Counseling Kevin

Multi-Culti Chicanery and The Irrational Ten Percent

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It:

Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means that your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live an African or Native American society. It's the quintessential piece of progressive humbug....Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

[...]

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally "valid."  To accept that proposition means denying reality--the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, and global population movement.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind:

Cultural relativism succeeds in destroying the West's universal or intellectually imperialistic claims, leaving it to be just another culture. So there is equality in the republic of cultures. Unfortunately the West is defined by its need for justification of its ways or values, by its need for discovery of nature, by its need for philosophy and science. This is its cultural imperative. Deprived of that, it will collapse. The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. What makes its political structure possible is the use of the principles of natural right to found a people, thus uniting the good with one's own. Or, to put it otherwise, the regime established here promised untrammeled freedom to reason--not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies all other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion. And this regime, contrary to all claims to the contrary, was founded to overcome ethnocentrism, which is in no sense a discovery of social science.

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man:

Relativism---the doctrine that maintains that all values are merely relative and which attacks all "privileged perspectives"---must ultimately end up undermining democratic and tolerant values as well. Relativism is not a weapon that can be aimed selectively at the enemies one chooses. It fires indiscriminately, shooting out the legs of not only the "absolutism," dogmas, and certainties of the Western tradition, but that tradition's emphasis on tolerance, diversity, and freedom of thought as well. If nothing can be true absolutely, if all values are culturally determined, then cherished principles like human equality have to go by the wayside as well.

Pope Benedict XVI:

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

Azam Kamguian, Iranian human rights activist:

According to cultural relativism, human rights are a Western concept and not applicable to people living in non-Western parts of the world. Cultural relativism is a racist idea because its essence is difference. The idea of difference always serves racism. According to cultural relativism we must respect people’s culture and religion, however despicable. This is absurd and amounts to a call in many cases for the respect of brutality. Human beings are worthy of respect, but not all beliefs must be respected. If a culture allows women to be mutilated and killed to save the family’s "honor", it cannot be excused.

 Victor David Hansen, on Iranian President Amadinejad, and his plan to use the West's love affair with relativism against it: 

He has studied the Western postmodern mind and has devised a strategy based on its unholy trinity of multiculturalism, moral equivalence and cultural relativism. As a third world populist, he expects that his own fascism will escape proper scrutiny if he can recite often enough the past sins of the West. He also understands the appeal of victimology in the West these days. So he knows that to destroy the Israelis, he, not they, must become the victim, and Westerners the aggressors who forced his hand.

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Ahmadinejad also grasps that there are millions of highly educated but cynical Westerners who see nothing exceptional about their own culture. So if democratic America has nuclear weapons, he asks, why not theocratic Iran?

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Moreover, he knows how Western relativism works. Who is to say what are facts or what is true, given the tendency of the powerful to “construct” their own narratives and call the result “history”?

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Money, oil and threats have gotten the Iranian theocrats to the very threshold of a nuclear arsenal. Their uncanny diagnosis of Western malaise has now convinced them that they can carefully fabricate a Holocaust-free reality in which Muslims are the victims and Jews the aggressors, setting the stage for Ahmadinejad’s “righteously” aggrieved Iran, after “hundreds of years of war,” to set things right.

In the midst of all this passive-aggressive noisemaking, the Iranian government pushes insidiously forward with nuclear development — perhaps pausing when it has gone too far in order to allow some negotiations, but then getting right back at it. Nuclear acquisition for Ahmadinejad is a win/win proposition. If he obtains nuclear weapons and restores lost Persian grandeur, it will remind a restless Iranian populace how the theocrats are nationalists after all, not just pan-Islamic provocateurs. And a nuclear Iran could create all sorts of mini-crises in the region in order to spike oil prices, given world demand for oil.

[...]

The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature — which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it — whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.

So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and ten percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational ten percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.

The cultural cold wars rage on, within and without. On and on they go, and where they stop, no one knows.

