Ricardo Duchesne: The Necessity Of A Common Ground

This month, we (TP) are pleased to interview Dr. Ricardo Duchesne (RD), a Canadian scholar, who writes about the importance of Western culture and civilization. Dr. Duchesne recently took “early retirement” from his tenured position at the University of New Brunswick so he could enjoy the opportunity to think critically about current politics and the history of Western Civilization, freed from the anti-intellectual and anti-Western atmosphere prevailing in Canadian universities.

TP: Welcome to the Postil, Dr. Duchesne! Could you give us a little background of your experiences as a professor in Canadian academia leading to your decision to take early retirement? You have been burdened with various baseless yet pernicious labels. Do you think this is simply weaponized language to win rhetorical points, or do you think this is a symptom of something graver – the rise of mass conformity in the West, i.e., the death of freedom?

RD: Like almost everyone in academia, I was a leftist throughout my student days and for about 10 years after I began teaching in 1995. My disengagement with the left was not a two-step transition from left to right.

Over the course of many years, I travelled the entire political spectrum from Soviet Marxism and Third World Communism to Western Marxism and New Left politics, from mainstream liberalism and postmodernism to neo-conservatism, and from these establishment views to the realization (around 2012/13) that the supreme political issue of our times was the forced diversification of all Western nations through mass immigration.

Mind you, through these changes in ideology I have remained attached to Western individualism. I was really bothered by the way leftists (pretending to be liberals) had manipulated the principle of minority rights into a call for the diversification of Western lands through the importation of millions of individuals from diverse cultures and races. I could not accept the claim that a program of diversification implemented from above with little democratic consultation was concomitant with the fulfillment of liberal-democratic ideals.

There is nothing in the philosophy of liberalism that requires one to accept mass immigration. One can be a firm believer in individuals rights in the same vein as one rejects the ideology of diversity. The Western nations that fought in WWII against Nazism had very strong immigration regulations.

I came across the term “cultural Marxism” around 2011-12. This term, it seemed to me, captured the politics of the left quite well in pointing to the fact that contemporary leftists were far less concerned with class economic issues than with the transformation of the culture of the West, the traditional heterosexual family, the “Western-centric” curriculum, the values of the Enlightenment.

The left was no longer identifying the ruling elites in economic terms but primarily in sexual and racial terms. The academic left was far less concerned with improving class relations than with attacking whites as a race and claiming that all cultures were morally and intellectually equivalent.

It was obvious to me that the often-used concept “Dead White Males” was a direct attack on the legacy of Western civilization, the high culture of this civilization, right inside the institutions of “higher learning”. It was an attack with malicious double standards, of which the most unfair standard was the prohibition of any ethnic identity by whites except negatively against its “white privilege” — in the same vein as minorities were celebrated in racial terms as “vibrant” and as progressive “victims” fighting “oppression” by whites.

I had no problem with the left arguing that Nazism was unacceptable because of its racism, but it was obvious to me that we were dealing with a new leftist ideology that would have us believe that any strong admiration for Western history and its achievements was tantamount with racism against those who were from non-Western cultures.

I could see how in academia students were being thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that any positive cultural identity on the part of Europeans was immoral and illiberal. I realized that multiculturalism was about encouraging other races to be proud of their cultures in the same vein as Westerners were expected to show pride in their increasingly multicultural nations, in the celebration of other cultures and races.

As liberalism came to be dominated by cultural Marxists, the use of racial categories became a staple of the left, weaponized to promote the forced diversification of Western nations. Immigrant diversity grew imperceptibly at first in the 1960s/1970s, as other leftist movements, women’s rights, civil rights for blacks and indigenous peoples, environmentalism, and anti-war movements, played the dominant role.

But from the 1990s on, with increasing momentum, immigrant diversity became the established religion it is today. Across the West no one is allowed to question the pathological the idea that INCREASING (without any set limitations) racial diversity through IMMIGRATION is “the greatest strength” of the West.

I think I would have survived in academia if I had restricted myself to the questioning of feminism, and multiculturalism, in the name of assimilation to Western culture by immigrants. I know a few conservatives in academia who vigorously question many aspects of the left.

What is prohibited above all else is any critical thinking about the diversification of the West through immigration. Both the left and the right side of globalism support diversity. When one questions diversity, one is going against the entire establishment.

Since the left successfully linked immigrant diversity with promotion of racial equality, and since globalist neocons agreed with them, anyone who questions immigrant diversity is automatically categorized as a racist who is fighting racial equality, even if you believe, as I do, in minority rights.

Your use of the phrase, “the rise of mass conformity in the West,” is spot on, insofar as it refers to the utter lack of dissident thinking in the West on the question of diversity. The spread of transsexualism undoubtedly poses an immense threat to our civilization, but I think one can survive in academia questioning trans politics, as the success of Jordan Peterson testifies and the success of magazines like Quillette.

TP: In your pivotal book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, you dismantle the arguments of various historians who seek to deny the West its exceptional character. Could you acquaint our readers with some of these arguments and how you have taken them apart?

RD: Denying the exceptional character of the West has come along with the promotion of multiculturalism. There are legitimate scholarly questions about the rise of the West that predate multiculturalism, but it is hard to deny that efforts to downplay the achievements of the West intensified as multiculturalism spread in the 1990s.

Advocates of a multicultural world history openly admit today that it is morally wrong to teach about the exceptional character of the West to a diverse classroom. This is why the teaching of Western civilization, a requirement across most colleges in the United States some decades ago, is now a rarity; and those who still teach Western civ are very careful to portray the West as a civilization “connected to the rest of the world”.

The basic argument of “revisionists” (such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Jack Goldstone, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, David Christian, and multicultural historians generally) is that the West was only different in acquiring the resource-rich lands of the Americas, subjugating African and Asian lands with its gun-powder technologies and aggressive colonialism.

Currently, most of the experts are focused on the comparative economic histories of Asia/China and Europe/England, under the supposition that economic differences are the real issue. Europe/England, they insist, was barely, if at all, ahead of Asia/China before the “great divergence” brought by the Industrial Revolution after 1750s/1820s.

These two major regions were similarly developed in their technologies, markets, state organization, and agrarian productivity, with Asia/China standing slightly ahead until Europe managed to surge ahead in the eighteenth century thanks to colonial empires and readily available coal supplies.

Even someone like Gregory Clark, not a multicultural historian, views all preindustrial societies as equally “Malthusian,” improving productivity very slowly, never achieving sustained improvements in their living standards, because every advance was consumed by higher rates of surviving children. He, and multicultural historians, believe that all preindustrial civilizations were fundamentally alike in their inability to achieve technological changes capable of outpacing population growth. Multicultural historians also believe (but not Clark) that Europe was “lucky” in acquiring colonies to finance a revolution that finally allowed it to escape the Malthusian limitations that prevailed throughout history before the Industrial Revolution.

It was not hard for me to show – which is telling since no one else thought about it — that China was the beneficiary of its own colonial expansion around the same time as Europe colonized the Americas. China extracted masses of resources from territories in the southwest, including the very sizable territory of Manchuria in the north. China acquired vast amounts of American silver through its positive balance of trade with Europe, in addition to American tropical goods.

But the key counter argument I make is that the Industrial Revolution was only one divergence among many others that should be traced back to the ancient Greeks. While it is true that, before the Industrial Revolution, the standard of living in the world’s civilizations barely rose above subsistence, except for a tiny minority at the top (and in this respect all civilizations were alike in their Malthusian limitations), we should not ignore achievements in scientific reflections, democratic politics, arts, music, historical consciousness, military strategies and organization.

As it is, you can’t ignore the role of mechanistic science in the making of steam engines, which were crucial to the industrial take off of the late eighteenth century. James Watt’s steam engine rested on new scientific principles about the connection between heat and motion.

Some revisionists reluctantly acknowledge this connection but they assume that China would have developed this technology if the right economic incentives were in effect, the prices of the factors of production, or cheap access to coal. But this ignores the immense intellectual breakthroughs involved in the rise of modern Galilean and Newtonian science, the many ideas which had to come together before Newton could come up with his mechanistic world view.

There is no question that the Second Industrial Revolution after 1850, associated with chemical industries and electricity, would have been impossible without the periodic table, the science of thermodynamics and electromagnetism, which were totally absent in the non-Western world.

These modern scientific ideas, moreover, presupposed ancient Greek deductive reasoning, geometrical proofs, the logic of Aristotle and the subsequent scientific ideas in Hellenistic times in the fields of mathematics, solid and fluid mechanics, optics, and physiology, as argued in Lucio Russo’s The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had To Be Reborn (2003).

We can’t ignore either the fact that the Hellenistic period was followed by the theory of impetus of medieval times and the introduction of algebraic notation in the early Renaissance, to name a few key ingredients that created the conditions for modern science.

We should mention as well the creation of universities for the first time in history with legal autonomy, proper standards for the acquisition of degrees and with a curriculum heavily infused with logic, mathematics, grammar, theology, and philosophy. In other words, there was continuous development in scientific knowledge, and rationalization, from ancient to medieval to renaissance to modern times, and from this science to the First and the Second Industrial Revolution.

In Uniqueness I also go beyond the science-modern industry connection, to write about the importance of the Greek miracle, Roman rational law, rise of autonomous cities, and a legal system with many types of laws – feudal, manorial, mercantile, urban, canon, and royal law — the European discovery and mapping of the globe, the Enlightenment, and other cultural developments that bespeak of a civilization far more dynamic and creative.

One of the things I talk about lately is the European invention of all the disciplines taught in our universities: history, geography, geology, economics, archaeology, botany, physics, biology, chemistry, paleontology, and many other fields. This fact alone speaks volumes about how different the West was.

TP: Would it be correct to say that self-loathing is now an orthodoxy of Western culture? If so, what do you think is the origin of this self-hatred? Why does the Western mind now choose to denigrate, and even deny, its own existence?

RD: I addressed this question in Uniqueness in terms of how the Western idea of progress was rejected from about the 1960s onwards, replaced with the opposite idea of regression. Marshall Sahlins, Margaret Mead, Marvin Harris, among others, come up with the idea that history had regressed away from the “affluent, egalitarian, and peaceful” world of hunters and gatherers to the American capitalist empire with its pollution, increasing inequalities, and threat of nuclear war.

I attributed this to the rise of a number of interrelated ideological currents, history from below, postmodernism, cultural relativism, feminism, identity politics, and dependency theory. The left came to view the West as the promoter of world inequality, an empire that rose on the backs of Third World peoples, a destroyer of nature with its capitalism, an elitist culture that was dismissive of the contributions of people “from below”, and a believer in metanarratives that excluded the stories of “the Other”.

I explained how these ideologies were rooted in the Western proclivity for continual self-reflection, criticism of its assumptions, re-examination of past ideas. What made the West so creative was turned against the West itself from the 1960s on.

The trust in reason, which brought modern science and the Enlightenment, came under suspicion — reason came to be seen as “one dimensional”, inherently “instrumental”, uncaring of nature and the “knowledges” of Indigenous peoples, and Eurocentric.

With the spread of multiculturalism in the West, it was no longer a matter of identifying the limitations of reason, as the Romantics, Heidegger, and the Existentialists had done; it was a matter of identifying the West as such with “logocentrism” and the creation of binaries that excluded other ways of being, less exploitative ways of life.

