One of the very few things that Barack Hussein Obama has in common with George Walker Bush is a serious misreading of human nature: the belief that everyone wants to live like an American. Well, everyone wants our (frayed) material prosperity and relative stability, but not everyone wants the kind of republican government that has helped to make us unique.
People have always fought for their freedom, but that does not mean that they fought for, or now fight for, the Bill of Rights. They fight for the right to be themselves. And if that means that other people, either in their own county or elsewhere, have to suffer for it...so be it. That is why Madison and the others understood "Democracy" to be a synonym for majority mob rule.
When Tito or the Shah or Saddam or Mubarrak or Gaddafi --or the Soviet Union-- come undone, what follows in their wake is people fighting for their freedom...to kill each other and/or set up regimes that match their culture. To make world in which they and their fellows feel comfortable, at home and in charge. In the Arab world, what possible ground is there in that culture to embrace the strange and unnatural values of the soulless (and now Godless) AngloSaxon capitalists, what used to be quaintly called "Republican virtue"?
None.
Samuel Huntington, whose insights so frighten and horrify good liberals, understood that humans identify primarily with family and tribe, not with some complicated set of abstractions that are supposed to make up the "creedal" nation.
Our Founding Fathers, the inventors of this supposed "country without a culture", all, to a man, assumed that it would always be dominated by White Protestant* Men. And for very good reasons.
Even within such a homogeneous group, the Union was fragile, as became tragically obvious in 1861.
Am I wrong to think that they would find the country they fought for dominated by Statist women, Blacks, Hispanics, Jews and Catholics --to say nothing of Mohammedans--anything less than a nightmare? Gay marriage?
Obama, Pelosi and Stern
My point is that their universal-sounding principles were not intended by them to be applied universally. How could they? Just as so many AmerIndian tribes name themselves in their own tongues as "The People" --aka, The Real Humans--, so the Founders assumed that Their Own Kind were the subject of their revolutionary project. The group they assumed would (and should always) rule is now on its way to becoming a barely tolerated if not actively despised relic.
Culture trumps institutions and laws. Even now, as the demographics and culture of the US are changing, --as they always have, of course-- our Constitutional order changes with them, regardless of what is written on parchment. There have always been elements both of continuity and discontinuity in our history: how did "America" change as it went (symbolically speaking) from the Gentlemen Founder Presidents to Jackson to Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt to Reagan and now to the scandal of Barack Hussein Obama?
Less then fifty years from now, when "America" will be a minority White country. There's a reason the Tea Party is so overwhelmingly White. And why 90% of Blacks voted for a "Black" candidate for president.
One of many speculative break-up scenarios which, if not concretely accomplished,
may be the psychological and power reality of a future "USA".
may be the psychological and power reality of a future "USA".
And why the Arab Spring will, to all current indications, bring about the re-Islamification of that world.
Not everyone wants to be "American". And some day, very soon, that will include most "Americans".
*Not in a primarily sectarian theological sense, but as combining the general moral teachings of Protestant Christendom --Northern and Western European--with the Enlightenment's Reformation-inspired privileging of a free conscience and free inquiry. Do you think George Washington's letter to the tiny Sephardic congregation of the Truro Synagogue would have been so sanguine if he had not felt so serenely in charge?
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And yet some powerful deep shift must have occur'd after 1945 to make tribalism now so appealing, whereas formerly the History-makers' preference was for a fusion of individualism with collectivism (Marx: we demand the full development of each as the condition for the full development of all!).
Communists made countless cadres enthusiastic for liquidations of millions of populations for the sake of individualist-collectivism.
The "Arab world" used to be into individualism and collectivism (cf those pictures of educated-class Egyptians c.1955 with educated-class Egyptians c.2010).
But now tribalism has come to the fore, even behind neo-Islam's claim to be the (universal, catholic) religion?
And yet to do so, neo-Islamists must use Enlightenment criteria: "The reason subaltern regions of the globe don't have material prosperity and [political] stability is that Zionist Western imperalism have deprived us of these things." Western ecclesiastical and secularist academics totally agree that "we" have deprived the two-thirds (sc .666) world of [political] stability in democracy and material prosperity, although they draw the Traditionalist conclusion that this proves Hobbes' foundation (material prosperity + political stability [not via democracy!]) is fake and must be smash'd in the name of diversity of whatever in tribalism.
During the heyday of the Enlightenment, e.g. 1776, there were tribalists, dismissing Hobbesian History-building and quite enjoying a life poor, nasty, brutish and short -- for instance, the hillbilly white male clan feuds in the Appalachians and Ozarks ('the Martins and the Coys were restless mountain boys').
No doubt this obtuse tribalism, from which the Jews and their Christianity try'd to rescue us, goes back a long way in white male pagan "culture" -- prior to book-learnin' and monotheism and Shakespeare and the Anglo-Saxon competence in politics and law.