The Defining Issue Isn't Policy, It's Character

Irving Babbitt, from Democracy and Leadership:

“Social justice…means in practice class justice, class justice means class war and class war, if we are to go by all the experience of the past and present, means hell…The inadequacy of social justice with its tendency to undermine the moral responsibility of the individual and at the same time to obscure the need of standards and leadership may be made clearer if we consider for a moment the problem of government with the utmost degree of realism. Thus considered, government is power. Whether power is to be ethical or unethical, whether in other words it is subordinated to true justice, must depend finally on the quality of will displayed by the men who administer it. For what counts practically is not justice in the abstract, but the just man. The just man is he whose various capacities (including intellect) are acting in right relation to one another under the hegemony of the higher will. We are brought back here to the problem of the remnant. Those who strive for the inner proportion that is reflected in the outer world as justice have always been few. The remark of Aristotle that “most men would rather live in a disorderly rather than sober manner” remains true, at least in the subtler psychic sense. Though one agree with Aristotle as to the ethical unsoundness of the majority, it does not follow that the ethical state is impossible. Human nature, and this is its most encouraging trait, is sensitive to a right example. It is hard, indeed, to set bounds to the persuasiveness of a right example, provided only it be right enough. The ethical state is possible in which an important minority is ethically energetic and is thus becoming at once just and exemplary. Such a minority will also tend to solve the problem of union. The soul of the unjust man is, according to Aristotle, torn by every manner of faction. The just man, on the contrary, is he who, as a result of moral choices based on due deliberation, choices in which he is moved primarily by a regard for his own happiness, has quelled the unruly impulses of his lower nature and so attained to some degree of unity with himself. At the same time he will find that he is moving toward a common center with others who have been carrying through a similar task of self-conquest. A state that is controlled by men who have become just as the result of minding their own business in the Platonic sense will be a just state that will also mind its own business; it will be of service to other states, not by meddling in their affairs on either commercial or “idealistic” grounds, but by setting them a good example. A state of this kind may hope to find a basis of understanding with any other state that is also ethically controlled. The hope of cooperation with a state that is unethical is chimerical. The value of political thinking is therefore in direct ratio to its adequacy in dealing with the problem of leadership. The unit to which all things must finally be referred is not the state or humanity or any other abstraction, but the man of character. Compared with this ultimate human reality, every other reality is only a shadow in the mist.”

No wonder the Left hated Babbitt.

So, America, how are we doing in finding the most "just" man, the man who has best displayed the ability to master the expansive, selfish senses and to rightly order his capacities under the hegemony of the higher will? Who on either side of the aisle seems to be the just man that we most need to lead the state at this time of special distress?

I'm having great difficulty discerning the "saving remnant" among our leadership class these days. Again, if you can spot the exceptions, please point them out.

As to the presidential contest, it appears that this year we'll have a choice between an empty Armani suit and an empty Brooks Brothers suit. Not exactly Jefferson versus Adams, is it?

And Now, A Word From Our Sole Sponsor

Regarding some recent high-profile criminal prosecutions that are being tried on cable and network news shows by every blathering talking head that can inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide: there's a presumption of innocence.

And now, back to Nancy Grace!

That said: my personal opinion, based on over 37 years as a lawyer, and having been a consulting expert to the defense in more than one felony criminal prosecution and civil lawsuit by the government against an individual convicted by the press prior to trial, is that if I were ever indicted, thought that I was guilty, didn't think I could plea-bargain a sentence that was relatively low (considering the nature of the crime), and decided to abandon both the sense of personal responsibility that's been drummed into me since I was a little boy and the faith I've chosen to adopt as an adult (both of which would require me to confess, accept my punishment, make restitution, do penance, and beg forgiveness), then I'd definitely opt to take my chances with a "jury of my peers." I mean, OJ gives every defendant a glimmer of hope. I definitely wouldn't want a trial to the court, decided by a steely-eyed judge who can repel smoke that some trial lawyer's trying to blow up his nether regions, who can rigorously apply logic (and the law) to a set of facts, who can apply the rules of evidence to separate the credible facts from the unbelievable facts, and who is likely to take a dim view during sentencing of some D-bag who wasted the court's valuable time trying to beat a rap he should have manned up and accepted. No, I'd want pie-hole-stuffing, sans-a-belt-trouser-wearing, MTV-saturated "peers" making snap judgments based upon inherent prejudices.