In the affluent world of the 1960s, young people bought these naïve ideas, even as the evidence was coming in that hunters and gatherers were the most violent peoples proportionate to their numbers, and news about the far worse environmental pollution in the Soviet Union, China, and non-Western nations, and the suppression of equal rights and persistence of despotic rule.

The self-loathing of Westerners is an extremely strange phenomenon without parallels in human history, and it came precisely at the peak of achievement of this civilization. Today I am inclined to think that this attitude has roots in the peculiar, and contradictory, psychology of whites to see themselves as the moral care takers of humanity at the same time as they see the ways of other humans as more authentic and good-natured.

But we can’t ignore the role certain individuals played in pushing white guilt, in making a whole generation believe that the West cheated its way to greatness, and that the West is now morally obligated to the rest of the world, and that it must perform penance by diversifying itself and replacing its “white supremacist” past.

TP: In your book, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, you continue to present the history of Western uniqueness, by way of a frontal attack on academic Marxism. In light of this, could you explain what you mean by the West’s “Faustian soul?”

RD: Unlike Uniqueness, Faustian Man was written after I became aware that immigrant diversity was the main agenda of the left and the establishment right. This book, which was also intended for a wider audience, gets into the ideology of cultural Marxism, and how this term can be effectively used to identify all the major ideological currents of the West.

However, in this book I did not attribute the uniqueness of the West to differences in average IQ between races and ethnic groups. I felt that the term “Faustian man” from Oswald Spengler was a more fruitful way to grasp the intense creativity of the West.

This term refers to a type of man who is always looking for ways to transcend ordinary life, to find the explanations for the nature of things, to subject accepted beliefs to critical reflection. There is a rationalizing tendency in this soul in the way that Max Weber observed since ancient Greek times in polyphonic music, perspective painting, architecture, theology of Christianity, historical documentation, military organization, bureaucratic administration, and modern capitalism.

But Spengler was astute in going beyond Weber’s protestant ethos, and seeing that the driving impetus behind this rationalization was not some calmed intellect peacefully sitting on a chair, or some religious figures coming onto the scene in modern times, but a “soul”, or a psychological energy inside Western man, with origins in the early Middle Ages (though I think the origins go further back in time) to break through the unknown, achieve immortality, strive upwards into the heavens, imagine infinity, and achieve incomparable deeds through al life of arduous endeavours.

I elaborate in Faustian Man how this soul should be traced back to the aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans in the context of their way of life in the Pontic steppes, their initiation of horse-riding, co-invention of wheel vehicles, dairy diet, and other material attributes, including their unique aristocratic form of rule wherein the ruler was seen as “first among equals” and in which the highest goal in life was performance of heroic deeds for the sake of immortal fame.

It is not that other cultures, such as the Huns and Mongols from the steppes, lacked all these attributes. I try to explain how these cultures came under the influence of more advanced despotic civilizations, losing their aristocratic tendencies; and, it has to be said, we are not talking about absolute differences in kind — the differences that matter in history are differences in degree.

TP: The Central Asian origins of the West is a theme that is also dominant in your thinking, in that you do not shy away from the Indo-European roots of Western man. Are there specific characteristics which led to Indo-European (IE) dominance, from the borders of China, to India, to Ireland, and beyond? In other words, is it possible to define an “Indo-European mind?”

RD: Let me add to what I already said about Indo-Europeans that in Faustian Man I have a chapter which contrasts the historical significance of the Indo-European to the non-Indo-European nomads. I argue that the impact of such nomadic peoples as the Scythians, Sogdians, Turks, and Huns never came close to the deep and lasting changes associated with the “Indo-Europeanization” of the Occident.

While Indo-Europeans were not the only people of the steppes organized as war bands bound together by oaths of loyalty and fraternity, they were more aristocratic and they did retain their aristocratic forms of rule as they moved into higher levels of state organization, and they did thoroughly colonized Europe with their original pastoral package of wheel vehicles, horse-riding, and chariots, combined with the ‘secondary-products revolution.’

In contrast, the relationship between the non-Indo-European nomads with their more advanced sedentary neighbors was one of ‘symbiosis,’ ‘conflict,’ ‘trade,’ and ‘conquest,’ rather than dominion and cultural colonization.

One of the ways I try to get into the Indo-European mind is to read books about their myths and their heroic poetry and songs, such books as West’s Indo-European Poetry and Myth and Watkins’s How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of IE Poetics, going back to a prehistoric oral tradition. Although this subject needs more investigation, one of the points I note is that IE poetry exhibits a keener grasp and rendition of the fundamentally tragic character of life, an aristocratic confidence in the face of destiny, the inevitability of human hardship and hubris, without bitterness, but with a deep joy.

I note as well that Indo-European stories show both collective and individual inspiration, unlike non-Indo-European stories from the steppes, which show characters functioning as collective representations of their communities. In some sagas there is a clear author’s stance, unlike the anonymous non-Indo-European sagas. The individuality, the rights of authorship, the poet’s awareness of himself as creator, is acknowledged in many ancient and medieval sagas.

TP: In your work, you are also a very disciplined critic of multiculturalism. Why do you think the West has created multiculturalism? And why is anti-white racism now another orthodoxy of Western literary and scholarly elite?

RD: Multiculturalism on its own is fine if one is reflecting about the co-existence within the boundaries of a nation state of more than one ethnic group, say, three or four groups long established in the nation. One can accept Pierre Trudeau’s identification of Canada as multicultural in 1971 in light of the multiple European ethnic groups co-existing in Canada, including small Asian, Black, and Indigenous groups.

I have no problem with a multiculturalism that recognizes the cultural presence of long established cultures within the nation state alongside the dominant Anglo/Quebecois cultures, and the right of individual members from other cultures to express their own traditions as long as such recognition does not entail the proliferation of full blown cultures with their own quasi state; although in the case of Quebec and Indigenous peoples this may include granting them some autonomy in their own territories within a federal system.

The problem is that Trudeau was not thinking of Canada as it was then; he was thinking of a future Canada that would open its borders to new cultures in the world. He was thinking about breaking up the domination of both Anglo and Quebecois Canada, delinking the nation-state from these two ethnic groups, turning these cultures into private affairs, individual choices, while pushing multiculturalism as the official culture.

Trudeau, however, never anticipated the way multiculturalism would become an anti-white movement, and he never called for the rise of full-blown cultures, but believed that multiple cultures could express themselves within a Western political culture of equal rights, rule of law, and democracy.

But with his son, Justin, there is now talk of a “post-national” Canada that downplays even its “Western” liberal heritage, or interprets this heritage from a cultural Marxist perspective to mean that Canada should accommodate the cultural ways and political inclinations of other peoples inside the nation, including the “indigenization” of the curriculum in our universities, and the marginalization of “Eurocentrism” in the Arts and Sciences.

As you know, the introduction of multiculturalism in Canada was part of a widespread phenomenon in the West, with some states not identifying themselves as officially multicultural but nevertheless opening their borders to non-Europeans peoples. The common glue that held European immigrants in the past was their Christianity and common historical experiences in Europe.

But once the borders are opened to multiple traditions and religions, multiculturalism inevitably follows. All the talk about Canada being a “mosaic” and the US being a “melting pot” is over – the US is no less a mosaic today than Canada.

Multiculturalism is the order of day at the level of states or municipalities in the US, and across most schools and universities, and in the media. We are just witnessing the beginnings of cultural divisions, the inability of governments to hold their nations together as the cultural landscape is broken apart with the dissolution of common cultural experiences, common historical memories, heroes, and religious beliefs.

Without a common history, religion, and deep culture, beyond mere political liberalism, individuals cannot find a common ground, a sense of collective identity, which is indispensable for humans in their search for meaning, for something beyond their pleasures and daily careers. They become instead mere private consumers without roots, easy to manipulate by corporations – which brings me to how it is that both the left and the right came together in their support of immigrant multiculturalism, but for different reasons.

The globalist right wants mass immigration because it increases shareholder earnings in terms of lower wages, the total market value of goods and services generated from a growing population, real estate development, shopping malls, highways, and dollar stores. It cherishes docile consumers and workers without a strong national identity who can identify with any generic global brand. CEOs love academic ideas about inclusiveness and diversity, a universal-ingroup identity in which humans from all races and sexual orientations become equally attached to their banks, FB pages, Google searches and Twitter accounts.

The globalist left, on the other hand, is obsessed with fulfilling the ideal of equality, which now means fighting “systemic racism”, which it equates with the very existence of white majorities in Western nations. It claims to be fighting for the human rights of everyone, the right of refugees and poor immigrants, to come to Western nations, against “privileged” whites who greedily want these nations all to themselves.

They are global socialists who believe that immigration will balance per capita incomes across the world, releasing population pressures in the Third World, while providing ethnic votes for leftist parties in the West.

The left at least provides ideals for individuals to live for, and this is why it still attracts so many young individuals. The smart right-wing globalists realize this, and this is why they promote leftist ideals, their continuous struggles for the equalization of all things.

But the left is now nihilistic, too individualistic in its pursuit of individual identities, breaking apart all common identities, ethnic, national, sexual, thus leaving individuals stranded alone with anarchic and undisciplined values as the only glue.

So both the right and the left have converged in their agreement that Western nations must be diversified and that whites who question this program are racists who want to reign supreme over other races, even though no nation outside the West is expected to include other races within their nations, and dissident whites don’t want to rule over other races but only to protect their cultural heritages and identities across the West, against mass immigration, which does not preclude some immigration and individual rights for everyone.

TP: Your critique of multiculturalism finds its fullest expression in your book, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. In many ways, Canada has enthusiastically embraced the rather eccentric ideas of one scholar, namely, Will Kymlicka, who is very much the “Godfather” of multiculturalism. Why has Canada adopted Kymlicka’s vision as its own, so that it now seeks to become a “post-nation?”

RD: Kymlicka did not originate the idea of multiculturalism. He effectively rode a multicultural wave making the argument that multiculturalism is not inconsistent with a version of liberalism that values community attachments and rejects the libertarian idea that individuals can fulfill their goals as private consumers and producers in the market place.

Humans have a “deep need” to belong to a community; they are inherently social beings who make choices and fulfill themselves as individuals inside a common culture. Kymlicka employed these “communitarian” ideas (well-established within a branch of Western liberal thought) to push the idea that multiculturalism could provide the community ties for immigrants coming to Western societies from different cultural backgrounds.

Anglos in Canada, he began to argue in the 1990s, already had their cultural communities; we should not expect immigrants to assimilate to the “dominant” Anglo culture since immigrants come with their own cultural traditions; instead, we should allow them to retain and cherish their customs, folkways, languages, religious beliefs – so long as these cultural ways were not inconsistent or ran counter to the liberal principle of individual rights.

But when one looks closely at what Kymlicka means by the “dominant” Anglo culture in Canada, he really means a deracinated neutralized sphere consisting of modern economic amenities, infrastructure, legal rules, and liberal political institutions.

He actually calls for Anglos, and, I would argue, Euro-Canadians generally, to forgo their deep cultural traditions, their heritage in Canada, the idea that they were the founders of this nation; for a future Canada that will have a neutral public sphere, bereft of the religious symbols of Euro-Canadians, without special public holidays for Anglos, or public attachments to songs, without an “Eurocentric” anthem, etc. in order to make a new Canada that is fully welcoming towards the cultures of immigrants. Euro-Canadians must set aside their cultural memories and customs, and adopt multiculturalism as their culture, adopt a culture that celebrates the cultures of immigrant minorities.

