems are far more serious. They not only affect Europe’s finances and economy, but may also tear down the political EU framework. When the European Commission placed Athens under EU supervision last week, Greece was almost bankrupt. Brussels has forced the Greek government to present a plan to drastically reduce its budget deficit from 13% to 3% by the end of 2012. The plan will cost the Greeks blood, sweat and tears. It includes a freeze on civil service wages and the postponement of the retirement age. Brussels has invoked new EU powers under Article 121 of the Lisbon Treaty, which allow it to reshape the structure of Greece’s pensions, healthcare, labor market and private commerce.

“The envisaged correction of the deficit is feasible but subject to risks,” says EU Commission President Barroso – an understatement. The Commission fears a backlash from the Greek unions, who might organize strikes and bring down the Greek government. Trade unions in other countries are nervous, too. They warn that it is unacceptable that the European Commission intervenes in setting national wages.

The EU’s Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia declared that the Greek targets will be enforced strongly and that, if necessary, even more draconian measures will be taken. “Every time we see or perceive slippages, we will ask for additional measures to correct these slippages. Never before have we established so detailed and tough a system of surveillance,” Almunia said. He has demanded quarterly updates on progress towards reduction targets, as well as a first report on 16 March. “This is the first time,” he said, “we have established such an intense and quasi-permanent system of monitoring.”

In an age of "multiculti" bureaucratic empires, one is ultimately offended by a lack of self-rule, even if one no longer wants the responsibilities and hardships of self-rule and just wishes a safe sinecure and pension be granted from on high, as befits one's offended status. Alas, I fear most will continue to be offended by imperial reality.

As Belien has been writing, we will soon have the chance to learn whether it is possible to bind people politically by first binding them to a common monetary policy. The EU project aims to force further political integration by first making the member nations conform to the demands of a common currency and monetary policy whose pricing of currency/debt serves some nations and regions better than others. But where there is not the common political will, can a common currency and policy detached from national self-rule succeed? There is some reason to doubt it. Anthropologically, the political unit, and not the economic one, comes first: a political binding must be prior to any reasonably peaceful economic distribution; the latter depends for its ethical license on the former. But this is not to forget that maybe the Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. have largely given up on the values of national self-rule and will be dragged, with only a little kicking and screaming, into a new imperial political order by their EU "brothers and sisters". The little ones' acceptance of harsh economic terms will be the sign of their political surrender to Brussels. And that will offend me. Tough!

Belgian Antichrist?

Is a socialist Eutopia a particular Belgian idea? Paul Belien thinks so. I don't know... isn't a man who wears such a collar and tie perhaps the end of the line for a bureaucratic empire, a self-revealing bad joke... or is he truly the Godfather of "global governance", grand molly coddler of globalization's many left-Islamic resentments?

There is something nasty about the look, like he could be the accountant or inside man for the more flamboyantly evil Jew in a James Bond film. It seems to me that both James Bond and his villains are fantastic projections of a modern reality on which the other characters in the films are more plausibly based. In related news:

‘This guy clearly does not have anything better to do... What does he think we do? Does he think we sit on our hands waiting to read emails from a ten-year-old who has just discovered Conservatism, on a £200,000 salary in some farmhouse with a wife who works for Google?
[...]
Other figures in the party say that when they first received the bulletins, they thought they were a spoof from the BBC’s political spin doctor satire The Thick Of It, which features a Hilton-style PR guru called Stewart Pearson who ‘hangs’ at Tory HQ dressed in jeans and T-shirt and talks impenetrable gobbledegook.
[...]
One emailed bulletin that has particularly irritated some Tory frontbenchers urges them to discuss ‘cool examples of the post-bureaucratic approach’ by directly contacting American gurus such as Richard Thaler, the co-creator of the fashionable ‘nudge’ theory which suggests that people can be persuaded to change their behaviour without heavy state intervention.

Mr Hilton then uses the example of ‘binge-drinking in Montana’ to explain his theory.

‘The authorities in Montana managed to cut binge drinking amongst students – something that the Labour Government has tried and failed to do,’ he writes.

‘How? They simply put up advertising that stated, “80 per cent of Montana college students drink fewer than four beers per week.” This led to an immediate fall in drinking because of the power of social norms.’

Right... and will we soon be wearing van Rompuy ties?

