Learned and freethinking gentlemen,
Sorry I
haven't been in touch. I took some time away from Maddingcrowdbook in
order to hear myself think. The herd found me anyway. Even in the
mountains I can hear them move.
Here's something of where I've
uncomfortably been for the last few months. I promise I'm not coming
from a place of racism, sexism, or (worst of all) conservatism, but--
~~~
I
read Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique. He suggests that evolutionary
psychology can clarify the unconscious motivations of certain
ideologues, with a certain persistent tribal identification, who assert
that healthy Western cultural norms are secretly pathological.
There
are good historical reasons for Jews to have led the argument in favour
of multiculturalism, and against European ethnic hegemony.
This
means that there actually is an internal coherence and logic to my
education in the denigration of Western civilisation
(post-structuralism, deconstruction, critical theory, et cetera). It's not
just that it was frustratingly mystical and pretentious; it was wrong, and it was wrong for reasons.
A little psychology and history applied to my lessons makes them appear
less like a misanthropic shit test. This recasts my failure to engage
in the bad faith performance necessary for my final papers. Of course I
couldn't get my Honours! The field of cultural studies wasn't
honourable!
The reasons for that are understandable,
and not at all a conscious conspiracy by scheming Jews to undermine our
culture, but the whole tenor of my studies is rendered suddenly
comprehensible by this transgressive observation--that a significant
portion of the people I read in university were Jewish atheists who
believed in the moral exceptionalism of the Jewish people.
~~~
So
I've just read in MacDonald's book--about academic theory--that
immigration policies in the West were changed in the 60s and 70s against
popular sentiment, and not by elected politicians, but by government
officials responding to lobby groups. Canada quietly abandoned a policy of
favouring immigration from the cultures that constituted it because
that's what it had to do to play ball with the UN. It was not a
democratic decision.
All of this is swirling around my
head, when the biggest migration since the last world war breaks into
the news, and browbeaten Swedes and Germans scramble to welcome refugees
who have crossed half a dozen safe countries to get there. What am I
to make of this?
~~~
More
conscious of the origins of intersectional grievance politics, I take a
closer look at the works of people who got degrees like mine, but
actually believed them. Gamergate, Shirtgate, Elevatorgate; each time
the media just repeated what professional victims said about the
oppressive patriarchy. That kind of talk is grounded in opaque poetical
political philosophising, not any kind of science.
They
have not one, but two Jewish prophets: Marx and Freud. It's inevitable
that the oppressed female proletariat will throw off the shackles of
those bourgeois boys with all their unfair power. It's clear that white
people repress how hateful and unbalanced they really are (just like
all men want to fuck their mothers) and your vehement denials really
just prove how deeply true it is.
This is old stuff,
adapted and polished for a new age, but people live and breathe it as
gospel truth -- and they know the god they don't believe in is on their
side.
~~~
Where have I heard this before? But of course!
This is the "ressentiment"
of slave morality. Nietzsche was talking about Judaism by way of
Christianity, but the psychological calculus tracks perfectly.
Resentment
of the powerful leads to a reversal of values whereby the weak and
powerless turn their lack of power into a virtue. Where the nobles
before called the things that were not great "bad," the slaves now call
the things that are great "evil." Where "goodness" before was a
sense of strength and health and the power to effect one's will in the
world, "goodness" in slave morality glorifies being a victim.
Nietzsche was writing about Social Justice Warriors in the fucking 1880s!
~~~
In
the service of this narrative of oppression, regressive progressives
have abandoned any pretense of classically liberal values. The academy
and the wider public discourse have become actively hostile to the free
expression of ideas, to say nothing of facts and reason. What passes
for moral and rational is frequently a barrage of ad hominem, ab absurdo, straw man,
and reductio ad Hitlerum arguments.
People
think that repeating the received dogma is what constitutes thinking.
How can I be surprised? Other than the philosophy courses I took, that
was the measure of success in my seminars.
Universities
are not about reading widely and learning how to assess information,
the media is not about objectively reporting the facts and showing all
sides, politics is not about defending the interests of the people and
the land, and the agora, the marketplace of ideas, has been reduced to
the exchange of instinctive feelings, recycled reasons, and decadent
distractions. 2500 years of intellectual, political, scientific, and
moral development have earned us the privilege of not simply neglecting
those gifts, but denying their value.
Franz Boas said that
cultures are relative and can't be compared, which our radicals have
taken to mean that only our culture can be criticised, and certainly not
praised. And why bother cultivating an elevated sense of possibility,
if nothing we could ever accomplish would be any better than savagery?
Maybe
the epidemics of mental illness and addiction and suicide in our
society have something to do with the consequences of not honouring our
ancestors (something codified as a religious rite by some cultures, but
perhaps developing from a naïve psychological instinct for health).
We're the culture that chose to end institutional sexism, to end the
most obvious forms of colonialism, to end legal slavery, and instead of
pride for our self-overcoming, we accept the blame for inventing these
injustices, reversing our accomplishments into a listless and demented
ethnomasochism.
~~~
And then...
Those
people didn't choose to bomb Syria. They didn't colonise Algeria. They didn't deserve it. So why
are some people--my father, for one--seemingly more interested in
understanding and defending the motivations of jihadists than in
deploring a dangerous ideology?
No amount of cultural
relativism makes it not wrong. Of course we shouldn't meddle with other
regions. Of course our nations have done terrible things in our name.
It's still wrong. There's no moral equivalency that can absolve
terrorism. It's wrong without the need for a song and dance to lend
context and nuance. That's my culture.
If the people
who value liberty, equality and fraternity can be gunned down for
peacefully enjoying their way of life, and they shrug and say they
probably deserved it, what competition can we hope to muster against a
theocratic religion still in its petulant teenage years?
~~~
In
Missouri, where the president of the state university was forced to
resign after someone made a swastika out of poo, activists began using
the hashtag #FuckParis, because those Parisians don't understand the
institutional oppression of a townie driving by and shouting the n-word.
In Peterborough, the city where I got my schooling in what turned out to
be cultural Marxism, someone set fire to the only mosque.
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