Because the Quebecois are a minority in Canada, they can affirm their cultural heritage in Quebec, preserve its distinctive character, but the Quebecois too (in Kymlicka’s view) should accommodate immigrants with different cultures, and start educating their children to be multicultural. Indigenous peoples too should be allowed to achieve some territorial autonomy within a loose federal system where they can affirm their unique cultural ways and preserve their heritage.

They add to Canada’s multiculturalism. Immigrant minorities are not expected to create their own autonomous territories but are to be granted group cultural rights in addition to their individual rights, i.e., affirmative hiring, dual citizenship, TV stations, government funding for the preservation and enhancement of their cultures, special loans to establish businesses, and a new curriculum away from the heritage of Euro-Canadians.

Meanwhile, Anglos will enjoy individual rights only, downplay their collective traditions in Canada for the sake of a new multicultural culture. Immigrants, Quebecois, and Indigenous peoples can interpret multiculturalism as a call for them to enhance their particular cultures, whereas Anglos (and Euro-Canadians) can only interpret multiculturalism as a call to embrace the “vibrant” cultures of others.

So, there is a huge double standard in Kymlicka, to the point that he thinks Euro-Canadians should not be allowed to speak out against diversity, speak out in defence of their heritage in Canada, on the grounds that such attitudes are “racist” against minorities. Immigrant minorities should be celebrated for speaking out in defence of their cultures.

Anglos and Euro-Canadians should be condemned for not accepting the creation of a new Canada with many collective immigrant cultures. Kymlicka regularly refers to the majority Anglo culture as a culture of “colonizers,” “racists,” and “conquerors” while using pleasant words such as “pride” and “culturally meaningful lives” when speaking about minority cultures.

Kymlicka says that Canada must “never be allowed” to be “white and Christian again”. Not just Canada, however. He has spent most of his academic career giving talks in Europe promoting the “incredibly successful model of Canadian multiculturalism”, calling upon Europeans to diversify themselves through mass immigration.

He is disingenuous in the way he makes his students believe that he is merely calling for minority rights in Europe, and that multiculturalism is intended only as way of protecting these rights. But it is obvious that his theory of multiculturalism – for which he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars by way of grants and government prizes – was intended as part of a program to diversify all European nations through immigration. Government and corporations pay him handsomely for papers explaining how Europe should be thoroughly diversified.

He argues that it is racist for any European nation to retain its heritage and not accept millions of Africans, Muslims and Asians. He completed his PhD under the Marxist Gerald Cohen, who wrote a highly celebrated book in the 1970s on historical materialism. He regularly uses the cultural Marxist phrase “slow march through the institutions” in reference to the imposition of multicultural norms across Western societies, inside government institutions, private companies, the media and schools.

All the while he claims that his ideas are about the actualization of the ideals of “liberal democracy”. But he is clearly of the view that no one should be allowed to question diversity, that Europeans should not be allowed to defend their heritage, and that only minorities-to-become-majorities have a right to collective cultural identities right inside European nations. He is a cultural Marxist who has enriched himself by promoting the ethnocide of Europeans.

TP: In this book, you carefully examine Canada’s Franco-British heritage. While it is true that Quebecois culture remains resilient, why has Canadian English culture entirely collapsed?

RD: Simply put, the Quebecois have a stronger sense of collective ethnic identity, a sense that being a Quebecois is about speaking a language, having strong Catholic roots, unique customs, foods, songs, memories; whereas Anglo Canadians came to identify their culture as individualistic per se. This does not mean Anglos have no cultural identity; they did in their connections to Britain, and then to their experiences and uniquely developed customs in Canada along with other English-speaking Canadians.

But still, they are of the view that their culture is about “individual liberties”. This left them far more susceptible to leftist attacks against their past historical “crimes” and the need to become more inclusive. But this is happening to the Quebecois as well, certainly the ones in Montreal and among the globalist elites; they now think that speaking the French language is good enough to be a good Quebecois and that an immigrant from a former French colony can be more Quebecois than an English-speaking person with deep family roots in Quebec.

TP: Do you think Canada will continue to exist as a nation?

RD: No. Canada is undergoing the most radical transformation in its history right now, and so is Britain, France, Italy, Australia, United States, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, and other Western nations. The transformation is due to imposition of immigrant diversity.

You can’t have multiple races and cultures in large numbers co-existing within the same nation state without a strong ethnic majority providing some cohesion to the nation. Justin Trudeau was implying as much when he said Canada was a “post-nation”.

Similar statements are being made in other Western nations as they are thoroughly diversified. Donald Trump is a civic nationalism; he values the liberal culture of his country, its achievements and historical memories; he does not like painting the American past in negative terms, and when he says “make America great again” he means “again” not because he wants to return to the past but because he values the past and believes that the leftist attacks on America’s past should not go unchallenged.

You can’t be a great nation without respecting your history, the founding peoples, the accomplishments of your ancestors. But in Canada we don’t have a populist movement; the culture from top to bottom is dominated by the left, and the left now hates national identities of any kind including civic identities based on Western liberal values, never mind a strong cultural identity that cherishes the cultural traditions of Canada in a deep way.

Canada will die as a nation with a unique identity. Separatist regional tendencies should be expected, but it depends how much these regions are diversified, since the Canadian government is implementing a well-orchestrated plan to diversify rural towns beyond the major cities; and, once this happens, all the regions will look alike in their diversity, multiple cultures without any common glue to even be able to create smaller national identities out of the regions.

In other Western nations we will have similar trends, but I do anticipate a counter movement by the native French, Italians, possibly Australians, and perhaps later on the Germans. Not sure about Sweden and Britain, but I can’t believe the British will disappear without a fight. Brace yourself for coming civil wars.

TP: What lies ahead for you personally? Is there another book on the horizon? What are you researching?

RD: As you know, I took early retirement after I experienced an “academic mobbing” (to use the term an expert on work place mobbing used in an article he wrote about my case) at my former university where I had been a professor for 25 years. I have more time to do pure research and get involved in politics.

I am currently writing my fourth book, and it will be about the psychology that brought Western civilization its greatness. I believe that the discovery in ancient Greece of the mind, the realization that humans have a faculty that is uniquely theirs and is the source of our knowledge, and that truth can only emerged out of this faculty in communication with other minds, rather than handed down through blind traditions, enacted by gods, or mysterious forces beyond our comprehension, is a key to Western uniqueness.

Westerners became increasingly conscious of their consciousness, aware that they can affirm themselves as an “I” in contrast to that which is not-I. Their aristocratic attitudes played a big role in nurturing this psychology, which entails a disposition not to submit, to prostrate in front of any authority however much one may rightfully respect worthy authorities; it means not allowing one’s being to be swallowed up by the world around, by nature, the demands of the body, knowing what belongs to the I and what belongs to the not-I.

This is a multifaceted, long drawn out development with roots in the prehistoric world of Indo-Europeans, with increasing levels of self-reflection exhibited throughout Western history. It is a view that does not deny the civilizational decline that accompanies affluent cultures but which looks to the degrees to which humans have attain or expressed themselves consciously as high as possible in the order of nature.

TP: Thank you so very much for sharing your thoughts and ideas with our readers. We sincerely appreciate you giving us this opportunity.

The image shows, “The Anger of Achilles,” by Jacques-Louis David; painted in 1819.

Why Eastern Europeans Do Not Want Islam

Why Eastern Europeans are much more reluctant to accept Muslim migrants than their Western counterparts can be traced back to circumstances surrounding a pivotal battle, that of Kosovo, which took place on June 15, 1389, exactly 630 years ago today.  It pitted Muslim invaders against Eastern European defenders, or the ancestors of those many Eastern Europeans today who are resistant to Islam.

Because the jihad is as old as Islam, it has been championed by diverse peoples throughout the centuries (Arabs in the Middle East, Moors (Berbers and Africans) in Spain and Western Europe, etc.). Islam’s successful entry into Eastern Europe was spearheaded by the Turks, specifically that tribe centered in westernmost Anatolia (or Asia Minor) and thus nearest to Europe, the Ottoman Turks, so-named after their founder Osman Bey.   As he lay dying in 1323, his parting words to his son and successor, Orhan, were for him “to propagate Islam by yours arms.”

This his son certainly did; the traveler Ibn Batutua, who once met Orhan in Bursa, observed that, although the jihadi had captured some one hundred Byzantine fortresses, “he had never stayed for a whole month in any one town,” because he “fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege.” Christian cities fell like dominos: Smyrna in 1329, Nicaea in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337. By 1340, the whole of northwest Anatolia was under Turkic control.  By now and to quote a European contemporary, “the foes of the cross, and the killers of the Christian people, that is, the Turks, [were]  separated from Constantinople by  a channel of three or four miles.”

By 1354, the Ottoman Turks, under Orhan’s son, Suleiman, managed to cross over the Dardanelles and into the abandoned fortress town of Gallipoli, thereby establishing their first foothold in Europe: “Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them to mosques,” writes an Ottoman chronicler: “Where there were bells, Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins.”

Cleansed of all Christian “filth,” Gallipoli became, as a later Ottoman bey boasted, “the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation—that chokes and destroys the Christians.” From this dilapidated but strategically situated fortress town, the Ottomans launched a campaign of terror throughout the countryside, always convinced they were doing God’s work. “They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil,” explained Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was taken captive in Gallipoli, adding, “and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves them!”

After Orhan’s death in 1360 and under his son Murad I—the first of his line to adopt the title “Sultan”—the westward jihad into the Balkans began in earnest and was unstoppable. By 1371 he had annexed portions of Bulgaria and Macedonia to his sultanate, which now so engulfed Constantinople that “a citizen could leave the empire simply by walking outside the city gates.”

Unsurprisingly, then, when Prince Lazar of Serbia (b. 1330) defeated Murad’s invading forces in 1387, “there was wild rejoicing among the Slavs of the Balkans. Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and Hungarians from the frontier provinces all rallied around Lazar as never before, in a determination to drive the Turks out of Europe.”

Murad responded to this effrontery on June 15, 1389, in Kosovo.  There, a Serbian-majority coalition augmented by Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian contingents—twelve thousand men under the leadership of Lazar—fought thirty thousand Ottomans under the leadership of the sultan himself. Despite the initial downpour of Turkic arrows, the Serbian heavy cavalry plummeted through the Ottoman frontlines and broke the left wing; the Ottoman right, under Murad’s elder son Bayezid, reeled around and engulfed the Christians. The chaotic clash continued for hours.

On the night before battle, Murad had beseeched Allah “for the favour of dying for the true faith, the martyr’s death.”  Sometime near the end   of battle, his prayer was granted. According to tradition, Miloš Obilić, a Serbian knight, offered to defect to the Ottomans on condition that, in view of his own high rank, he be permitted to submit before the sultan himself. They brought him before Murad and, after Milos knelt in false submission, he lunged at and plunged a dagger deep into the Muslim warlord’s stomach (other sources say “with two thrusts which came out at his back”). The sultan’s otherwise slow guards responded by hacking the Serb to pieces. Drenched in and spluttering out blood, Murad lived long enough to see his archenemy, the by now captured Lazar, brought before him, tortured, and beheaded. A small conciliation, it may have put a smile on the dying martyr’s face.