As Nietzsche reveals in the first essay of his Genealogy of Morals, the original warrior gentry (Adel) could select e.g. skin colour or hair colour as an emblem of excellence. No need for Western culture, then! Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Christianity has got to go. The hillbilly Martins and Coys are quite sufficient for a Western world we can all be proud of! No need to try to understand what GWB meant when he claim'd Jesus as his favourite political philosopher. Just slap on some woad sunscreen, vandalize D.C.'s National Cathedral for laughs, and make it a Burning Man venue to bring out the true meaning of the northern European spiritual heritage.
Lose oneself in tribalism and fear no evil genealogy? Nietzsche: "Herd" is the oldest instinct. Yet 'herd' must be ruled by the will-to-power it alienates to a non-ego ...
Speaking of socially constructed tribalism, I see that "race" and IQ tests are back in the blog-news.
What a corner liberals have arranged to paint us into! If research doesn't find that all race-identify'd population groups are "equal" in intelligence as measured by an IQ test that can finally be approved of as culturally neutral, we must all agree that Hitler was right. We must all scramble to agree that evolution may have given different "Races" different appearances, height, etc, evolution didn't given "races" different IQs. This perhaps doesn't include intra-'race' differences. For instance, evolution or who knows what other breeding patterns may have differently gifted white Jews and white Gentiles in terms of intelligence, but evolution and breeding patterns definitely couldn't have differently gifted different 'races" in intelligence.
Our "culture" prizes IQ (SAT, LSAT, MCAT, etc) as a measure of the ability to manipulate the concepts of specialized knowledge. But why is this measure racialized? Or why is "race" measured in terms of the quasi-valuational criterion of IQ?
I think for a long time in European culture, Jews have been consider'd far more intelligent than Gentiles. It was evidently a theme in anti-semitism (the post-1789 Judenhass) as we see Sartre exploiting and struggling with the assumed Jew-Gentile difference in "Anti-Semite and Jew." The "clever" Jew was consider'd nationally alien to France because although he might speak and write French far more accurately and elegantly than the (Gentile) Frenchman, he didn't have a real 'feel' for the French language -- as it is spoken by Gentile Frenchmen, who make many a mistake in grammar, syntax, etc. No doubt if IQ tests had been available in 1789-1913 Europe, Jews' comparative excellence in these tests would have been dismiss'd as irrelevant to the matter of "spiritual" or "cultural" excellence. And in a way such tests are. If a Jew is using his high IQ to contribute to race and class civilizations of liquidation strategies, we can't suppose he would be approved of by Maimonides, or Moses.
A "smart" population such as Europe's Jews can get crazed by dialectical materialism in a way that an ordinary white Gentile population simply can't get. At most we Gentiles popularly-communally understand street fights (cp clan feuds in the Ozarks, the Appalachians, or the Scots highlands), which is why demos-based fascism never got farther than smashing windows and burning books and suppressing decadent culture.
Hitler had to leave all the fun stuff behind when National Socialism made the quantum leap from fascism to totalitarianism, or from the SA to the SS. Even then, the SS never "got" totalitarianism. All their personal race trees and so on even Himmler supposed proved that he was the high-priest of a new religion. But Hitler mock'd him for his pretensions as the high-priest of the SS. As Arendt relates, when Himmler's handler inform'd him that virtually all the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated, he was astonish'd. Why would we do that?! ... I wonder how IQ tests would have been mock'd in Pascal's Provincial Letters.
As with the Boas school's insistence that "cultures" are incommensurable in terms of value or excellence, IQ and racial identity/value egalitarianism seem to me an evasion of Nietzsche. They let on that they are a guilt-driven effort by condescending white liberals to praise groups previously victimized by white imperalism etc.
But we see no real effort to prove that studying Machiavelli's Prince is not a bit more worthwhile a cultural artifact than this or that generic pagan totem (e.g. the Anglo-Saxons' may poles). Instead a brittle insistence on cultures' equality is socially constructed into us. So also a brittle insistence on every racial group's equality in IQ whenever a truly culturally neutral test can be devised, and whenever all racial groups can be found to have equal environments and equal freedom from feelings of intimidation by tests and so on.
But when these brittle social contructions get crack'd, the conclusion apparently must be some sort of specious excellence attributed to "white" or "European" culture and IQ (since IQ alone presumably shows that oriental asians are the most excellent human resources in terms of IQ). Or perhaps Jewish-Gentile European culture as a cooperation (sc in apostasy from the Bible).
So far the proof that all "races" are equal in intelligence and in real IQ is establish'd by the unscientificness of research that has purported to show races are different in intelligence. I am prepared to suppose that that research was unscientific. Measuring "IQ" and "race" does seem a social construction of 'race' in terms of "intelligence" into populations' valuational attitudes. But I must say that the proof of races' intelligence equality doesn't thus stand on strong grounds. One white female liberal blogger who sneer'd at the blogger who got the recent flap going allow'd that, besides, even if races do differ in intelligence, there are different sorts of intelligence, just as she who is good at words isn't good at computerization (therefore, a race that isn't gifted in IQ, say, is surely gifted in some sort of different sort of intelligence. Which maintains the race-identity-intelligence system, and closes out Nietzsche). She also sent everyone to Gould's "The Mismeasurement of Man." But googling this book indicates that Gould wasn't always entirely fair or even entirely accurate. Which leaves the youngster to conclude that since equality of 'races' is false, then something like Nazism must be the truth.