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist

So says Baudelaire. But what about Herman Van Rompuy? Paul Belien tells us:

Get used to the name. He is the first President of the European Union, which with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by all the 27 EU member states in early November was transformed into a genuine United States of Europe.

The President of Europe has not been elected; he was appointed in a secret meeting of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states. They chose one of their own. Herman Van Rompuy was the Prime Minister of Belgium. I knew him when he was just setting out, reluctantly, on his political career.
[...]
A closer look at Belgium, the laboratory of Europe, shows, however, that the country lacks more than patriotism. It also lacks democracy, respect for the rule of law, and political morality. In 1985, in his book De Afwezige Meerderheid (The Absent Majority) the late Flemish philosopher Lode Claes (1913-1997) argued that without identity and a sense of genuine nationhood, there can also be no democracy and no morality.

One of the people who were deeply influenced by Dr. Claes’s thesis was a young politician named Herman Van Rompuy. In the mid-1980s, Van Rompuy, a conservative Catholic, born in 1947, was active in the youth section of the Flemish Christian-Democrat Party. He wrote books and articles about the importance of traditional values, the role of religion, the protection of the unborn life, the Christian roots of Europe and the need to preserve them. The undemocratic and immoral nature of Belgian politics repulsed him and led to a sort of crisis of conscience. Lode Claes, who was near to retiring, offered Herman the opportunity of succeeding him as the director of Trends, a Belgian financial-economic weekly magazine. It is in this context that I made Herman’s acquaintance. He invited me for lunch one day to ask whether, if he accepted the offer to enter journalism, I would be willing to join him. It was then that he told me that he was considering leaving politics and was weighing the options for the professional life he would pursue.

I am not sure what happened next, however. Maybe word had reached the leadership of the Christian Democrat Party that Herman, a brilliant economist and intellectual, was considering leaving politics; perhaps they made him an offer he could not refuse. Herman remained in politics. He was made a Senator and entered government as a junior minister. In 1988, he became the party leader of the governing Christian-Democrats.
[...]
In 2003, however, the Christian-Democrats were not in government and Herman was a leader of the opposition. His complaint was intended to cause political problems for Belgium’s Liberal government, which refused to divide the BHV district because the French-speaking parties in the government refused to accept the verdict of the Supreme Court. The Flemish Christian-Democrats went to the June 2007 general elections with as their major theme the promise that, once in government, they would split BHV. Herman campaigned on the issue, his party won the elections and became Flanders’ largest party.

Belgium’s political crisis dragged on from June until December 2007 because it proved impossible to put together a government consisting of sufficient Dutch-speaking (Flemish) and French-speaking (Walloon) politicians. The Flemings demanded that BHV be split, as instructed by the Supreme Court; the Walloons refused to do so. Ultimately, the Flemish Christian-Democrats gave in, reneged on their promise to their voters, and agreed to join a government without BHV being split. Worse still, the new government has more French-speaking than Dutch-speaking ministers, and does not have the support of the majority of the Flemings in Parliament, although the Flemings make up a 60% majority of the Belgian population. Herman became the Speaker of the Parliament. In this position he had to prevent Parliament, and the Flemish representatives there, from voting a bill to split BHV. He succeeded in this, by using all kinds of tricks. One day he even had the locks of the plenary meeting room changed so that Parliament could not convene to vote on the issue. On another occasion, he did not show up in his office for a whole week to avoid opening a letter demanding him to table the matter. His tactics worked. In December 2008, when the Belgian Prime Minister had to resign in the wake of a financial scandal, Herman became the new leader of the predominantly French-speaking government which does not represent the majority of Belgium’s ethnic majority group. During the past 11 months, he has skillfully managed to postpone any parliamentary vote on the BHV matter, thereby prolonging a situation which the Supreme Court, responding to Herman's own complaint in 2003, has ruled to be unconstitutional.

Now, Herman has moved on to lead Europe. Like Belgium, the European Union is an undemocratic institution, which needs shrewd leaders who are capable of renouncing everything they once believed in and who know how to impose decisions on the people against the will of the people. Never mind democracy, morality or the rule of law, our betters know what is good for us more than we do. And Herman is now one of our betters. He has come a long way since the days when he was disgusted with Belgian-style politics.

Herman is like Saruman, the wise wizard in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who went over to the other side. He used to care about the things we cared about. But no longer. He has built himself a high tower from where he rules over all of us.

I guess Tony Blair was too obvious.