In the Sandusky case, if it doesn't end in a plea-bargain (and that's going to depend on how well the accusers remain "on message" and build a wave of testimony that even the best defense counsel realizes he can't build a levy strong enough to hold back), it's going to a jury. Finding an impartial jury panel is going to be an "interesting exercise." I guess they'll have to pull in some former coma patients and some rug merchants from Kabul.

How Far The Mighty Have Fallen

I wonder how many people watched last night's episode of 60 Minutes on CBS? Steve Kroft did a segment about how members of Congress have exempted themselves from laws that prohibit trading stock on insider information. The full version can be viewed here.

The venality and corruption that Kroft profiles cuts across party lines. The corruption has been exposed by a conservative think tanker and his student apprentices, but he lambastes John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi with equal fervor. What you and I would go to jail for doing (as some high profile hedge fund managers and others have done recently), members of the US House and Senate do all the time without a care. It's why, as Kroft points out, so many members of Congress retire so wealthy.

Here's what we need to do next year: throw all the bums out. if the crop we replace them with turns out to be as seducible as the clowns who are there now, then throw them out, too. The law of averages favors us eventually getting lucky and having a few honest men and women in the place, doesn't it?

Or, you know, we could all move to Belize.

Osama bin-Amish!

We may have a tough time securing our borders against terrorists. It may have taken us nearly a decade to track down Osama. But, by Yahweh, we're smackin' down those lawless Amish and their diabolical sharing of unpasteurized milk (hat tip to The American Princess via Twitter).

Federal agents watched the home closely for a year, gathering evidence. Then, in a pre-dawn raid, armed members from three agencies swooped in.

No, this is not a retelling of the lightning U.S. commando attack in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Rather, the target of the raid late last month by U.S. marshals, a state police trooper and inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was Amish farmer Dan Allgyer of Kinzers, Pa. His so-called “crime” involved nothing more than providing unpasteurized, or raw, dairy milk to eager consumers here in the Washington area.

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What could possibly be the rationale behind this FDA action? The agency banned the interstate sale of raw milk in 1987. It says raw milk can contain harmful pathogens such as listeria and that pasteurized milk is safer.

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Many critics question why the agency concerns itself with raw milk. After all, virtually any food can conceivably contain harmful pathogens - including beef, poultry, pork, seafood, fruits and vegetables. Yet the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) permit the overwhelming majority of these products to be sold in their raw forms. For example, the USDA, which regulates beef, pork and poultry, permits their sale in raw and cooked forms. The FDA, which regulates seafood and eggs, likewise permits those to be sold raw or cooked.

[...]

Even if consumers were unaware of the risk involved in consuming a raw agricultural product like raw milk or raw beef, FDA and USDA guidelines, along with many state and local health codes, typically require warnings about the potential dangers of consuming raw or undercooked foods. Where a warning will suffice, a ban is inappropriate. The FDA’s extraordinary message when it comes to raw milk, though, is that the American people are too dim to read the very labels the agency requires.

You give in on unpasteurized milk and the next thing you know these horse'n'buggy Amish gang-bangers will be sharing organic produce with the poor and starving. Then where would this country be?

I don't know about you, but I sleep better at night knowing that E. coli-hating bovine bureaucrats are slammin' down stings on these low-lives and watching over the health and welfare of you, me and every other homogenized, pasteurized, milk mustache-wearer in this great country I like to call "The Land of the Free."

Help keep the U.S. udderly free of foreign bacteria. Bust a Mennonite today.

Their Sweating Selves

I Wake And Feel The Fell Of Dark, Not Day
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decrees
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.

I spent the last few days on a road trip to a state many hours away from my home base, with another attorney, locked in a conference room at a financial institution that finds itself, as too many too-small-to-save do, locked in a death struggle with a maternal praying mantis of a bank regulatory agency hell-bent on reconstructing history to make people who lacked prescience take the fall for the fact that almost all of us, including the regulators, lacked the same. After all, bad things have happened on their watch and in order to prevent any opportunity for the critics within their self-contained circle of back-stabbers and zero-sum-game-players to accuse them of failing to anticipate the unforeseeable, it's better to destroy institutions and livelihoods by reinventing the past and pushing a narrative that the steamrolled were negligent rather than unfortunate.