Murad’s son Bayezid instantly took charge: “His first act as Sultan, over his father’s dead body, was to order the death, by strangulation with a bowstring, of his brother. This was Yaqub, his fellow-commander in the battle, who had won distinction in the field and popularity with his troops.” Next Bayezid brought the battle to a decisive end; he threw everything he had at the enemy, leading to the slaughter of every last Christian—but even more of his own men in the process.

So many birds flocked to and feasted on the vast field of carrion that posterity remembered Kosovo as the “Field of Blackbirds.” Though essentially a draw—or at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Ottomans—the Serbs, with less men and resources to start with in comparison to the ascendant Muslim empire, felt the sting more.

In the years following the battle of Kosovo, the Ottoman war machine became unstoppable: the nations of the Balkans were conquered by the Muslims—after withstanding a millennium of jihads, Constantinople itself permanently fell to Islam in 1453—and they remained under Ottoman rule for centuries.

The collective memory of Eastern Europeans’ not too distant experiences with and under Islam should never be underestimated when considering why they are significantly more wary of—if not downright hostile to—Islam and its migrants compared to their Western, liberal counterparts.

As Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán once explained:

“We don’t want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don’t want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see….  I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go “through that experience for 150 years.”

And those years—1541 to 1699, when the Islamic Ottoman Empire occupied Hungary—are replete with the massacre, enslavement, and rape of Hungarians.

This is an excerpt from Raymond Ibrahim’s book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, which was also reviewed in the Postil here.

The photo shows, “The Kosovo Maiden,” by Uroš Predić, painted in 1919. The scene illustrates a scene from the poem, “The Kosovo Maiden,” from the Kosovo-cycle of Serbian poetry.

Multiculturalism Is Not Progressive

Can one believe in Progress and still believe in Multiculturalism? Today, many Liberals identify themselves as both “”Progressives” and “Multiculturalists,” but what exactly do these ideas mean and are they truly compatible? It is the purpose of this article to outline how both ideas, Multiculturalism and Progress, are mutually exclusive.

What makes the belief in Progress and Multiculturalism mutually exclusive? The progressive believes that a culture can improve, necessitating the idea that not all cultures are equally good; i.e. that the culture of tomorrow can be better than the culture of today.

On the other hand, multiculturalism believes that the government should sustain the existence of several cultures as opposed to assimilating them. This necessitates the idea that all cultures are equal, otherwise why not just assimilate the inferior cultures to those that are better?

 

Progress: A Brief History

What does it mean to believe in “Progress”? And why do people call themselves “Progressives” anyway?

Before the Enlightenment, philosophers tended to have a cyclical view of history. Many thinkers saw history through the lens of “Harmonia,” the idea that things went through cycles of destructive disharmony and rectifying harmony. For example, Aristotle understood the world in terms of periodic floods, in his work, The Metaphysics.

But, the modern conception of Progress emerged much later during the Enlightenment in the late 1700’s, and reached its maturity of development during the mid 1800’s.

The idea of Progress in the modern world originated from the French Enlightenment philosophes Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and Marie Jean Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet. These thinkers were the first to systematically assemble and defend the idea of Progress in the modern world.

Inspired by the Scientific Revolution, Turgot and Caritat believed that the development of technology and science was not cyclical, but rather followed a generally linear path. In other words, science and technology progressed.

In addition, they theorized that the deepest root of scientific advancement was philosophical progress; and that the two co-evolved. I.e. better science discoveries would lead to new theories of the world, and new theories would lead to new scientific discoveries.

Furthermore, these thinkers believed that Liberal states were better able to unleash progress in science and philosophy. Because tyrannical states were dependent on constraining new ideas, progress was a threat to all non-liberal states. Therefore, scientific and philosophic progress was linked to the development of Liberal states.

The idea of progress was that human history was advancing scientifically, technologically, philosophically, culturally, and politically in a generally linear direction. These advancements were tied together in co-dependence and ultimately positive and beneficial for all of humanity.

In summary, the idea of progress was that humanities’ cultures could improve and were improving.

It wasn’t until the mid 1800’s that the idea of progress reached its zenith with the philosopher William Fredrick George Hegel and his follower Karl Marx.

Hegel thought History was set on a great ideological track of progressing ideas. In his mind, the state was the “march of God [Spirit] in the world” as it shook off old ideas for the new. Every conflict was headed to a reconciliation of masters and slaves in an ultimate, liberal, and egalitarian future, which he called the Absolute.

Hegel believed that the Progression of human history was inevitable, and that individuals were incapable of stopping it. For example, one could go back in time and destroy Newton, but could you ever stop Calculus? Could ideas, or their progression through history, ever be destroyed? Hegel didn’t think so.

Karl Marx, Hegel’s student, borrows the idea that progress is inevitable. To Marx, progress wasn’t dependent on ideas, but material. It was not the idea of capitalism that would generate the great Communist revolution, it was the physical manifestation of factories, mass produced materials, and abused workers that would ignite the revolution.

Both Hegel and Marx had very linear notions of human Progress. For example, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx articulated that the stages of history were humanity’s progression from tribalism, to feudalism, to capitalism, and finally (so Marx believed), to Communism.

Marx and Hegel are significant because they set forth the idea that progress was an inevitable aspect of human culture, and they emphasized that some cultures were better than others.

The Hegelian understanding of Progress gained unprecedented popularity in the 1800’s with the expansion of Europe’s “progressive” colonial empires over the “backwards” peoples of the rest of the world.

The Marxist idea of Progress would reach its peak with the rise of the Soviet Union and its mission to ignite a world revolution. The USSR sought to sweep all backward bourgeoisie ways of the thinking back into “the dust bin of history.”

But why would anybody want to be considered a “progressive?”

Part of the reason people want to be known as progressives is because they believe that humanity is progressing to a good place and a better future. If people thought that humanity was getting progressively worst, they wouldn’t seek to be known as progressives. On the contrary, it’s because the belief that humanity is progressing to the worse, many become conservatives – quite possibly the greatest opponents of “progressives” throughout history.

As shown above, one of the most dominant themes of Progress has the belief that the culture of tomorrow can get better and will be better than the culture of yesterday.  This view necessitates that idea that the culture of yesterday is worse than the culture of tomorrow; meaning not all cultures are equal and that some are better than others!

Can we really get anywhere, if we don’t leave something behind?

 

Multiculturalism: A Brief History

Multiculturalism has been popularized and developed much more recently than the idea of Progress.  Because of its fresh state of development, this present-day philosophy is a bit harder to pin down.

One universal idea among multiculturalists is the recognition of the existence of many cultures within a given area. In addition, believers in multiculturalism reject the idea of a “melting pot;” i.e. the assimilation of cultures into a single dominant culture.

Instead of having cultures assimilate into a singular dominant culture, multiculturalists favor allowing minority groups to keep their collective practices.  But, multiculturalists vary on how active or passive the government should be in helping minority groups maintain these practices.

Some multiculturalists believe that the government should simply take a laissez-faire policy towards the cultural practices of minorities within their culture. For example, if a minority within the country were practicing arranged marriages, then the passive multiculturalist would desire the government to neither aid the practice nor hinder it.

But many multiculturalists want the government to take a far more active approach in aiding a minorities struggle to keep their cultural practices. The father of contemporary multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka, falls into this camp.

Kymlicka states that the government should have “group-differentiated rights,” arguing that universal human rights are insufficient to protect the cultural practices of minorities. He believes that if universal human rights are supplemented with “group rights,” then the cultures of minorities within a given state will be better retained.

Group rights could include special residential rights within a city, payments made to a cultural group, and affirmative action in universities, the adoption of language, etc.

Multiculturalism is not as fringe as one might believe; but has already been put into practice on grand scale. For example, Canada guarantees the protection and advancement of multiculturalism in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. The German state also adopted multiculturalist policies in their push to develop “multikulti” within the German state.

Multiculturalists, like Kymlicka, argue against the assimilation of indigenous groups and minority nations. Instead they favor the extension of “group rights” to help these cultures attain self-determination. Because of this reasoning, multiculturalism is in many ways nationalistic, rallying nationalities to celebrate their cultures.

But why do people argue for multiculturalism?

Very simply, because they don’t believe a culture is particularly better or worse than any other culture. If multiculturalists believed that one culture was superior to another culture, then why wouldn’t they just argue for inferior culture to be assimilated by the superior culture?

For example, if you thought Western culture was superior to Middle Eastern culture, then why wouldn’t you just advocate for adoption of Western culture? Or the assimilation of Middle Easterners to Western ways of life (especially if you thought that those ways of life were superior)?  Why would you advocate for the existence of both if you thought one was a better way of life.

The culture you might advocate for might not even be in existence yet. Let’s say you imagine a Utopian culture that you’d like the world to head towards. If you thought this world’s contemporary culture was worse, why would advocate for the multicultural existence of both your Utopian culture and the world’s current culture?

To justify being a multiculturalist, you must believe that all cultures are equal. If you believed a culture was superior for humanity, then wouldn’t you advocate the adoption of that culture? Likewise, if you believed that a culture was inferior than the others around it, wouldn’t you desire its elimination (and the absorption of its followers into the neighboring superior cultures)?

This presupposition of the multiculturalist (that all cultures are equally good) is incompatible with progressive thought (that the culture of tomorrow can be better than the culture of yesterday).

Can one be a multiculturalist and a progressive? Not a chance.

Because the progressives believe in the improvement of culture, they believe that not all cultures are equally good (otherwise there would be no room for improvement). On the other hand, because multiculturalists believe in the preservation of multiple cultures, they believe that cultures are equally good (otherwise why not just have the inferior cultures assimilate into the best culture).

Because the two camps disagree with the idea that all cultures are equal, we find them clashing on the political battlefield in the following areas: civil rights, governance, and material culture

 

Civil Rights

Can you be a progressive champion for civil-rights and be a multiculturalist?  As an example, lets dive into Feminism. Don’t some cultures treat women better than others?

For instance, does a culture that supports clitoridectomy, has arranged marriages, performs honor killings, supports sexism, practices Sharia law, supports rape-culture, gives lower wages to women, nurtures the cult of domesticity, doesn’t allow women to drive, objectifies women, sets up child marriages, or bars girls from going to school just as good as a culture that doesn’t?

The progressive Feminist answers with a resounding “NO!” To them, these backwards acts of barbarism deserve to be swept into the past because there’s no room for this nonsense in the future (at least if tomorrow has any hope of being better than today).

The multiculturalist might play the role of an apologist, taking the stance that these practices and ways of life are just as valid and equal as any other way of life.

Or more likely, the multiculturalist will point out that none of the contemporary cultures on earth have eliminated all these atrocities. In fact, all the cultures have a different, but equal, combination of backwards and progressive policies.

In other words, the multiculturalist might say that culture is a like a zero-sum game. Maybe you forsake Sharia law and let women dress liberally, but then they become sexually objectified anxiety-driven anorexics. Is one really better than the other? Can cultures really progress more than others?

And that’s really the crux of the issue, isn’t it? Furthermore, you can apply it to other civil rights issues beyond anti-Feminist cultures like homophobic cultures, racist cultures, etc.

Can cultures really progress beyond those around them? Are we really capable of progressing for the better? In the end, are some ways of life better than others? Are all cultures truly equal?

