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Cultural Recovery
Leaving aside the risk of conquest by stronger outsiders, there is the problem of how to adapt when a culture no longer works. Socrates and Plato were the tip of the spear for a generation of Greeks who found philosophy about Forms or essence more meaningful than stories about the rather petty gods of Greek religion. Everyone grasped that what Socrates was teaching the young to do (question everything) was ultimately a mortal threat to the increasingly shaky foundational myths of the culture.
A century ago, American culture was founded on a unity of faith, family, and patriotism. God had clearly blessed America. Now, a huge portion (quite possibly a majority) no longer believes in that three-part unity. But I suspect a majority does miss the certainty, positivity, and security of that previous state of affairs and will grope or be led towards that which looks like a viable replacement, one most likely offered by better liars than those now in control.
Because the issue of cultural recovery is of great interest, I find the efforts of native peoples to reestablish some cultural identity to be instructive. Consider the case of M. Kaneo Manuel, blamed by some for the delay in releasing water to be used to fight the Maui wildfires. He issues mixed references to Hawaiian culture and the quintessentially white social justice rhetoric. Would traditional Hawaiian rulers call for “conversations about equity” in a crisis or simply do what was in the interest of their own people but maybe not of their enemies?
Cherry-picked elements of a tribal culture bathed in the rhetoric and ideology spawned by the Frankfurt School is a Frankenstein monster of sorts—defiantly non-white but “non-white” as defined solely in terms and concepts provided by whites. Consider this excerpt from an articulate statement by a young Native American:
The lack of reciprocity within Western education highlights the uneven power dynamic embedded within both universities and settler colonial society at large. True decolonization means genuinely listening to Indigenous community members and creating shifts in the power dynamics that uplift Indigenous ways of connecting with the lived environment. Institutions, including both universities and government systems, need to provide more than seats at the table.
He says that decolonization requires listening to indigenous voices but if the dialogue they employ only uses the language concepts found entirely in white leftist academia and in old Obama speeches doesn’t that complete the white cultural conquest? It is a mockery of tribal peoples and cultures if they are reconstructed as white liberals conceive of them. It is at least a bit ironic that the statement cited above appears on the website of the Aspen Institute, the mothership of white liberal cultural colonizers.
I read somewhere that Australian aboriginal peoples did not use distinctions and categories like technology, religion, history, or politics but simply referred to the collective wisdom and practical knowledge of the tribe as “the Law.” Centuries ago, Polynesian visitors in the north of Australia introduced agriculture but the locals ultimately rejected that in favor of the old ways, which makes sense if method, belief, and social cohesion are tightly integrated.
In contrast, the tribes of the Great Plains built an entirely new culture from the killer app (horses) left by the Spanish and promptly made mobile war on each other with enthusiasm. In even greater contrast, Americans have tried (with mixed success) to create a culture in which innovation and technological change comprise the norm. Maybe the Australian First Nations People were onto something about the benefits of trying to make beliefs, social order, and technique a consonant and unchanging whole.
As we normals are pushed onto reservations in red states, watching history decide whether Hegel (there will be one all-powerful state) or Nietzsche (once everyone realizes everything is BS there will be anarchy) was right, we might want to reflect on the spiritual roots of true humanism and Western civilization. That is where the rebuild must start and not with a deconstruction and power analysis of our status as an oppressed people. The enemy has correctly focused on lies about “identity” as a main theater of their cultural war because universal recognition of the truth and intrinsic value of our shared humanity is the first line of defense against tyranny. If we become ignorant of who and what we really are, the enemy thinks they win.
Published in General
It sounds like you’re saying that we’ve lost some of our most fundamental traditional beliefs to the decadent and dangerous post-modernist folks. I worry that we will never be able to find our way back to the most important of those beliefs, and some people will be convinced of some “new and improved” version that only faintly resembles the past and continues to lead us in the wrong direction. I am in the general territory?
Yes.
I have been going back into the Weimar Republic Sourcebook to frighten myself about how literally all of the current social and ideological perversions of the current age were already in full flower in Weimar Germany. From the perspective of the middle-class average Johan, the economy was a shambles, the men who served in an incredibly ugly war thought they had been betrayed by the leadership, Berlin probably had more hookers per capita than Bangkok or Tijuana and the first major gay rights demonstrations took place. The marxist critique of conventional sexual mores and identity was underway.
meanwhile, Hitler was funny-looking (many people openly wondered what was with that weird little mustache), his movement looked kinda over the top with the uniforms and apparent leather fetish. But he was the guy who would kick butt and take names (literally as it turned out) and restore the moral and social order and that was his ticket to power.
But you were never going to get a return of an Ozzie and Harriet social order if you delegated the task to guys like Goebbels and Himler. The pope told Catholics to not send their kids to Hitler Youth because the teachings were perverse, especially the idea that loyalty to the state trumped all other moral obligations. But it was already way too late to keep the whole sick drama from heading for Gotterdamerung with all of the death, destruction, and sheer evil it would wreak. Instead of a more moral society, the “ideal” German and German family was a perversion of family values and a strange embrace of racism. Jews were never going to fit in that caricature.
I once told a liberal friend that if he knew more about how Hitler came to power and what his supporters were reacting against he would be grateful that all the American left got in response to what they are trying to impose was Trump. It could easily be something vastly worse.
