It's amazing even to me how many of the 39 Articles of the Liberal Religion I don't subscribe to anymore. Some I never did, some I used to and a few I still do. But only a few.
The themes in Burnham's (somewhat repetitive) list are: the equality of everybody everywhere, the obligation of the successful to the unsuccessful, the rights of everybody to have what they think they need and the obligation of the State to provide it, the belief that talking can solve every conflict, etc.
The underlying assumption is that human nature is good and that all human groups are equally smart, moral and capable, unless blocked by unfortunate circumstances (that are usually, and ironically, the doing of other not-so-good humans in groups.)
One of the funny ones, which shows how this list has aged, is 19. Corporal punishment, except possibly for small children, is wrong. Nowadays, it is most wrong for small children.
And of course, liberalism holds for freedom of expression, except now when "offensive" or "hateful" toward Official Sacred Victim Groups. Freedom of expression, without the above exception, is one of the few articles I still like.
One of my recent thoughts is that the Founding Fathers' Constitution was based on some social and demographic assumptions which they thought immutable. The dominance of White English-speaking Christian Males is the primary one.
I find a similar assumption in the Liberal camp, one which John Kekes pointed out. All these ideas assume the continuation of nation-states: popular sovereignty, one-man-one-vote, borders, support of risings against tyranny, etc. But the logical of liberalism is based on common humanity, not common nationality. Liberalism aka Progressivism has no inherent self-limiting principle. Nations are simply matters of habit. If, in Obama's America, the rich must "pay their fair share" and US Whites must repay their karmic debt for slavery, what is to stop the whole rest of the undeveloped world from taking the same attitude toward America as a whole? To pay its fair share and repay its karmic debt? Whether the privileged minority resides within a nation or comprises the whole nation, what is the real difference? So there is nothing in the Articles which could stand in principle against a globally united government which would be utterly dominated by Third World peoples, who would then have the "right" to dominate and despoil the First World countries that gave birth to this bizarre faith.
That is what is happening now, in Europe and America. Liberals have no defense against it and indeed, must convince themselves to welcome it, and their own demise.
Whites: the most foolish people on Earth.
The themes in Burnham's (somewhat repetitive) list are: the equality of everybody everywhere, the obligation of the successful to the unsuccessful, the rights of everybody to have what they think they need and the obligation of the State to provide it, the belief that talking can solve every conflict, etc.
The underlying assumption is that human nature is good and that all human groups are equally smart, moral and capable, unless blocked by unfortunate circumstances (that are usually, and ironically, the doing of other not-so-good humans in groups.)
One of the funny ones, which shows how this list has aged, is 19. Corporal punishment, except possibly for small children, is wrong. Nowadays, it is most wrong for small children.
And of course, liberalism holds for freedom of expression, except now when "offensive" or "hateful" toward Official Sacred Victim Groups. Freedom of expression, without the above exception, is one of the few articles I still like.
One of my recent thoughts is that the Founding Fathers' Constitution was based on some social and demographic assumptions which they thought immutable. The dominance of White English-speaking Christian Males is the primary one.
I find a similar assumption in the Liberal camp, one which John Kekes pointed out. All these ideas assume the continuation of nation-states: popular sovereignty, one-man-one-vote, borders, support of risings against tyranny, etc. But the logical of liberalism is based on common humanity, not common nationality. Liberalism aka Progressivism has no inherent self-limiting principle. Nations are simply matters of habit. If, in Obama's America, the rich must "pay their fair share" and US Whites must repay their karmic debt for slavery, what is to stop the whole rest of the undeveloped world from taking the same attitude toward America as a whole? To pay its fair share and repay its karmic debt? Whether the privileged minority resides within a nation or comprises the whole nation, what is the real difference? So there is nothing in the Articles which could stand in principle against a globally united government which would be utterly dominated by Third World peoples, who would then have the "right" to dominate and despoil the First World countries that gave birth to this bizarre faith.
That is what is happening now, in Europe and America. Liberals have no defense against it and indeed, must convince themselves to welcome it, and their own demise.
Whites: the most foolish people on Earth.
7 comments:
Were whites ALWAYS the most foolish upon the earth? ...