 

Governance

Another issue that divides the progressive from the multiculturalist is the question of governance. Is one culture’s method of governance better than another culture’s method of governance or are they all more or less equal in worth?

The progressives would claim that some forms of government are better than others because some cultures are more progressive. On the other hand, multiculturalists claim the ways different cultures across the world govern themselves are all equally valid.

This is because if one culture’s way of governance were truly better, then it would call into question why other nations should stick with their relatively inferior forms of governance.

For instance, are the democratic cultures of the world better than dictatorial culture of North Korea? Is a culture immersed with liberal conceptions of Rights Theory just as good a culture with statist undercurrents that revere their central leadership in the likeness of a god? Are cultures that are imbibed with slavery and drunk with tyrannical horror just as sober-minded as a culture of peaceful freedom? Are societies that engage in tribalist blood feuds, and archaic understandings of citizenship as nothing more than an extension of genetics, just as good as cultures that have transcendent understandings of civic nationalism?

The progressive once again screams, “NO!”

Traditionally speaking, philosophers of progress have a history of crying out against what they saw as inferior forms of governance brought about by different cultures around the world.

For example, it is in the name of progress Marxists spoke up against tribalism. In his work, Karl Marx places tribal as ground-zero, the bottom base line from which all people progress from; I.e. the most backwards form of governance.

Contemporary Marxists, like Frances Widdowson, still speak out in the name of progress, against tribalism and its lingering effects within the indigenous cultures of Canada.

On the other hand, the father of contemporary multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka, opposes Widdowson. He argues that not only should the indigenous not be assimilated, but rather that the Canadian government should strengthen Indigenous cultures.

The multiculturalist might play the role of an apologist, taking the stance that these practices and ways of life are just as valid and equal as any other way of life.

Or more likely, the multiculturalist will point out that none of the contemporary cultures on earth have truly eliminated coercement, tyrannical legislation, or fully adopted liberty. In fact, all cultures have a different, but equal, combination of backwards and progressive policies.

In other words, the multiculturalist might say that culture is a like a zero-sum game. Maybe you forsake dictatorship, but then your nation is paralyzed by political squabbles, half-heartedly elected goons, and an impotent leadership. Is one better than the other? Is there really such a thing as progress in political culture?

And that’s really the crux of the issue, isn’t it?

Can cultures really progress beyond those around them? Are we really capable of progressing for the better? In the end, are some ways of life better than others? Are all cultures truly equal?

 

Material Culture

Another issue that divides progressives and progressives and multiculturalists in the question of material culture. Material culture is the physical aspect of culture. Can the material culture of society be better than the material culture of another society?

Is a culture that uses primitive agricultural methods better than one that uses the latest form of mechanized farming?  Is a culture with a sharp difference between the material wealth of the rich and the poor better than a culture where there are no rich and poor? Is a culture that uses AR-15 machine guns just as good as one that still uses bows and arrows?

Historically, progressives have claimed that the societies that used more advanced technology are the more developed and progressive. The first philosophers to systematically defend the idea of progress, Turgot and Caritat, claimed that philosophic progress and technological progress worked together.

In other words, technology like computers increase the speed information travels leading to better ideas about the world, better ideas about the world leads to better science and technology.

Overall, this cyclical process creates a progressively better world. Furthermore, one of the cornerstones of progressive thought has been the belief that the distribution of wealth in some material cultures was better than others.

For example, Marxists believe that the material culture in capitalist societies horrifyingly abusive to the poor. They reasoned that a communist culture would be superior because of its much more even distribution wealth.

But the multiculturalist calls all of this into question. They deny the idea that the material culture of one society is truly better or worse than the material culture of another society.

Does better technology really make a better culture? The multiculturalist is not convinced that atom bombs and artificial preservatives is better than bows and arrows accompanied by fresh food.

As for the distribution of wealth, capitalism can be pain, but it better than Stalinist kicking in your doors, Kulak witch hunts, and the forced redistribution of capital? Is there really such a thing as progress in material culture?

And that’s really the crux of the issue, isn’t it?

Can cultures really progress beyond those around them? Are we really capable of progressing for the better? In the end, are some ways of life better than others? Are all cultures truly equal? These questions modernity has yet to settle.

 

The photo shows, “The Kidnapping,” by Franz Roubaud, painted ca. 1880s-1900.

The Curious Death Of Canada

Is it right for a state to legally sustain and promote a social experiment, based upon an idea now thoroughly derided and debunked, and implemented by political will rather than the will of the people? Is it ethical to have a law that permanently binds race to culture? Is it good for people to live in politically defined structures of abnegation so that various expectations of an ideology may be met?

Sadly, Canada is the only state in the world that can firmly answer, “Yes,” to all three questions. Why? Because it is multicultural by law. (Australia is as well, but its implementation of this ideology is different).

Other western nations have flirted with multiculturalism, but they have had the wisdom not to sanction it by law). And even more sadly, Canada sees multiculturalism as its defining characteristic, its very identity as a state, so that it cannot help but fall into absurdity, with its mantra, “unity” through “diversity.”

An entire country defined by one social experiment – and a failed one at that? Is this the best that Canada can do to overcome Voltaire’s observation that it is nothing more than “quelques arpents de neige…a few acres of snow?”

Indeed, Canada has evolved into a place where all its hopes and even all its fears are placed upon political parties. What has Canada become?

First and foremost, it is a state. It is no longer a nation. That is an important distinction, because the state and the nation are not synonymous, despite the amalgam, “the nation-state.”

By way of political philosophy, a nation is defined as one community, with a shared history and culture – or, in the words of Ernest Renan, the nation is “a soul, a spiritual principle.”

The state, on the other hand, is a political alliance of individuals who share one geographical space defined by borders.

Canada has no community with a shared history, and therefore it has no culture, for culture is a consequence of history – culture cannot, and certainly should not, be created by governments through and by political means. And, Canada certainly has no soul, no spiritual principle which might define why it must exist as a nation.

Therefore, Canada is a state, in which the government aggregates people through immigration for its own ends – to sustain a tax base, because the population within its borders can no longer renew itself through biological means.

As Kant points out, such an aggregation cannot make a community, cannot build a nation – because a nation must be a moral community. And there cannot be diversity in morality. Is Canada, therefore, becoming a failed state whose only raison d’être is economics?

Of course, the very idea of a nation is a moral one (in that a nation should be greater than the sum of its economic capability and its geography). Nations embody values and therefore specify morality.

This is why some nations are better than others – this is why the flow of immigrants is westwards – millions of Canadians do not seek to migrate to other parts of the world. Why? Because the western world embodies a set of ideas and principles of morality that have historically proven to yield not only the best social results, but also the best economic results. Good ideas and good morality do create wealth, prosperity, freedom, happiness. Bad ideas do not.

A few years back, the philosopher, Marcello Pera established multiculturalism as the political version of a failed ideology, namely, relativism.

Briefly, relativism insists that history is useless because we are better than the past – because we have benefited from progress.

History is filled with our benighted ancestors who followed regressive ideas that we now have to fix and make right, while shaking a scornful finger. We are smart; they were dumb; and there is nothing they can do about it. Since we are progressive, we will build a much better world by getting rid of all the tired-old notions.

It is obvious how thoroughly ingrained relativism has become, for it passes for much of popular thinking. Perhaps progress is the most damaging legacy of eighteenth century Enlightenment, whereby everything modern is better – because it is not old.

We have only to look to one of its gravest consequences – hyper-capitalism and the devastation it has wrought not only socially, but environmentally. Each year is divided into four quarters, and each quarter must be more profitable than the last.

Relativism also maintains that there is no such thing as truth, because truth is what you make it. So, things like morality, or values, simply become personal choices, expressed as individual rights, because no one truth, morality, or value is better than any other.

Thus, there can be no universal (transcultural) morality or set of values which may be considered as being better than another because there is no point of reference. Paul Feyerabend succinctly summarised all this in a catchy phrase, “anything goes.” It is all a matter of lifestyle, everyone’s opinion is valuable and important – because personal opinion is all that we are capable of.

Aside from the immediate contradiction that relativism falls into – that what it says is actually “true” (a transcultural moral principle) and that this “truth” is good for everyone on this planet (a universal judgement). Therefore, it ends up doing precisely what it denies. But there are far graver deeper fallacies.

First, there is social paralysis. If all cultures are the same, then an evil culture cannot be denied, let alone criticized or defeated.

Second, there is paralysis of judgement. If all cultures have equal value, then there must be an external value system, which must be true to be applicable – but such a system, relativism says, does not exist.

Third, if all cultures are valid, then change itself is denied, since abandoning one culture and moving to another does not lead to any change at all.

Fourth, if all cultures are valuable and worth preserving (by government intervention), then cultures become prisons, from which escape is impossible – your DNA , not your mind, determines who and what you are – forever.

Why? Because you can never say that one culture is better, and more preferable, than another. This is the reality of multiculturalism – a relentless, grim determinism – precisely what relativism supposedly sets out to destroy.

It is often argued that multiculturalism builds tolerance, that it neutralizes the perceived harmful effects of religion, that it strengthens secularism, that it sustains democracy by promoting individual freedom.

Such statements are typical of ahistorical diktats. Tolerance is not a consequence of multiculturalism; rather, it is a virtue deeply embedded in the very fabric of the West’s (ignored) history – Christianity. Multiculturalism cannot explain a very basic fact – that religions create culture.

But by promoting all cultures, multiculturalism legitimizes all religion. Therefore, multiculturalism cannot further secularism (whatever that may be) because it entrenches and promotes all religions – and all world religions are religious at very core.

As for the relationship between multiculturalism and expressions of individual freedom, it is simply an illusion. How can an ideology, which imprisons people (because of their DNA) into their geographical places of origin, claim to be a liberator?

This is a tragic deception – because multiculturalism demands a total submission of the individual to his/her culture. This deception becomes clearly obvious if we consider a recent example. There was much uproar over women fully hiding their faces in veils.

Relativism in all its splendour was invoked – with reminders of personal freedom, the right to choose (if women can legally be topless, then they can legally go about fully veiled), and so forth.

But no one wanted to ask the much harder question – why does a fully-veiled woman refuse to change? Because she does not wish to participate in a non-Muslim world – she will be forever absent from the non-Muslim public sphere.

However, she is simply following the expectations of multiculturalism by fully submitting to the demands of her culture (as she interprets it), not as an individual – but in accordance to the expected behaviour of her sex in her culture.

Thus, multiculturalism does not mean freedom, democracy, individuality for everybody – it is simply a method to help Canadians with British DNA to overcome their own guilt of being historically Christian – because good relativists that they are, they imagine that are not yet free enough, secular enough, individual enough, progressive enough.

Quebec, of course, fully understands that if it starts playing the multicultural game, it will have to abandon its narrative of being historically unique in North America and learn to accept that it is just like any other culture carried over by immigrants. This is why Quebec has always been a fellow-traveller on the great culture experiment.

In effect, the larger, British culture of Canada is expected to be multicultural. The various immigrant communities (which behave like mini-nations) are firmly expected to be mono-cultural.

Perhaps it is now time to ask a fundamental question – why must Canada continue to cling to multiculturalism? Is it simply to say that because of it Canada is not like the “melting Pot” of south of the border?

Is Canada really as fragile as that? Is it simply to demonstrate to the world that Canada is a “world-leader” when it comes to being on the “cutting-edge” of modernity? Is it to assert that it is profoundly post-Christian and entirely secular?