Meet the President of Europe | The Brussels Journal

Young People: time to unplug the ipods in public, lest you be plugged?

As often, last night's Covenant Zone conversation at the Vancouver Public Library turned on the fate of Europe and, somewhat analogously, of the rather nihilistic condition of many of the young people we see slouching about our city, full of dark self-loathing, or of endlessly coy ironies, and often of cannabis. A tour of the blogs today provides some material to bring out these themes.

First, we find Jim Kalb commenting on the New York Times' bemoaning that Young Adults are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice (but not just newspapers: "In fact, most teenagers and adults 30 and younger are not following the news closely at all"). Kalb:

Big changes in popular habits are no doubt part of a whole network of other changes, so it’s hard to point to specific causes and effects, but isn’t there a distinct connection between young adults’ acceptance of multiculturalism and their total lack of interest in public affairs? To me it seems glaringly obvious that multiculturalism makes public life impossible even in concept. There can’t be public life unless there is public discussion and decision. That requires a public that’s coherent enough to have thoughts and reactions and take action, at least to some degree. The point of multiculturalism, though, is that no particular culture—no particular pattern of thoughts and reactions and no particular history of action—is allowed to determine things. If that’s so, though, how can public life exist? Multicultural government is “free to be you and me” turned into universal law. Under such conditions, there can be no politics and we have to be ruled by experts, therapists and money instead. If the only legitimate role for ordinary people in politics is to parrot the line taken by New York Times, because they’re not experts and if they act on their non-expert prejudices they’ll just mess things up, why shouldn’t they concentrate on their personal affairs and ignore things they have nothing to say about anyway?

I like that, though I don't think Kalb, in general, gives enough attention to how multiculturalism has been a dead end, which was not at first predictably a dead-end, in a nonetheless necessary process of cultural evolution and renewal in our Western tradition, an evolution towards greater freedom.

And yes, we live in very complex social systems with countless interactions and relationships leading to unpredictable changes; but historical change, even in face of all the natural calamities and bounties the world has in store for us, is ultimately a question not of biology, geography, economics, technolgy, etc, but of human self-understanding and our response thereto. In other words, the great motor of human history is the ethical, the human necessity to reflect on and change our social relationships in response to the inevitable resentments and limits on freedom that all social orders and differences create.

As such, our understanding of the historical process is usefully reduced to our ethical concerns and all promoters of self-governing societies should be wary of giving the suggestion that the historical process is mystifyingly complex. In retrospect, it is not a great mystery, even if there is much we can never know. It is only the future outcome of human freedom that must remain a great mystery, precisely because we are free to decide and to respond to decisions in infinitely complex, i.e. eternally open-ended, ways.

This blog, Covenant Zone, and its public meetings, are dedicated to the proposition that multiculturalism will have to be replaced as Canada's governing ideology. This is because official multiculturalism limits human freedom by replacing self-governing nations with largely unaccountable elite bureaucracies and judges deciding what rights we, or groups to which we supposedly belong, have and do not have. We feel that our genuine desire to maximize human freedom cannot go in hand with the pretense that everyone can be just "free to be you and me" under the protection of a big multiculti state. Rather we see the need for a new covenantal culture in which those who seriously pretend to be members of our nation, no matter where their ancestors once lived, will sign on to new freedoms and responsibilties in Canadian self-rule, in embrace of the cultural traditions, largely Western, that make a self-governing covenantal culture possible and necesary to the growth, regulation and security of a free-market economic system.

Open-ended national covenants, that construct reality according to the ever-adapting intelligence of the freely participating members, respect, much better than the soft-totalitarianism of today's imperial, post-national political masters, the truly inexhaustible possibilities for human ethical self-organization. Today's masters want to hold on to a fast-fading vision of postmodern reality with its analysis of history as little more than a process of victimization, countered by the victims' redemption according to the dictates of a "human rights" bureaucracy that must always out-rank popular, representative rule and decentralized, locally-organized, forms of redemption.

At the end of the day, when it comes to understanding our personal identities, we have to decide whether we give pride of place to our membership in a free, open-ended, nation, to make of ourselves what we will through unpredictable, though honest, political and intellectual combat, or to some more limited identity that we think the state must help us protect from the waves of history and the "exploitation" of others. In other words, do we believe, as I think we generally should, that calls to membership in free, self-ruling nations, are not, as the multiculti left generally has it, veiled attempts to promote the will of some privileged class? Could the promise of freedom be just that? Can we humans live well without the freedom to promise, and covenant, to make reality as we will?