As many decades as I've invested swimming in this cesspool, and having survived the carnage in Denver and Dallas from 1982 to 1993, you'd think I'd be used to the stench. To an unfortunate extent, I am. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the highly skilled sub-hominid I've become, occasionally  I have to stop and don an oxygen mask to prevent suffocation or, worse, retching that leaves me feeling spent but, unfortunately, still sensate.

I can't think of a greater horror, and for that reason a more fitting punishment, than to spend eternity as exactly the person I am at this moment. As C.S. Lewis speculated in his novel The Great Divorce, perhaps God grants us each a chance for redemption even after death, but, if so, I assume he also permits us to make that choice burdened by the same essential character we posses at the instant of our death. It's not that Lewis proposes that most fail to grasp such a chance that surprises me, it's that he proposes the possibility that anyone actually reaches out at all. Most of the people I see seem destined to be locked for eternity in the straight jacket of their own brokenness.

Life Lived Humbly, In The Round

"Most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions," complained Theodore Roosevelt, who tended to live his life "in the round."

The hash that the main stream and "heterodox" media, and our political class, have made of "the lessons of Tuscon" give proof to his complaint. The greatest "blood libel" that has been uttered has nothing to do with anything Sarah Palin or Tea Partiers might or might not have uttered and who was or was not influenced by the same, and everything to do with the fact that every pundit making an assertion as to the lessons we should learn from this seemingly senseless act of horrific violence claims that his or her assertion is "the truth."

The truth? You can't HANDLE the truth!

Here's what I think may be approaching the truth, and I don't assert it as a fact or even as something as profound. It's merely something that, to me, sheds a little light in the darkness. Maybe that light is equivalent to that of a firefly flickering in the bowels of a deep, dark woods, and if you find it so, move along, because there's nothing to see here.

We're incapable of making sense of such senseless acts of violence, and it's hubris to claim otherwise. While we always must do the best we can to "police up the area" and take whatever actions we think -- with the application of our limited reason and with a conscious recognition that we are all flawed human beings who will never get it absolutely right -- we deem appropriate to preserve public order and minimize the risks, the ultimate "reason" that six people died and others were seriously wounded in a Safeway parking lot by a man who thinks that government is controlling our grammar and therefore a score or more of other human beings must die by his righteous hand, is beyond our ken. Not if you're a commentator on MSNBC, Fox News, or HBO, of course, but for most of the rest of us, most assuredly.

Writing of the death of his beloved wife from cancer, in his most personally anguished book ("A Grief Observed"), C.S. Lewis uttered a passage that's stayed with me through many a horror, public and personal.

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness...But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't.

Either way, we're for it.

Yes, either way, we're for it. You "take your choice" about what to believe and in that choice lies all the difference in the world about how you respond to your inability to control the world around you and the bad things that happen to you. Some respond with a humility fit for a life lived in the round, others with the arrogance that a political or legal construct will assure us all that "it will never happen again."

Yours, Mine and Ours

Never one to tread where the timid dare not dip their toes, I usually shy away from controversial topics. I find that the prospect of offending some hothouse flower's refined sensibilities so horrifying that I almost always opt to take a middle course, steering between the rocky shoals of "hot opinions" and aiming for the tepid tapioca beach where no offense is given or received, where good feelings and glad tidings abound, and where ... MMMMMMMWWWWAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!

OK, I couldn't keep a straight face.

I usually dive into any issue bound to offend the politically correct and unleash my Gatling Gun of barbs, if for no other reason than to arouse the professionally aggrieved to spout and spew like harpooned whales on a final breach.

No, that's not "what Jesus would do." Then again, I see through a glass, darkly.

However, for a refreshing change of pace, on the third-rail topic of gay marriage, I'll let Lee Harris, a conservative gay writer, do my talking for me.

Writing an op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News (free registration required), he called the entire issue a "tar baby."

Gay marriage is rapidly becoming our national tar baby – something that you cannot touch without getting tar all over you. Once you touch the tar baby, you can never quite get rid of it again.