The fact remains, no country in the world wants to be multicultural. They want to be nations. They do not want to lose their spiritual essence, their soul.

In a very strange twist, multiculturalism spawns that which it sets out to dismantle – cultural superiority. Government-endorsed propaganda expounds “pride” in one’s DNA-ingrained culture, and people are avidly encouraged to be “proud” of however they want to romanticize “the old country.”

The old moral concept of humility has long been replaced by the strident political one of “pride.” Whoever dare say that he is truly humbled to be a Canadian?

 

The photo shows, “The Death of Jane McCrea” by John Vanderlyn, painted in 1804.

Why Liberals Are Narrow-Minded

In today’s world, discussion about morals is a lost art. In part, this is because stupidity is on display everywhere, and encouraged to be so, even though most people’s thoughts and opinions are less than worthless, as a glance at Facebook or The New York Times comment sections will tell you.

More deeply, it’s because America is dominated today by the nearly universal (but wholly unexamined) belief that the only legitimate principle of moral judgment is John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” – that no restriction on human action can be justified other than to prevent harm to another.

The Righteous Mind is an extended attack on the usefulness of the harm principle as the sole way to understand and justify human morality, combined with detailed explanations of the much broader ways in which people can and do view morality.

The author, Jonathan Haidt, uses this framework to understand political differences, and to plead for an increase in rationality and civility to arise from that understanding.

I am not hopeful such an increase will happen. But this book is fascinating beyond belief. For a relatively short book, it packs in a tremendous amount of insight. It is therefore difficult to review or summarize; I could spend pages discussing relatively minor matters covered in the book.

Haidt has that talent which eludes other science writers such as Steven Pinker – the ability to condense complex material without losing impact. The result is a work well worth reading.

The book is divided into three main parts. The first and third deal with how humans engage in moral reasoning, and how that affects politics. The middle part deals with, in essence, evolutionary psychology—how humans became as we are now in regard to morality, and what that implies for us today.

The first part of the book contains what is perhaps Haidt’s most counter-intuitive claim, on which the entire book rests – that the majority of moral reasoning is intuitive and pre-rational, and that the rational side of each person participates primarily to justify a conclusion already reached, which reasoning is “useful to further our social agendas.”

Haidt uses the metaphor of an elephant (intuition) and rider (reason) – mostly, the rider does what the elephant says, although sometimes the rider can guide the elephant, or at least influence him.

He begins with a captivating review of how moral psychology has been studied and viewed by academics over the past few decades.

In the 1960s through the 1990s, it was believed, following Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, that children had no inborn moral impulses, but figured out morality for themselves through their interactions, so-called “rationalism.”

This theory believed that as children become able to see the world as others saw it, they come to understand that fairness is everything, and build their morality around metrics of equal treatment.

Moreover, as Elliot Turiel showed, children can differentiate between arbitrary and universal rules, nearly always believing that harm to others is wrong regardless of what is dictated by formal rules.

As Haidt notes, these researchers’ conclusion, that morality’s chief aim is reducing harm and creating fairness, and that any other moral judgment is imposed arbitrarily from without by societies and cultures, dovetailed precisely with the then-rising American liberal (i.e., progressive) consensus, of maximizing personal freedom without limitation or end.

This further reinforced its accuracy in the minds of its investigators, because it fit with what they personally believed.

But this science was all wrong.

These researchers fell into the trap of believing that because American children, and certain groups of Americans they studied, based their morality on fairness and non-harm, all others also did so.

Haidt relates how he personally started with the same beliefs that were popular at the time (in the 1990s), but when he started reading Richard Shweder, an expert in Indian moral psychology, and went to India for some time, immersing himself in the culture in a non-judgmental way, he began to understand that people there viewed the world very, very differently.

He began to wonder what that implied for morality – was the American view overly narrow and simplistic? At the most basic level, the difference in morality he saw was between individualistic, American-type views, and sociocentric views, “placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals.”

Harm in this view is not irrelevant, nor is fairness, but they are far from the most important consideration, whereas in an individualistic culture, where society cannot make any non-harm based demands on its individual members, it is the only thing that matters.

Individualism basically came on the scene during the Enlightenment and only in the West; the rest of the world is still primarily sociocentric.

Beginning to see this, Haidt spent the next years conducting ever larger studies, among a variety of cultures and classes, to see what the moral views were of people in hypothetical scenarios, some of which involved harm, and some of which involved other possible moral principles, such as loyalty and purity.

He began to realize that it is simply false that children create morality for themselves out of the harm principle; instead, they have certain innate impulses, which are guided and enhanced by learning from the culture in which they grow up.

There are many more innate impulses than mere avoidance of harm to others (which is also innate, not formed by rational thinking, contrary to Piaget and Kohlberg) and there is a complex relationship between those impulses and culture.

Haidt then turns back to a history lesson, starting with Plato’s Timaeus and looking at various ways we have viewed the relationship among mind, reason, and morality. He discusses Hume, Jefferson, and most importantly for his book, Darwin.

Haidt notes how in the mid-twentieth century, the idea that there was any native, or inherent, element to human nature became toxic, leading to the demand that all right thinking people reject that human nature exists, with the necessary conclusion that morality is purely the result of reasoning, with no innate component.

He discusses how ideology was used to suppress those who thought otherwise, such as Edward O. Wilson, excoriated for daring to challenge the scientific consensus, but rehabilitated today.

Over time, as evidence built up to the contrary, this monolith eroded, and an inherent human nature became recognized (though it is still denied in some quarters).

For Haidt’s purposes, the crucial element of this realization was that various experiments showed that intuitions were critical to moral conclusions, with reasoning playing second fiddle: “Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.”

We “see-that” before “reasoning-why.” We do this not to tell ourselves why we believe something, but, for evolutionary reasons, to “find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.”

It is important to realize that intuitions are not irrational, they are a type of cognition, not inherently of less worth than abstract reasoning.

And, most critically, if you want to convince others you have to address their intuitions, not their reasoning, since the former comes first, and for the most part trying to address their reasoning is like addressing the rider where the elephant is actually in control.

In fact, people who don’t make moral judgments this way, who instead use pure reason, are psychopaths, incapable of normal human interaction.  (Almost all psychopaths are men, Haidt mentions – throughout the book, although he does not emphasize it, it is obvious that Haidt views men and women as far from interchangeable, probably for the evolutionary reasons he stresses in other contexts).

Finally, in this section, Haidt demonstrates through the results of experiments that many of the reasons we state for believing as we do are social in nature – designed to enhance our popularity, justify ourselves to others, justify ourselves to ourselves, engage in confirmation bias, and, critically, find reasons that result in actions benefiting not just us but our group—all just like a politician, although here Haidt is not making specific political claims.

Our stated reasons are largely manufactured to accomplish these goals after we have already concluded our moral judgments.

This implies, among other things, that we cannot get good behavior by rationalism; that philosopher kings are not going to be more moral than anyone else; and that teaching ethics is worthless (which I have long believed, so I am sure Haidt is correct) – we should instead be conditioning intuitions.

So Haidt, in the second part, turns to the specifics of those innate intuitions. More specifically, he sets out to prove given that morality is largely based on intuition, that those intuitions are much more, and much broader, than the harm and fairness intuitions that are the sole focus of “modern secular Western morality.”

Haidt’s objection is not that the harm principle, in particular, is unjust or wrong, but that any moral theory resting on a single principle is not in keeping with how people really view morality, and therefore both are largely useless as an explanation and overly constraining as a hortatory method.

“Modern secular Western morality” is what Haidt also calls (following a group of cultural psychologists), WEIRD morality, where the acronym stands for “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.”

“WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature.”  They “see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.”

In other words, most people, and nearly all of the rest of the world, have totally different moral intuitions, and therefore moral concerns, from what we are told by the dominant voices in the West are universal intuitions and concerns.

WEIRD morality is “blind” to the concerns of others. (You’d think those obsessed with “multiculturalism” would welcome this conclusion, but you’d be wrong—liberals hate this conclusion, since it denies the primacy of autonomic individualism, a higher good.)

When he realized this, Haidt had a “red pill moment,” where he “stepped out of the matrix.”  He realized, of himself and his fellow liberals: “We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals.”

The remainder of this long section is devoted to expanding the foundations of moral judgments beyond harm and fairness (clarified as pairs of opposites, “care/harm” and “fairness/cheating”) to include four others:  “loyalty/betrayal”; “authority/subversion”; “sanctity/degradation”; and “liberty/oppression.”

Again, it is hard to do justice to the incisive and insightful nature of this analysis. Suffice it to say that Haidt is correct, and once you view questions of morality, and of individuals’ views of morality, through this framework, rather than being confined in the straitjacket of mere harm and fairness, you understand what drives people much more than you did before.

Haidt emphasizes that these six ways of viewing the world (and perhaps others) are innate – not in the sense of being wholly predetermined, but in the sense of being “organized in advance of experience” – a “first draft” inherent in each person when born.

Those traits lead people along different paths, often reinforcing their inherent characteristics, though not always.

He notes repeatedly how, as with so many claims later proven wrong, a scientific “consensus” insisted until the 1990s that each person was a blank slate, but that has been proven definitively false.

All six foundations, Haidt believes, originated in evolutionary behaviors, which he identifies for each, but that does not make any one, or any set of them, more or less valid than another.

They all operate simultaneously in each human being. And they are all necessary for a good society: “…moral monism – the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle – leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles.”

Of course, as will be obvious upon a moment’s reflection, and as Haidt explains, liberals draw their conclusions by relying on only three of these foundations (care, fairness and liberty), and often only two (fairness easily gives way to liberty, if oppression is thought to be present).

Haidt is himself liberal, and he admits his original personal response to these insights was to try to aggressively put them to use to help Democrats win elections (John Kerry’s election, to be specific).

His concern, then and now, was that since most conservatives (he identifies libertarians as very closely allied to liberals in their moral judgments, so here and elsewhere he means Burkean conservatives) rely more-or-less equally on all six foundations, their appeal is broader than the liberal appeal, which only offers something to a subset of the population.

Although he mentions Edmund Burke, Haidt’s exemplar of a conservative is not Burke. He also mentions other relevant thinkers, such as, Thomas Sowell (who invented the terminology of the “constrained vision” of human capacity, on which Haidt in part relies to characterize conservatives), and Robert Nisbet (the originator of modern conservative theories of community). But he relies on neither one.

Instead, Haidt chooses someone more obscure – the turn-of-the-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the polar opposite of John Stuart Mill.

Among other things, Durkheim believed in the centrality of the family and the critical importance of a society consisting of networked, overlapping groups, in which the individual as individual played little role.

He is Haidt’s exemplar of a conservative, fully realized in the sense of relying on all six of Haidt’s foundations of moral judgment, and Durkheim reappears repeatedly in the second half of the book.

While religion is the focus of a fair bit of discussion, it is all about the evolutionary value of religion. But the reader is left with the lurking feeling that much of what Haidt ascribes to evolutionary pressure, to the “first draft” of intuition, is in fact the latent Christianity that is the utterly dominant moral backdrop of the West, even now.

It may be true, for example, that human beings have an innate sense that others should not be unduly harmed, or that oppression is bad.  (Haidt ascribes these to the evolutionary motives of keeping children safe and “a response to adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others”—but when weapons were developed, could be resisted).

