From Scruton's
Civilizational Suicide: the 12-step program (2008)
“Suicide,” as the political philosopher James Burnham observed in his book Suicide of the West, “is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” And civilizational suicide, as Burnham knew, can take many forms and is always a more or less protracted affair. What Burnham warned about, and what we are still conjuring with, is the seductive toxin of unanchored liberalism.
Burnham subtitled his book “The Definitive Analysis of the Pathology of Liberalism.” At the center of that pathology is an awful failure of understanding which is also a failure of nerve, a failure of “the will to survive.”
Liberalism, Burnham concludes, is “an ideology of suicide.” He admits that such a description may sound hyperbolic. ” ‘Suicide,’ it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and ‘bad.’ ” But it is part of the pathology that Burnham describes that such objections are “most often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.
It is time–far past time–that we get back to the task of building it back up. The first steps in that process are 1) jettisoning the rancid, self-hating pieties of multiculturalism and 2) recognizing and celebrating what is valuable in our own civilization.
What
Mr Scruton and other conservatives cannot allow themselves to say --if they even know it anymore-- is that civilization is rooted in culture and culture is rooted in a people. Not everyone, but a people. Which requires definition. And definition, by definition, includes exclusion. This, and not that.
Which, of course, means race and nation.
One of the central "rancid, self-hating pieties of multiculturalism" is that Western Civilization can be claimed and continued by non-Westerners, that is, people not descended from Europeans. The outcome of this is Nancy Pelosi's claim that the more non-Americans America is filled with, the more American it is.
And a big part of the multicultural lie must be laid at our own doorstep. Since the Enlightenment at least, our claim to fame has not only been that our civilization is better than everyone else's but that its superiority rests precisely on its being the true civilization of all humanity. That universalism, once a source of pride, is now the door to our destruction. Cause that means our White Western civilization is really everybody's property.
Except ours.
The bizarre state we have come to is this: for
ExCathedra to claim that White Western Civilization is the property and patrimony of White Westerners --and therefore not of anyone else-- is considered to be the deepest sin imaginable. We are required to bear the guilty for all of Western Civilization's sins --if in fact, sins they be--but dare not claim its glories for our own.
When I first saw the phrase,
Liberalism is a mental disorder, I thought it was wildly exaggerated.
No more.
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