Frankly, the gay-marriage tar baby perplexes me. I do not understand it. All I know is that I want to keep my distance from it.

The source of my confusion is this. For 18 years, I have shared my life with a member of my own sex, and I have been entirely satisfied with our domestic arrangements. Never once did it occur to me that there was something missing from our lives or that we were the oppressed victims of the heterosexual majority. Never once did I think our lives would be more complete, or more honorable, or more worthy, if only we had been able to get married.

My thought was not that marriage should be only between a man and a woman but, simply and matter-of-factly, that marriage was and had always been between a man and a woman. Marriage as an institution was theirs; it wasn't ours.

Once upon a not-so-distant time, all gay men and women instinctively made this distinction between "theirs" and "ours."

[...]

In the early and creative phase of the gay liberation movement, gays recognized that we were different from them; they recognized that they were different from us. We said, "Listen, we want to have our own turf, our own communities"; and they said back to us, "OK. You can have your own turf and your own communities. But, please, make sure you stay on your side of the line."

This sensible concordat was responsible for the immense progress that gay men and women made in the post-Stonewall era. But it was abruptly shattered with the proclamation of a radically new political agenda that was launched with the publication of Andrew Sullivan's 1996 book, Virtually Normal.

At the center of Mr. Sullivan's thesis was the notion that the distinction between "ours" and "theirs" was illegitimate. To me, this claim made no sense philosophically, psychologically or politically. Gay men are different from straight men; gay women are different from straight women. Nor is there anything demeaning or morally objectionable in our being different.

I see the world differently because I am gay, and I am heartily glad of this fact – not because I see it clearer or better, but because it allows me to see it from a different perspective and to discover things in that perspective that no straight man could be expected to notice.

No matter how I came to be the way I am, I am grateful that I have ended up as I have. I need no one else's confirmation or blessing to be equal to myself. I deeply love my partner, and I hope to die with him; but there is nothing in my fidelity that requires me to borrow the concept of marriage.

Is friendship a less sacred ideal than marriage? Perhaps it is for them, but it is not – or should not be – for us.

This is why I look with such great sadness at the national tar baby with which all of us will soon be smeared. It will needlessly divide straight from gay, gay from gay, straight from straight; it will sully everything that it comes into contact with it. We are no longer practicing the politics of compromise; we are now practicing the politics of Push comes to Shove. Only now we are no longer trying to shove them out of our communities; we are trying to shove our way into theirs.

Of course, to proponents of gay marriage, the issue is defined purely in terms of the language of virtual equality: moral rights, natural rights, legal rights. They see the matter exactly as I originally saw the question of flag-burning and, therefore, are utterly unable to grasp how the other side really feels about the question – or, when they do notice these feelings, they tend, as I did, to dismiss them as irrelevant to the issue.

But such a superior attitude ignores the heart of the problem: Who gets to define what the gay marriage controversy is really about? If the proponents do, then it is all about legal rights, but if, on the other hand, the opponents get to define it, then it is all about defending an ethical institution that they believe is theirs alone.

When men and women cannot even agree on what they are arguing about, argument is of no avail, and sheer force of will becomes the final arbiter of the controversy – if we are lucky.

This is not how the American gay community got where we are today, and it is almost a sure guarantee that we will not be where we are tomorrow.

Andrew Sullivan offers a contrary view, as Harris (and we) would expect. To Sullivan, there are, and should be, no differences between straight and gay couples as to the institution of marriage. Marriages between both types of couples should be legally recognized as being the identical institution. The Dallas Morning News "Points" page on which these contrary editorials originally appeared gave Sullivan's piece featured presentation, with Harris' opinion shunted to the side, with smaller font and, unlike Sullivan's, without bold face. Think the MSM might be biased?

For a more detailed analysis by Harris, in the context of a broad defense of traditional values, read Harris' article The Future of Tradition, from the June-July, 2005 issue of Policy Review.