In any case, your posting puts the focus on the proper object, namely the whites that cause the self-destruction of Western civilization. ...
Yet the rising up of "Third World" peoples to dominate and despoil 'us' seems a mere fancy. Where in Latin America or Arabia or Africa is a Golden Horde of super-organized military mongols gathering in order to march in and conquer?
They send us "economic refugees" but although some of these will coast on 'social programmes' their main purpose will be new evidence that "whites" cannot must not impose Western civilization even within the Western lands. (The refugees having fled non-Western lands may be quite reluctant to see Western welfare systems, not to mention ordinary employment, replaced by non-Western disorganization.)
Even China could not be threatening to impose a new hegemony without funding by the US treasury by way of the build up of sovereign debt and exponentially increasing interest payments.
Burnham's definition of (white) "liberal," provided as the epigraph of Ex Cathedra, is not the definition of Spinoza, or Locke, or Kant, or Mill.
Liberalism was formerly a doctrine precisely for the power institutions, and not a self-destruction doctrine for the power institutions. The liberal's claim was _progress_, a confident construction of a future of ever more freedom and equalness for individuals.
Burnham: "The liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself."
Since the 'less well off' other who confronts the liberal must be, by this description, not a liberal, this is indeed a self-destruction principle for liberalism.
But since such liberals have already given up confidence in their own thing, namely world progress toward freedom and equality plus maybe some fraternity thrown in there, they were destroy'd before ever they encounter'd the unfortunate non-liberal other.
The real liberal would be confident that his duty to the non-liberal is to persuade him of the justice of liberalism and thus to elevate the unfortunate to material and prestige prosperity.
The original 'limousine liberal' may have felt guilty before the unfortunate, but he or she attenuated the guiltiness by working for the liberalization of the misfortunate. Michael Harrington does not urge, at least not directly, a revaluation of destitution and disorganization as vibrant richness, and a revaluation of prosperity as spiritual destitution.
Certain Christians, including Protestant divines, associated prosperity or at least richness with spiritual and moral decay. But this valuation of prosperity was articulated only from a confidence that an intense Christianization in faith and and morals was the proper alternative to the enervations caused by wealth.
There was no Christian celebration of destitution, indigence, etc. Which in any case would have been patronizing, since the valuers in these things always remain some part of the advantaged class. (Clergy always direct their congregants to help the poor. Those who attend white churches are always somehow the unfairly advantaged. There's never the least sense that the poor, who are supposedly spiritually rich, have a duty to go door to door in rich neighbourhoods warning the rich that their material wealth is an entanglement and that poverty would make them freer, more beloved of God, etc. That is our clergy still feel -- against Jesus' advice -- that wealth is a really good thing! So far as I can see, only Chinese culture is honest enough to honestly basically worship wealth and the rich.
There is also some implicit awareness that the poor and oppress'd are not in fact all that rich in spiritual awareness. Our clergy don't expect anything of them.
I don't mean that the destitute are at fault for their inabilities. I meant it when I said it is realistic to see that their lives are too destroy'd by multiple factors, mostly not in their control, I suppose, for "us" really to find spiritual wisdom and so forth in them.
In any case, we quote Wesley or nowadays whatever Catholic saint happens to be convenient on the problematicness of wealth for Christian salvation.
Some author, I forget who just now, even had the temerity to remark that the spiritual Mammon of a wealthy genius such as Rembrandt was a far greater obstacle to entering the Kingdom of Heaven as a child than the ordinary wealth of this or that tycoon, who has always been more or less hated by the intellectuals and the population. ...
According to Jesus, anyway, the vilify'd "Robber Baron" of private equity is closer to the Kingdom of God than the global narrative's social-justice hero.
But can the self-destruction white liberal of Burnham's definition at least claim to be obeying Jesus' advice not to resist evil -- not even by non-violent moral intimidation? This advice not to resist evil derives from Jesus' principle not to claim to be good, but to let the understanding of good and evil as if begin from the Father. I suppose Lao-Tsu makes a similar stand, in part also from wanting the gratification of awe for being above ordinary praise, the praise of the tycoons and democrats.
But should this doctrine be apply'd to the institutions of civil society?