But our interpretation of our intuition, the second draft made after the first draft of intuition, flows purely from Christianity, and it is hard to distinguish where one ends and the other begins.

To non-Christian cultures, for example, the Golden Rule is either unimportant or insane. Nobody has an innate urge to obey it.

The much more usual moral judgment of “care/harm” is that of the Roman dictator Sulla, who wrote as his epitaph, “No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.”

This suggests that Haidt’s project of reclaiming some agreement on moral issues through better understanding others is doomed, since if it is true that what understanding we have relies largely or wholly on latent Christianity, as that disappears what agreement we have is likely to disagree as well.

As to the validity of Mill’s harm principle as the touchstone of moral judgment, we can do no better than examine the braying of progressive philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

Although Haidt does not mention her, she is in many ways the anti-Haidt. A large part of her recent career has revolved around her exaltation of the harm principle as the sole valid method of moral judgment, and the rejection of disgust, or what she claims to be disgust, as well as sanctity, as invalid.

She has become famous for this, mostly because her positions conveniently fit right into the Zeitgeist, in that she claims all traditional morality, especially sexual morality, is to be rejected in favor of total individual liberty, the holy of holies of modern progressivism.

Although I have not read her 2010 book From Disgust to Humanity, by all accounts its reasoning is exactly what Haidt finds most disturbing, and most cluelessly narrow.

Her book is an extended attack on any moral judgment that cannot be justified adequately to Nussbaum on the exclusive ground of Mill’s harm principle, and most especially on any moral judgment that depends in any way on a decision regarding sanctity or purity (i.e., in her mind, on moral judgments that are the opposite of “Humanity”).

Nussbaum further discovers a Constitutional imperative to enshrine in law her beliefs and way of looking at morality, which would have surprised any American jurist prior to 1950, and something Haidt, with his plea to understand and value all the different bases for moral judgments, doubtless finds troubling.

But that, of course, is why Nussbaum is so widely praised—she offers apparent intellectual cover for WEIRD individuals to write their preferences into law in a way that cannot be appealed and cannot be legislated against by the majority who still honor the morals of sanctity.

Presumably somewhere in her work Nussbaum enunciates why she believes the harm principle is the only moral criterion that can be permitted to exist; no doubt, her argument relies on assertions that only it is “rational.”

But as Haidt shows, this is just the result of a parched inability to understand human beings, and a rejection of the cognitive function of intuition – which is why Nussbaum and her many allies are, though they don’t realize it, on the wrong side of history.

The third part of the book focuses on why these intuitions developed from a Darwinian perspective, and in particular on “group selection” – behaviors in groups, especially moral behaviors, and why Haidt believes they developed, namely in order to confer evolutionary advantage on a group level.

This is another view that until recently was an utter heresy against the scientific consensus, and it is also the view that causes Haidt to attack the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, etc.) as blinkered and ignorant, for refusing to see the obvious truth that religion confers group advantages, especially “cooperation without kinship,” and is not a negative “parasite” or “virus.”

Haidt himself is an atheist, so this is in a sense an intra-atheist dispute. And his definition of religion, following Durkheim, is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things,” in order to create a community.

This definition is broader than revealed religion, and could easily include, for example, the belief system of modern liberals and their institutions sometimes called the “clerisy” or the “Cathedral” – but that’s a topic for another day.

Here also Haidt veers into brief discussions of evolutionary genetic change in the recent human past (he believes it can and did happen, and continues to happen, but avoids excessive exploration, presumably so as not to get into the disputes that have embroiled Gregory Clark and Nicholas Wade, although he cites the latter several times).

As the reader can see, Haidt relies heavily on evolutionary explanations. I have always been skeptical of evolutionary explanations for human characteristics – as Haidt acknowledges, they often shade into “just so” stories.

Even if these explanations are true, or largely true, Haidt’s six foundations of moral intuitions do not explain many related areas of human nature. For example, why do people seek transcendence? But perhaps explaining everything is too much to ask, and what Haidt does explain is plausible enough.

Haidt’s ultimate evolutionary conclusion is that humans are a unique combination of mostly chimpanzee with a little bee – we are mostly self-interested individuals willing to form groups, but sometimes willing to be “ultrasocial” (his term for human eusociality) and make sacrifices for the group as a whole, in ways chimpanzees never would (apparently chimpanzees can’t even agree to carry a log together, not ever, or engage in any other behaviors Haidt calls “shared intentionality”).

“We evolved to live in groups,” which implies that an ethic of extreme individuality, as the WEIRDs would run society, goes against the grain of human nature.

Community is critical to human flourishing: “When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.”

In other words, our society today exhibits “anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.”

Again, I am not doing justice to the volume of information and analysis contained in these pages, which manages to be both extremely dense and very readable, sweeping in everything from Aztec use of hallucinogens to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Haidt ends with a series of political analyses. He offers two conclusions unpalatable to liberals – that conservatives are stronger politically, because as noted above their political offerings resonate with the moral frames of more people, and that conservatives are mostly right in their approach to human nature and its political implications.

Haidt says that liberals, in fact to their detriment, typically are unable to understand conservatives, because their own moral framework is relatively limited, such that they retreat, when confronted with incomprehensible opposing beliefs, into the belief that conservatives are inherently evil.

For example, liberals are far less able than conservatives to take a survey of moral beliefs and successfully pretend to be of the other political persuasion; they totally fail to grasp how and why conservatives really think, to a much greater degree than conservatives of liberals.

This is not without consequences. In fact, sometimes, as Haidt explicitly notes, liberals react to their incomprehension with the belief that conservatives should be “exterminated” – a belief not found among conservatives about liberals. (Apparently conservatives are wise to keep buying guns).

Haidt clearly struggles with his own self-image as a progressive, while being forced by his scientific analysis to admit the possibility that “conservatives [might] have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society.”

This is probably why he has been accused of being a crypto-conservative – not only because he attacks liberal pieties that traditionally go wholly unchallenged, but he goes even farther and seems to substantively edge toward endorsing actual conservative beliefs, by openly praising Durkheim, Burke, and the accretion of “moral capital.”

In his point-counterpoint, it’s conservatives who have something to offer everyone, and liberals/libertarians who have a pinched, unproductive, unrealistic view of the world.

Thus, he calls for understanding opposing viewpoints, but offers opposing viewpoints that are not opposite and equal. He says the “liberal wisdom” that conservatives should accept boils down to some regulation being good, and that corporations should be restrained.

But conservatives would not much dispute those two modest propositions; many would applaud the latter, especially today.

Then Haidt offers “conservative wisdom” that is vastly broader and more generally applicable: “You can’t help the bees by destroying the hive,” in which Haidt offers a full-throated defense of Burkean “little platoons” in opposition to emancipation of the individual, and of “Durkeheimian utilitarianism,” exemplified by when “Adam Smith argued similarly [to Burke] that patriotism and parochialism are good things because they lead people to exert themselves to improve the things they can improve.”

These are vastly broader propositions than modest regulation and corporate controls; they are entire visions of the good and human society, and if this is “conservative wisdom,” it is of massively greater import than the “liberal wisdom” Haidt offers.

Compounding his offense, Haidt piles on, among other things citing Robert Putnam to the effect that even if liberals claim to “stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion,” since they ignore important moral foundations such as loyalty and authority, their “zeal . . . . often lead[s] them to push for change that weaken groups, traditions, institutions and moral capital.”

In other words, liberals erode, if not destroy, society.

Two examples Haidt gives are liberal devastation of the African American family (as a result of the elimination of sanctity as a moral imperative) and increasing racism among Hispanics, resulting from pushing multicultural education (by over-exalting freedom from supposed oppression).

Just like Mark Lilla, Haidt has no use at all for celebrations of multiculturalism and diversity, nor, presumably, for “inclusion” as that word is used today, the celebration of the abnormal and corrosive, and the violent suppression of the normal and traditional.

He advises, “Don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the groups’ shared values and common identity. . . . You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies.”

In passing, Haidt destroys other liberal shibboleths, such as the primacy of emancipation from all authority, noting that “authority should not be confused with power” and “authority ranking relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative.”

Or, “Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).”

To say that all this is wildly offensive to most of today’s American progressives would be a gross understatement.

Of course, Haidt’s work opposes much conservative thought.

He rejects the truth of both any religion and anything such as natural law – morality may be based on innate intuitions, and human nature exists, but that does not imply that there is a deeper law, much less a law set by God. Humans have no teleology; Darwin exists in a vacuum.

Still, it would be valuable to try to apply Haidt’s framework to a variety of issues, though I won’t do so here. What of guns? Or global warming?

Abortion, for example, can be viewed in different ways depending on the external information used to inform innate impulses. Thus, in any abortion debate, care/harm is a critical question – but whose? That of the unborn child? The mother? Both? In what proportion?

Haidt, of course, doesn’t claim that his framework answers all moral questions – his claim is much more limited, that people approach moral questions in a definable way with certain common characteristics among all people, but with key differences as well, and that understanding this truth makes it possible both to discuss political matters with others and, up to a point, attempt to influence them in more productive ways than might otherwise be possible.

Haidt begins this book by quoting Rodney King, “Can we all get along?”

Since he wrote this book, in 2012, Haidt has become perhaps the most prominent liberal voice today in America calling for both a concerted effort to increase civility in political discourse, by using the frames he presents in this book, and by also calling for the toleration of conservatives in the academic world.

His linking of these things pretty clearly shows that he thinks that most narrow-mindedness, at least among elites, is on the liberal side.

He has been thinking this for a while; this theme can be seen in his modestly famous keynote speech at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, and in his more recent founding of a group, Heterodox Academy, explicitly devoted to reducing ideological persecution of conservatives in the academic world.

These are honorable and valuable goals, though I suspect the answer is “No, we can’t all get along,” and both Haidt’s analysis and events in the past six years support that answer.

Just because people of good will want others with hugely divergent moral visions to see everybody’s point of view does not mean that those people can live together in harmony, or even peace.

That’s too bad, but at least when we’re manning the barricades, if we’ve read this book, we’ll understand the people storming them better than we would have otherwise.

Charles is a business owner and operator, in manufacturing, and a recovering big firm M&A lawyer. He runs the blog, The Worthy House.
The photo shows, “The Conquerors of the Bastille in Front of the City Hall, 14 July 1789,” by Paul Delaroche, painted 1830-1838.

Why Multiculturalism?

Why multiculturalism? What has obligated western democracies to adopt this idea wholesale? The siren-song seems compelling enough: tolerance, inclusiveness, acceptance, and the cant of difference leading to social strength.

What can be wrong with an idea that promotes all these supposed worthy things? But in the myths of old, it was said the Siren-song was sweet in order to lure ships into treacherous waters, where they floundered and were lost. Is multiculturalism such a Siren-song? Is it luring the west to ultimate destruction?

For some reason the issue of multiculturalism is fraught with passions. Why should immigrants give up their culture? Why should they change? Why should they adopt to the ways of their new home? What about freedom?

And on the other side, if things were perfect back home, why not go back? Why leave your own country, come to the west, with all its opportunity, and then start demanding that the west become just like the country you could not wait to get out of?