If a renewal of national covenants doesn't happen in the short term, so that we may defend without victimary guilt, and without unnecessary violence, some realistic terms of membership in a free society, calmly and rationally excluding, through popular debate and rule, that which we find to be inimicable to our shared freedom, I imagine we will be left with the question of which of the alternative, all-too-limited scenarios is more likely to unfold. Do you see the future like:

1) Flanders' great patriot, the somewhat dour Paul Belien:

The Dutch Labor Party did everything in its power to undermine Judeo-Christian religions, but it is today the vehicle of the most radical Islamization. This has nothing to do with appreciation for yet another religion, but rather with the fact that, like secularism, Islamism is an enemy of Judeo-Christian values.

The European left appreciates Islamism not because it is a religion, but because it is a totalitarian political ideology. The Dutch Labor Party is catering to Islamist extremists even to the point of silencing party members like the Muslim apostate Ehsan Jami.

The same hypocrisy is displayed by Mr. Amato. He says that Europe will benefit from what religious Muslims can offer. However, Mr. Amato was the vice president of the European Convention, which vetoed any reference to God in the preamble to the EU Constitution. Sadly, there are more politicians like Mr. Amato and Mrs. Vogelaar. Take Patrick Janssens, the Socialist mayor of Antwerp, a city just south of the Dutch border. His administration sacks civil servants who warn about a takeover of Antwerp’s mosques by Islamist groups, and has them replaced by members of these very Islamist groups. Last week, Mr. Janssens welcomed international homosexual activists to Antwerp, which he likes to style the “gay capital of Europe.”

Does it make sense to cater simultaneously to radical homosexuals and Islamists? It does not, unless Europe's Christian heritage is your enemy.

Meanwhile, a German appeals court convicted a man for calling abortion “murder.” Klaus Günter Annen, a father of two, runs a Web site where he asks people to pray for “doctors planning an abortion murder.” On a separate Web page he lists German gynecologists who perform abortions. Last Thursday, the Oberlandesgericht in Karlsruhe stated that since abortionists do nothing illegal, no one is allowed — not even in an indirect way — to call them murderers.

It is often argued that Adolf Hitler was only able to grab power in Germany in 1933 because freedom and democracy were already dead. Soon, the secularist totalitarianism in contemporary Europe will be replaced by an Islamist totalitarianism. The Islamists will not need to kill freedom and democracy. The latter have already been murdered.

Or do you see the future like 2)America's great Europhobe, Ralph Peters:

the notion that Europe, the continent that's exported more death and destruction than any other, is going to just shuffle wimpily to its doom is crazy. The Europeans have been playing pacifist dress-up while we protected them, but, sufficiently threatened, they'll revert to their historical pattern--which is to over-react. Europe's Muslims may prove to be the real endangered species; after all, Europe's history of dealing with rejected minorities veers between genocide and, for the lucky, ethnic cleansing. For me, the question isn't whether Muslims will take over Europe, but whether Europe will simply expel them or kill any number of them first. Sound far-fetched? How would the Holocaust have sounded to an educated German (or Brit, or American) in 1932? Europe is a killer continent. When the chips are down, it will kill again.

Meanwhile, Europe's Muslims are behaving so stupidly that their folly can't be measured with any tools at our disposal. Even as British pols pander to radical clerics, the average Brit has had enough of coddling mullahs who preach the destruction of all non-Muslims (and closing the pubs). In mid-July, in Germany, the major organizations representing the millions of Turkish residents refused to come to a conference held by the chancellor to address integration. The Turkish leaders demanded--demanded--that the German parliament first rescind a new immigration law that would have prevented Turks from importing child-brides, isolating them as virtual prisoners and beating them to death. Oh, and the Germans also wanted new immigrants to have a vocabulary of 300 German words upon arrival--just enough to say, "Help, husband killing me." No self-respecting Turk was going to stand for that.

You get the point. Europe has never had a model for integrating non-white immigrants, and they don't really want one. Meanwhile, from Denmark to Marseilles, Muslim residents make outrageous demands that only anger the average voter. Eurabia? You have a better chance of finding honest lobbyists in Washington than you do of seeing the crescent over the spires of Notre Dame.