When we look at 1001 Goals in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we do not find IQ celebrated. We do indeed find Jews and Germans, and also Persians and Greeks. But these peoples' value tablets are elected as examples to guide consideration of a universal valuation for Europe ruling the planet.
Granting that "IQ" can be taken as a measure of cleverness (which it isn't), Nietzsche does not dismiss cleverness as irrelevant for value. "Why my ego is so clever" is the title of one of the sections of his auto-biography Ecce Homo. But if Jews are not employing — as a tool, an instrument — any cleverness they have to "Honour father and mother unto the race (root, Wurzel)) of the soul as an overcoming of being [sein] of their will," they are wasting their patrimony.
The retort may be that Nietzsche on the Jews is now is irrelevant because Zionism has replaced Jewishness-Judaism, and that the State of Israel has been constructed accordingly -- yes, and with what clever stupidity: this project can succeed only if it is given to Jews to be a nation like any other, that is, only if Jews can be Gentiles. Christianity offer'd a way of cooperation of Jew and Greek within Christendom (Galatians 3:28 and elsewhere Paul maintains the difference between Jew and Gentile Christian, even if Jews are placed outside the tree as workers who do the pruning etc by the method of reprobation, as Hegel says, sc that the God-man hasn't been achieved, as Strauss elaborates, when the interpreters aren't seen integral in the tree, as er guesses). But Christendom has been destroy'd (1776, 1789), and my worry is that the aftermath of spiritual materialism and spiritual racism still doesn't need any true reprobates.
Christians could perhaps take up the position of true reprobates, as apostle's of a biblical "counter-culture." Both Christians and Jews have been deem'd "haters of the human race" by the loftier sort of Paideia expert or Renaissance expert. ... Evidently Christianity has changed since the time of progressiveness, as nicely described in "Dawn" (publish'd 1881) when it is remark'd that the "promoters of health" aren't yet in control of the churches (¶202). But now the promoters of health in the churches are gone. No more "Power of Positive Thinking" etc. The alleged absurdity of the 'health and wealth and success Gospel' is a cliché of youth group leaders and evangelical para-church organizations -- to the extent that clergy should deride the wish to have an okay life to adolescents, and to adults juggling two jobs and childcare and sleep deprivation -- and the theme of healing and health in the New Testament notwithstanding. ("Therapy" is even translated as "household" by the KJV.) ... The mystery that the love of silver makes the root of all things evil (1Tim 6:10) isn't proclaim'd by clergy's "counter-cultural" reassurance of church-goers that one can be happy without a lot of wealth.
What counter-culture needs, though, is an earnest culture to run counter to. I suppose Communism was in some way a serious culture when Christians opposed it in the USSR. But America never had a culture, nor even had Britain in a way -- only an imitation of French culture, plus Christianity, plus residual pagan rites as extol'd by Robert Graves.
Today the West definitely doesn't have a culture, both the part within Orwellian Eurasia and the ejecta or British part within Orwellian Oceana. Accordingly secularist and Christian counter-culture amounts only to "critiques" of affluence and so forth. We do not expect in the world the incarnation of a serious "counter-culture" as Europe had a serious Christian culture in the time of Christendom.
Today the West definitely doesn't have a culture, both the part within Orwellian Eurasia and the ejecta or British part within Orwellian Oceana. Accordingly secularist and Christian counter-culture amounts only to "critiques" of affluence and so forth.
We do not expect in the world the incarnation of a serious "counter-culture" as Europe had a serious Christian culture in the time of Christendom.
»"Christendom" should never have happen'd«? Why didn't you counter-cultural Christian geniuses say so when the Roman Empire collapsed!
Or do you suggest that an Islamist caliphate will permit the rich festooning of a Christian counter-culture? But a bunch of rich stuff going on in the underground blow the cave doesn't constitute a counter-culture in the world. It isn't incarnational. It isn't God becomes man (Menschwerdung).
The alleged Golden Age of Christianity outside the West went down without a ripple because that's what it wanted to do. We needn't expect that Christian clerics will Chalcedon to dominate the caliphate as a matter of Incarnation, that is, right in the world. That would be "hating the human root." ... But the human root must be hated, just as the father must have a prodigal son waste his bios into zôê, or just as Laius must have a son who kills "him" and does sex with his wife. Le moi est haïssable. The ego has got to negate. Letting stuff go to decadent ongoing growth isn't sufficient. That would be the Prodigal son goes off into the remote country for decorum's sake, wastes the bios and stays on.
—er
The legitimate son, then, must return to the father. Isaac sees the binding and continues as son. Ishmael builds a sacrifice city, an Arabian No-Ammon, or something. ... The Elder son stays outside the tents.
Islam insists that Jesus hegira'd too, sc that Jesus didn't give his kerygma to the God on the Cross.
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