Bridges

I was tempted to post my thoughts about how disgusting both sides of the great debate over the mosque/community center near/two blocks from Ground Zero have been, but, then, where would one begin and where would one stop? The intellectual dishonesty on both sides of the issue has been astounding. Well, not actually "astounding," since intellectual dishonesty is the modus operandi of all sides of the political and social spectrum these days. The best comment I heard this week was George Will's on yesterday's This Week on ABC, to the effect that a month from now the American public will wonder what all the noise was about.

The condescension of the supporters of the community center was as amusing as it was annoying. The left always takes the stance that the right is composed of knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers, because it makes them feel more comfortable with the fact that although they're a small fraction of the populace that surrounds them, they're "superior" in oh-so-many ways. As C.S. Lewis once observed, there's likely a special place in hell for those who feel they're a cut above the common man.

Strangely (or perhaps, not so strangely), in the course of this week I also thought of the reverse condescension that once assaulted Mary Chapin Carpenter when she first burst on the country music scene many years ago. Country music "purists" could never accept the fact that a graduate of an Ivy League school like Brown could feel and express the same deep sense of hurt, longing, regret, and battered-yet-persistent hope that the rest of us red-necked riff-raff felt in our bones. In a sense, many of the "common folk" believed that only they had the right to feel those feelings and that someone from a privileged background like Chapin was a pretender treading on their sacred ground. The irony of that reaction to Ms. Carpenter made me take her to heart right from the get-go.

When we should be building bridges, we build walls. We're all fools. Every damned single one of us.

Truth is truth, and no one has a monopoly on truth save God. Whatever He's revealed to us, we all see it through a glass, darkly.

I'm not running
I'm not hiding
I'm not reaching
I'm just resting in the arms of the great wide open
Gonna pull my soul in
And I'm almost home

Belief in One God: "The Single Worst Idea In History"

Cultures fight wars with one another. They must do so because values can only be asserted or posited by overcoming others, not by reasoning with them. Cultures have different perceptions, which determine what the world is. They cannot come to terms. There is no communication about the highest things...Culture means a war against chaos and a war against other cultures.
---Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

An extended family member was recently ranting about all the "damage" that "organized religion" has done over the ages. She believes in a "higher power" that is--as best I can sort it out from her inarticulate explanations--a kind of nebulous "wind spirit," perhaps a giant Koala bear in the sky who waves a benevolent paw over creation once in awhile and who, like a much-beloved and doting Grandpa, wants everyone to munch eucalyptus leaves and just "be happy." She's bought off on her father's "whatever-floats-your-boat" theology and seems really angry that "true believers" in monotheism (such as yours falsely) are such closed-minded dunderheads, prone to "exclusiveness" and, in her mind, the originators of eons of violence and divisiveness.

She brought to mind an article I read almost five years ago in The Spectator by Mark Steyn, a nonbeliever in Christianity (or any form of monotheism, as best as I've been able to determine) who, nevertheless, "believes" that Judaism and Christianity are essential for the survival of Western civilization, a civilization he deems worthy of saving purely on the basis of reason. Steyn is not a gentle soul when it comes to skewering his opposition. If my relative thinks that I'm a hard-core hard-ass, I've got absolutely nothing on Steyn. However, he skewers "the Godless opposition" in ways that are as amusing as they are revealing.

Peter Watson, the author of a new book called Ideas: a History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, was interviewed by the New York Times the other day, and was asked to name ‘the single worst idea in history’. He replied:

‘Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on Earth determines how we will go into the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.’

And a Merry Christmas to you, too. For a big-ideas guy, Watson is missing the bigger question: something has to be ‘responsible for most of the wars and bigotry’, and if it wasn’t religion, it would surely be something else. In fact, in the 20th century, it was. Europe’s post-Christian pathogens of communism and Nazism unleashed horrors on a scale inconceivable even to the most ambitious Pope. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot: you’d look in vain for any of them in the pews each Sunday. Marx has a lot more blood on his hands than Christ — other people’s blood, I mean — but the hyper-rationalists are noticeably less keen to stick him with the tab for the party.

So the big thinker would seem to be objectively wrong in what, for a secular rationalist, sounds more like a reflex irrational bigotry all his own.