The western world lives in prosperity, comfort and relative individual liberty. But our cultural consciousness has become entirely fragmented – we have convinced ourselves that we do indeed live in a global village, in which everybody wants more or less the same things that we do; that we should never presume to correct the failures and follies of other nations; that all religions are about peace and love at their very core; that the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness are biologically ingrained in each human being throughout the world.

Such are our myths, or perhaps, our values, which we think are shared by all and sundry.

And the finest expression of this unfounded laissez-faire attitude is multiculturalism. Of course, this is nothing but eager naivety, since the world is full of good and bad, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness. We need to recoup the courage to make judgments so we do not sink into the morass of relativism.

We need to rediscover, or build up, the courage to say, the west is the best, and all other cultures are abysmal failures.

We need to recover the muscular, masculine quality of western culture (what has made it the best), by dismantling the incessant feminization that now smothers the west.

But what exactly is multiculturalism? Why is it seen as the savior of the western world? What makes the entire west despise or toss away its own traditions, its own history – in order to espouse all the cultures that immigrants bring?

Is this reverse colonialism, or a form of social management? And do we really mean multiracialism when we say multiculturalism? These questions are vexing because they remain unanswered – and unaddressed – despite the fact that most western democracies have eagerly jumped on the multiculturalism bandwagon.

It is always far easier to fall back into the usual explanations – of oppressors and the oppressed.

The idea of many people existing cheek-by-jowl within the borders of one nation – and indeed coming to define the very nature of that nation – is nothing new in history.

The Roman Empire was multicultural, as was the Empire of Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan, and more recently the British Empire.

There is little to be gained in the false and purely disingenuous excoriations that are cast upon the concept of “empire” and “colonialism” – it is an easy crutch used by nations that cannot solve the problems that they find themselves in – problems that have very little to do with the “evils of colonialism” and everything to do with greed and the usual appropriation of wealth and resources by the elite.

Therefore, multiculturalism, as such, is nothing new. People have always lived together, intermarried and been content and happy. But in doing so, these same people adhered to one culture – not many. And it was always the culture that provided the best results for everybody which everyone wanted.

People never clung to many cultures within one geographical location. Plurality is a euphemism for social chaos – because it destroys social cohesion.

No nation has ever exited that despised or destroyed its own culture and adopted everyone else’s – until now, that is, where the west is doing precisely that – destroying itself by promoting all the failed cultures of the world – failed, because none of them have contributed anything to modernity.

Why does the west cherish marginality, praise it, worship it? Marginality now defines our academic culture to such an extent that to critique it is to have burning coals heaped upon your head.

Critique of multiculturalism is the greatest heresy which must be destroyed by all means available. Multiculturalism is the state’s religion, to which every knee must bend, and to which every knee must not bend.

Such plurality is the very “bread-and-butter” of our education system, our culture, our politics – it is now the very defining character of the west. Why?

Multiculturalism is enshrined, advocated and defended as the perfect expression of an illumined mind, of liberal attitudes, of economic progress – with catch phrases such as, “We must learn to live together in order to survive.”

But is it not strange that multiculturalism exists only in the west – and nowhere else – nor will it ever exist anywhere else.

In order to establish multiculturalism as the “culture of the west,” we have had to negate and then eradicate history, by rewriting it.

What academic worth his/her salt not make a good living excoriating the west in lectures, articles, and books? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

West-bashing is a thriving industry. But who funds it? And why is it so well funded?

We have had to expunge our values. We have had to destroy the very cohesion of our culture – and in the process we have actively taught people we consider to be oppressed the value of victimhood, thus training them to wax haughty, so we can admire and praise them when they yell and scream about how wretched we are, and how noble they are.

What is this penance for? For the loss of God?

Why is such blatant hatred being promoted? Why it is being tolerated by all of us?

What is the endgame here? Why has the west come to espouse guilt so completely that it is willing to kill itself over it?

Perhaps this is nothing other than naïve antinomianism – a misplaced rebellion against authority, a misguided view that our history is forever wrong and therefore must be nullified.

Most troubling is the fact that multiculturalism is actively promoted by governments – it is state sanctioned culture, which is a generous way of saying, multiculturalism is socialist tyranny.

But multiculturalism is also state-motherhood, in a western culture that largely abhors real motherhood as patriarchal oppression. This is where feminism has led us – sterility and moral bankruptcy. Think about it – there is no interest in the family. Why?

What has the west gained by adopting and promoting multiculturalism? In a word, nothing.

Although the west has economic clout, it has squandered its intellectual and spiritual capital by investing it in multiculturalism.

The west has stripped itself of all that it once had, and it now wanders about, soullessly, trying on different cultural postures, to see in which one it can best feel at home. We have entered a new Dark Ages – entirely naked.

But there are voices crying out in the wilderness. Time has come to recover the values of western democracy – which are rooted in Judeo-Christian humanism, namely, the marriage of faith and reason.

If we fail in this endeavor, we are truly lost.

We must abandon feminism, we must abandon the nanny state and its tyrannical nurturing, we must destroy the culture of sterility and moral bankruptcy being imposed upon us so relentlessly by our political class.

We must rise up at last, before we are all destroyed and made into atomized slaves to bloated elites who live in their mansions and preach “morality” to us all from on high.

When shall we finally reach moralizing-fatigue?

If we do nothing, there will be no second chance for a very, very long time, because the west will disappear. And remember, none of the cultures that are being promoted as replacements to the west have a good track record when it comes to creating a brilliant civilization.

For the sake of all our humanity, we must fight to win back our freedom. We truly have nothing to lose but our chains. (Marx did offer a few good lines).

 

The photo shows an updated version of Thomas Couture’s famous painting, “Romans During the Decadence,” which was painted in 1847.

W(h)ither Canada?

In railing standeth all their revel. (Sir Thomas More, 1557)

 

Does Canada still exist? Certainly most people will point out a land mass labelled such on any world map. But the absurdity quickly disappears when we consider the reality of what this land mass now encompasses.

The current Prime Minister of this geographical area, Mr. Justin Trudeau, rather proudly, or perhaps philosophically, displays this wordage at all official occasions – “Diversity is Canada’s strength.”

Perhaps unbeknownst to him, this slogan simply summarizes the bêtise that Canada has become – an innominate state.

Those of a more cynical bent of mind may see here the shadow of the Spider King (Louis XI of France) who seems to have coined the phrase, “divide et impera” (divide and conquer).

Imagine a country actually wanting to be an airport, and you will find Canada

The wisdom of Brooks Atkinson needs to be reiterated at this time: “…a government…is put in…by blatherskites and populated by knaves and fools.” Of course, Atkinson was paraphrasing the Elizabethan pamphleteer Stephen Gosson’s work of 1582, Playes Confuted in Five Actions.

Canada has certainly been blessed with all manner of knave and fool populating its politics, all of whom vie stolidly to belong to the one Centrist Uniparty which has ruled Canada forever, it seems.

Distinctions such as “conservative” or “liberal” are merely emotional displays of the blatherskites which the ballot box piously tallies as “results.” Knavery, especially of the foolish variety, is most adept at stirring up emotions.

As is obvious, “centrism” defines nothing at all. Therefore, “Diversity is Canada’s strength” is the perfect motto for a state that stands for nothing at all.

But such a slogan is also extremely valuable to a state whose ambition can rise no higher than to not to be “like the US,” to be “more European,” to be “world-class,” to be “respected” on the world stage, to be, well, “nice.” Canadians love flattery. It is a national past-time and officialdom waxes well-nigh poetical with such gnomology.

the morality of robbing poor nations of their best and their brightest seems not to bother post-national Canadians

Canada has always suffered from an innate inferiority complex that expresses itself in all manner of strange ways, especially in its politics.

Again, Mr. Trudeau (fils), who likes to pontificate, describes Canada as the world’s “first post-national state,” which has “no core identity.”

In other words, Canada is a tranny-state, for Gallus-like, it has lopped off whatever it had in order to dispense the religion of the new Cybele: post-modernism. (Perhaps it’s time to give the promotion of transsexuality its historically accurate nomenclature – we are in the Age of the Eunuch).

So, by being “post-national,” Canada has become the world’s first Eunuch-State, with its Galli of feminist leaders (such as, the “feminist“Mr. Trudeau) who have no “core values,” and who therefore believe in nothing and are eager to become celebrants in the dies sanguinis of trendiness. Hail, Attis!

Canada jumps at the chance of being first in the world at anything, no matter how dubious the distinction (this peculiar condition is known by the more discerning as, being “world famous in Canada,” a phrase coined by Mordecai Richler). So, why not be the first gelding among nations!?

But just what is a “post-national state?” Who knows, but it sounds suitably “cutting-edge” and “progressive.” Canada still hasn’t outgrown that irksome hebetic tendency to take up causes in order to posture as being “world-class;” in other words, to be perceived as a grown-up among nations.

Sadly, this rapture at being the first post-national state has been long in the making. Since the 1970s, what Canadian politician worth his salt (yes, mostly “his,” except for one very brief hiccup) has not found ways to undermine or destroy all vestiges of British culture, now considered the root of all evil in the world?

Canada will eventually balkanize into different nations

The result is that the guilt-ridden British and European population of Canada has promptly chosen to vanish, by way of the usual methodology – just let the birthrate plunge, and rely on immigration to keep things going – the morality of robbing poor nations of their best and their brightest seems not to bother post-national Canadians.

But this also justifies the free-flow of a replacement population. Thus, every year 300,000 new immigrants are brought into the geographical location still known as Canada, lest the tax-base take a serious hit. But this is endemic to the entire west.

And lest tongues wag, the current Prime Minister also has a solid Family Foundation that seeks to undertake charitable work, no matter what the cost. Corporate colonialism now defines Canada, since it is now in the pockets of the Chinese and the EU.

These new immigrants are encouraged to retain loyalty to whatever land they could not leave fast enough; and before long they are happily living in two worlds – as boarders only in Canada and as nationalists who are loyal to their “real homelands.”

Of course, government money actively promotes such cultural dissociative identity disorder.

just what is a “post-national state?”

Thus, Canada has long vanished. It is now only a eunuchized geographical location where the values and cultures of the entire world are its own. Imagine a country actually wanting to be an airport, and you will find Canada.

What of the bright future? First, there is the Maoist control of language, so that even individual thought must follow party line of correct ideology. In other words, the total corruption of language to habituate the mind for self-censorship – that perfect form of propaganda.

Canada will eventually balkanize into different nations, for it no longer has a core that might justify unity. The replacement populations being brought in will grow in number, and because of multiculturalism they will remain ghettoized.

The fact of multiculturalism in Canada is very simple – no one, other than the host British population, has any real affinity or loyalty to Canada.

Thus, there will be an Islamic nation, a Chinese nation, a hodgepodge nation made up of people from the Indian sub-continent (when was India not a hodgepodge?), and some portion left to whatever British and European numbers that somehow decided to breed. As for the First Nations, they will have to decide which new nation to vanish into.

Since the current inhabitants of Canada are thoroughly propagandized by efficient state disinformation services, no one really cares about the future because – (a) they are always living elsewhere and their loyalty belongs elsewhere); or (b) the guilt-ridden British and European population is too busy pampering itself and enjoying life so it can feel less guilty.

Thus to speak about the future of Canada is to walk the path of contradiction, for once Canada denied and then dismantled its nationhood, it destroyed itself. And Canadians love it!

The only thing now left to do is see if anyone is even interested in giving this dead nation a proper burial. Any volunteers?