It may seem, perhaps, all very fine to give someone your shirt plus your cloak (Matthew 5:40), but would liberals do right to give our economic system to criminals, our legal system to islamists, our child education and enculturation system to desublimation and pornography, our religious system to platitudes of social-justice spirituality plus praise songs?
Jesus seems to have been of the opinion that his kerygma was entirely unsuited to civilization. In contrast to the prophets, Jesus would give Caesar zilch but money personnel. The ordinary unpickwickian duties of parents, employers, farmers, housewives would not be done at all if parents et al decided to live like the flowers, give no thought to the morrow, and simply go around getting free meals from each other as was Jesus' own lifestyle.
While it may be to white liberals' own personal advantage to give up on their responsibilities, and let ruin and desublimation take over Western civilization (as though law, politics, religion, economics etc are liberals' own private-property trust fund from their rich father to dispose of as they please), white liberals should not be permitted to pretend that they are ruining the political economy of the West in order to help the poor, the downtrodden, who seem wholly unconsulted in terms of what they would like for the future of the West. ...
Even if as Sufis argue the outer path (laying down shariah in _the_ world) must be only for the sake of providing a boredom that will help make the inner path out of the world via 'this' world, Sufis don't argue that the boredom structures must be an economic, political, religious ruin, or even that teenage boys ought to be abandon'd to a pleroma of interactive internet porno in obedience to Jesus' kerygma.
My own personal feeling of justice is that desublimators should be sent forth to live in lifestyle squalor. Perhaps even they should be given some sort of stipend from public money for this.
But desublimators should not be invited to legislate the future of our economic, political and religious institutions, nor even our military institutions. They want to roll naked in the mud and not have to make any 'thanatos' efforts in sublimation. Why could they want to assume responsibility for institutions? The hierophant of desublimation must be super-busy trying to keep Freud and the Bible for instance out of serious considerations of the future of our educational institutions. Not much of a vacation!
A multiculturalist could argue that white liberals in view of their 1/32d Indian POC heritage have the right to do a potlatch with Western civilization.
The difference though is that the basic economic system of the Indians of the PNW was not involved in the potlatch immolation of wealth for show-offy amour-propre competitive partying. When a potlatch was ended, one could go out and do a bunch of hunting, fishing, gathering.
The 300 million population of North America does not live by hunting and gathering. If the technological economic system were ruin demanded by our desublimational preceptors, we would all starve.
If economics didn't depend at all upon law and culture and family life and morals and politics and religion etc, then yes all these things could be immolated ina potlatch celebration by Burnham's white liberals as their own private property. We could all still get our food and clothing and clean water and food at the stores we do now. No problem.
We might regret the destruction of our culture, but Marcuse de Sade proved to the satisfaction of the smartest whites that desublimational pushpin is far better than poetry. When Mill said "Better Socrates dissatisfy'd than a pig satisfy'd" he was totally wrong, that's all. Pigs ruled by an ordinary police state. What's not to like?
Maybe the still colonised POCs are too awestruck by their white overlords to quibble with the desublimational conclusion. And surely any whites who object to the destruction of Western civilization are only haters. These whites may be less well off than the advantaged liberal, but the advantaged liberal definitely doesn't hesitate to beat such 'other' whites to an ideological pulp.
But modern economics cannot persist without the religious culture and edcuational and family systems that make it possible. Pig geniuses no matter how 'vibrant' cannot provide a foundation for the future of modern productivity. Weber and, even more Freud make clear that civilization and education and work are "thanatos." Desublimation into the world must undo the modern system.
One might prefer thanatos free from 'dangerous' biblical connections, and perhaps this is possible. But desublimation liberalism cannot be a foundation. Not even "repressive desublimation" (compusive porno consumption etc) in the world can do that.
In any case, the non-liberal 'other' confronts Burnham's liberal only when liberalism has already collapsed in the liberal.
We cannot even say that the spirited fight that Burnham's white liberal still puts forth when confronting a conservative (even POC conservatives such as Thomas Sowell) is still liberalism. It is an insistence on giving up. Critical theory mostly convinces conservative youngsters that defending Western civilization is unjust.
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