The ethics of suicide

A longtime friend criticized me yesterday for my current conservative worldview. He noted that years ago, when I was present at a meeting where some person of color would criticize white men as a group, I would regard it simply as a stupid and ignorant form of political correctness. I would say that since the person did not know me, it did not apply to me, reject the idea, and move on. Now, says my friend, this rejection has become a fundamental philosophical attitude, part of a political stance that puts me at odds with most people around me.

True enough.

I was wondering today, as I unsuccessfully attempted to find a sympathy card to send to the husband of a recently deceased dear friend --who would think it so hard to find something dignified?-- why I get so exercised about liberalism in its current form and have to have this blog to discharge my thoughts and feelings against it.

After all, liberals just want to be good.

The ethical aroma in liberal politics galls me. I have never been a fan of ethics. It is a useful and necessary consideration, but if taken to extremes, brings about unhappiness. Being good enough is good enough for me.

But why, I asked myself, should the desire for a political system to be good provoke me so?

I think I have the answer.

During the Cold War, it was common for American politicians and other cultural spokesman to trumpet the moral superiority of the West. I have no problem with that; the Eastern bloc, the Communist world, was in the grip of a rankly evil ideology which brought misery to hundreds of millions and death to at least one hundred million, as well as deforming the souls of those it touched. Why not make your opposition to it a moral crusade?

The difference now is that the moral high ground which liberals proclaim and seek to enact is aimed at their own people, their own culture, their own civilization, never at others. It is not an ethical stance of superiority over an enemy, but over our ancestors, one's own history and finally, oneself. The deep drive of liberalism is to atone by committing suicide. The task of the West, that is, the civilization of the white Christian male, is to repent and to disappear. We live in the time of White Lent.

The almost total inability of liberals to rouse themselves to any kind of moral fury or indignation against anyone but members of their own tribe is painful to see. Liberals are utterly blind to the savage thuggery of the jihadi Hamas in Gaza and spend all their energy condemning Israel, the Western democratic enclave in the middle of the tyrant-riddled Middle East. The pathetic antics of the Dutch and the British these days show an almost invariable pattern of punishing those who stand up for their native culture and values, and appeasing the immigrant Muslim strangers whose expansionist theocracy waits, without a hint of self-doubt or apology, to supplant them.

It is the suicidal self-hatred at the bottom of this narcissistic liberal moral drive which angers me so much. And it is the stupidity of erasing the very ground of the highminded morals so that it can be occupied by a backward and totalitarian religion that stands against every value the liberal loves --- except his own right to live.

Burnham's description comes often to my mind: The liberal is morally disarmed in the presence of anyone he deems less well off than himself. And now that includes the whole world outside the white Christian West.

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