Steyn proceeds to make logical conclusions based upon the facts, rather than politically correct prejudices, in defense of the benefits of a shared religious belief, especially Christianity. An attack on Christianity (represented by the movie The Chronicles of Narnia) by Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee prompts some especially pungent observations by Steyn:

‘Here in Narnia,’ she sneered, ‘is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America, that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.’ The first half of that sentence I don’t particularly disagree with, the second is just plain sad: no one who trades in language for a living should bandy phrases like ‘neo-fascist’ so carelessly. But Miss Toynbee went on to cite a more sober objection to Narnia.

Aslan, she writes, ‘is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on Earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can.’

Sounds very nice, doesn’t it? But in practice the lack of belief in divine presence is just as likely to lead to humans avoiding responsibility: if there’s nothing other than the here and now, who needs to settle disputes at all? All you have to do is manage to defer them till after you’re dead — which is pretty much the post-Christian European electorates’ approach to their unaffordable social programmes. I mentioned in the Daily Telegraph a couple of weeks back the amount of mail I get from British readers commenting with gloomy resignation on various remorseless trends in our island story and ending with, ‘Fortunately I won’t live to see it.’ When you think about it, that’s actually the essence of the problem: hyper-rationalist radical secularism reduces the world to one’s own life span. Why try to ‘settle disputes’ when you’ll be long gone? Faith is one of those mystic cords that binds us to our past and commits us to a future.

So I’d say Polly’s got it all wrong. The meek’s chances of inheriting the earth are considerably diminished in a post-Christian society: chances are they’ll just get steamrollered by more motivated types...

[...]

A rationalist ought still to be able to conclude that, as a societal model, Christianity is more rational than Eutopian secularism. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John cooked the whole racket up, it’s nevertheless a stroke of genius to anchor the whole phony-baloney rigmarole in the birth of a child and his triumph over death. Whether or not there is a hereafter, new life is our triumph over death here on Earth. A religiosity centred on eternal life will by definition be a more efficient organising principle for an enduring society than a secularism focused on the here and now, with ‘no other place yet to come’, as Polly Toynbee puts it...

[...]

What’s so rational about putting yourself out of business? On both sides of the Atlantic, the godly will inherit the Earth: in the United States, blue-state birthrates mean that in 20 years America will look a lot less like John Kerry’s Massachusetts and a lot more like Texas and Utah; Europe will look a lot less like an Amsterdam sex club and a lot more like Clichy-sous-Bois. Post-Christian Europe will also be post-European. If you’re cool with that, fine. If you’re not, you might want to rethink the lazy slurs about America’s ‘neo-fascist’ religiosity. Merry Christmas. Happy Eid.

To me, one of Steyn's most telling points, and one that initially spurred the post-9/11 "rebirth" of my belief in Christ, is one he makes almost in passing, the "challenge of Islam, a religion whose afterlife appears — at least according to many of its more bloodcurdling spokespersons — to reward ‘wars and bigotry’."

But the question then is what kind of society is best equipped to defend itself against such a challenge?

Steyn does not believe that a secularist society that values the thoughts embodied in John Lennon's song Imagine (no heaven, no hell, no afterlife) will produce people possessed of any fiber more robust than "fey passivity." For me, there's "the rub." Steyn's pointed out the obvious many times before: secularists are losing the breeding battle to Islam and to "radical" Christianity. Their "thoughts" and "beliefs" don't provide enough spiritual fuel to animate them to perpetuate themselves, much less oppose by force a more robust culture that hates their "thoughts" and "beliefs." They're doomed, and time is their enemy. However, inasmuch as they don't believe in an afterlife, and, therefore, are concerned principally with their own lives here on Earth, they adopt the stance of Louis XV (Après moi le déluge: "After me, the flood.").

Only tribes with strong "glue" infused into the very marrow of their common beliefs will be bound together tightly enough to give them a chance to prevail against people for whom a common set of strong core beliefs are a given. I don't care if the vapid, rootless, and utterly narcissistic secular humanists eventually waste away and yield inevitably to the Christians who out-populate them on a daily basis. What I do care about -- and what scares the living hell out of me -- is that while they're wasting away, their poisonous influence, magnified because they appeal to the powerful beast in all of us, will fatally weaken our society, regardless of the number of "believers" within it.