I hypothesize that a major root, maybe the major root, of our social breakdown is the acceptance of the idea that “racism” is bad. It turns out that rejecting “racism” means that you can’t prefer your own people.
There’s a great deal of overlap between racial and ethnic groupings, on the one hand, and social, cultural, and religious practices, on the other. This makes perfect sense, as people of different racial and ethnic groups shared a common geographic and cultural origin. Larger groupings encompass many sub-groups, but there’s still a tendency for African societies to be more similar to each other than to, say, east Asian societies, and this applies to many groups.
Once you decide that you can’t be “racist,” so you can’t “discriminate,” how do you uphold social norms and cultural practices? It becomes impossible, I think. The bonds that make a group of people distinct, and create cohesion between them, must necessarily break down as more and more strangers are accepted into the group. Once a group is full of strangers, with nothing in common, there is nothing to unite them.
You end up with a culture that is a mile wide and an inch deep. (I think that this phrase is from Douglas Murray.) Such a culture seems unlikely to endure.
Why in the world can’t one prefer one’s own people? Most people seem to do so. The Japanese prefer Japan, the Iranians prefer Iran, the Indians prefer India. I don’t see any problem with this. Generally, we can just leave them alone to be themselves.
It seems to me that this utopian vision of a multi-racial, multi-cultural society is the result not of Marxism or the Frankfurt School, but of the so-called Enlightenment itself. It doesn’t seem to work. My impression is that it is almost exclusively Western European and American. These are the two areas in which the operative ideology denigrates and despises the traditions of their own countries.
The ideology that does so is not just the Progressives or the Wokeists. It is even the so-called conservatives, or at least a large majority of them.
I believe that the root cause of almost all our perversions of culture can traced to the refusal of our Justice System to properly enforce many of cherished inalienable rights chief among them the freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the Equal Protection Clause, the Take Care clause and the right to Life, Liberty and Property guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.
Those deliberate perversions of Justice allowed a radical LeftWing and Nihilist element to take over almost all of our cultural institutions and to demand fealty among the populace to a set of values only a pyschopath could love.
Do you define “your own people” in terms of race?
She may be articulate. But I must confess that I have no idea what she’s saying here.
I consider Donald Trump to be a terrible speaker but an outstanding communicator.
She would be a good example of a good speaker but a terrible communicator.
“True decolonization means genuinely listening to Indigenous community members and creating shifts in the power dynamics that uplift Indigenous ways of connecting with the lived environment.“
What on earth?
I’m pretty sure I know what the articulate young Native American is saying. I’m also pretty sure that it’s intended to be manipulative and misleading, or at best is an unresolvable contradiction.
I got stuck on that bit too. Aside from any practical or political considerations, these people are just so boring.
Great moments in history when Native Americans came to Washington DC to learn how to utter complete and utter BS in the white man’s tongue as depicted in Outlaw Josey Wales (1976):
Remember Eric Holder calling for a national conversation on race? As if any dissident voices would be allowed to interrupt that one-sided lecture….
In the same vein, the “indigenous voices” will be scripted to issue the lines white liberals expect so that the white liberals can pretend to listen and feel guilty.
Nice euphemism.
When I was six years old, my father taught me about racism. And it was very personal. He said, “How would you like it if other people thought you were worth less because of the color of your skin? Or where you were from, or because of who your parents were? How would you like being told you couldn’t have a job because of the way you looked, or live where you want if you can afford it, or go to school where you were smart enough, or eat where you wanted if you had the money? Would you want people to do that to you? Then if you don’t want people to do it to you, don’t do it to others.”
Wonderful comment. At a personal level, my grandchildren are the following “races”: Black (African), Mixed hispanic/black (I predict that one will be in charge of all of us before she’s through), Mixed black/white, mixed Cambodian/White. Family photos look like a day care being run out of the United Nations. We don’t ever even talk about race. I’m not entirely sure that anyone in the family even notices or remembers. When love is real, you don’t fixate on skin.
Culture/worldview, on the other hand, is another thing altogether.
Yes, but when I was told this it was common practice to refuse any service to anyone based solely on skin color and perhaps hair. And the questions to me were directly applicable. Today people of the same bent couch their same prejudices in groups, and “science”, and statistics, and alleles, and countries of origin, but they are following the same basic racism that is the desired end result. Proving that certain individuals who look a certain way (conveniently without requiring DNA results) still have more value and less value based on how they appear visually or perhaps their accent.
They may not say they are descended from monkeys and provably not human, but instead they say they are all an inferior sub-species of human — and the old how-many-drops-of-blood racism is justified.
Yes. And there’s a sort of disguised form of this (and pernicious) engaged in by the left. It is the dehumanizing assumption that non-white races are incapable of self discipline, delaying gratification, or generally behaving as adults. These dehumanizing assumptions are everywhere in evidence in leftist assumptions and policies. And they’re being embedded, and institutionalized, into every government bureaucracy. A few years ago, the Smithsonian actually posted a helpful guide to their institutionalized racist assumptions along these lines on their web site. When people started pointing out how condescending and racist the assumptions were, they ended up taking it down.
Everything old is new again.
Mayor Pete is also an advocate of “national conversations.”
“National Conversations” is simply another term for “Let Us Progressives Tell You How to Think”.
“And keep your mouth shut (or else)”