Henry Dampier

Having ascended to the height of the world for some brief thousands of years (with a long, muddling interlude in the middle), the West finds itself on the back foot against its more numerous competitors. None of this is especially concealed: the only confusing part about it is that a large portion of the people who might otherwise be charged with perpetuating the civilization have arrayed themselves against it, often barely understanding, themselves, what it is that they are tearing down.

The America of the next generation will be completely unrecognizable from that of the current one, and that of the previous one. The same goes for Europe. Many of the distinctive qualities that make the West different will be diminished or enveloped by the surrounding factions looking for pieces of the former territories. To the extent that any of it survives will be the extent to which the people separate themselves out and survive within separate countries.

In some ways, we can also see this as an unforeseen consequence of technological progress, particularly in the field of weapons. The West kept climbing until it developed weapons which were so powerful that no leader wanted to risk using them. The typical correction mechanism for misgovernment is war — both civil and international, in the same way that bankruptcy clears out uneconomic firms from the marketplace. With war between Western states becoming mostly unfeasible, it became possible for thoroughly insane governments to take over enormous portions of the globe, with their growth only being checked in a limited fashion by economic failure.

In reflection, a good retort to the anti-war-slogan-question “War, what is it good for?” is “putting tyrannical governments into smoke.”

The growth in the market economy also fueled growth of bureaucratic states to levels which would have been impossible in leaner times.

In a spasmodic mixture of envy and self-loathing, the West is tearing itself down, replacing it with something that few have much of a motivation to sustain and grow. Even the people charged with paying the enormous social-security-and-medical-care bills show little love for the ‘racist’ and ‘bigoted’ societies that they are inheriting, and I really can’t blame them for that.

There is an alternative, put forth by Lawrence Auster (whom I’ve been linking to often over the last couple weeks), which may or may not prove feasible:

If genuine reforms are thought to be impossible because of opposition by minority groups, I would like the reader to consider how much more difficult all political decisions are going to be in the future when every issue will have to pass a minefield of ethnic and racial blocs. That is why it is vital that we act now while there is still time—if there is still time. Action requires that the great mass of Americans, whatever their color, who care for this civilization and want it to be pre­served, make their voices heard in a bloc, in the same way that highly motivated minority groups act when their interests are at stake.

It is not enough merely to express concerns about immigration. People are doing that all the time, and it accom­plishes little in the way of waking the nation up from its hypnotic passivity on this issue. On the contrary, the mere venting of anxieties and resentments only strengthens the open-borders orthodoxy by enabling it to dismiss all those who are concerned about immigration as xenophobes. It is time, rather, for the American people to legitimize the idea of meaningful immigration re­form and then to enact fair and substantive changes in the law along the lines I have suggested here. All that is lacking, as the result of a quarter-century of orchestrated guilt, is the conviction that it is morally right—and the will to do it. In any case, something must be done, and soon. The disdain felt by many Americans today for the 1920s nativists, for restricting immigration too tightly, will be nothing compared with the curses that future generations of Americans, mired in a divided and decaying society, will pile on our heads for erring too far in the opposite direction.

The immigration issue is more important than smaller political issues because a completely foreign people will create a completely foreign nation — one more similar to that of the third world than the country which we inherited.

One of the consequences of mass education is that it sets expectations among graduates and the rest of the society that they will become symbolic workers — people charged with manipulating symbols and knowledge rather than objects which exist in the real world. Proponents of mass immigration often say that low skilled immigrants “do the jobs that Americans won’t do” — pointing to high unemployment and a low labor force participation rate to prove their point.

The proponents do have a point. A college graduate will often prefer to be unemployed than to take a job as a roofer, dishwasher, or farm laborer — not only are they poorly suited for the work physically, but all their lives they have been prepared to work as bureaucrats. Employers of unskilled and semi-skilled labor, faced with a dearth of potential employees who aren’t besotted by addiction or unreliability, turn to the desperate and uneducated.

This is more of a long term problem than it appears to be on the surface, connected to countless other bad assumptions at the heart of many different American institutions. Some of these were foundational assumptions, but others were a sort of damage that only accumulated over time.

In the beginning, mass education’s goal had a more political than job-preparatory function. The goal was to create a unified American ideology which could be inculcated within the new masses of immigrants — many of whom were Catholic — from countries like Germany and Ireland. It was a way of preserving the American political system and creating a new, synthetic cultural uniformity which would have otherwise been impossible to maintain.

At the time, the type of ‘blank slate’ thinking in regards to education characteristic of philosophers like Rousseau had not really taken hold yet. The notion that intelligence and ability were highly heritable was taken as a given. It became even more established in elite circles when Darwin’s work exploded in popularity throughout the Western world.

 

While the early educators like Horace Mann were optimistic (to say the least) about the leveling power of education, they were not confused by the belief that all people everywhere were of equal ability.

The necessity of general intelligence,–that is, of education, (for I use the terms as substantially synonymous; because general intelligence can never exist without general education, and general education will be sure to produce general intelligence,)–the necessity of general intelligence, under a republican form of government, like most other very important truths, has become a very trite one. It is so trite, indeed, as to have lost much of its force by its familiarity. Almost all the champions of education seize upon this argument, first of all; because it is so simple as to be understood by the ignorant, and so strong as to convince the skeptical. Nothing would be easier than to follow in the train of so many writers, and to demonstrate, by logic, by history, and by the nature of the case, that a republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be, on a small one;–the despotism of a few succeeded by universal anarchy, and anarchy by despotism, with no change but from bad to worse. Want of space and time alike forbid me to attempt any full development of the merits of this theme; but yet, in the closing one of a series of reports, partaking somewhat of the nature of a summary of former arguments, an omission of this topic would suggest to the comprehensive mind the idea of incompleteness.

That the affairs of a great nation or state are exceedingly complicated and momentous, no one will dispute. Nor will it be questioned that the degree of intelligence that superintends, should be proportioned to the magnitude of the interests superintended. He who scoops out a wooden dish needs less skill than the maker of a steam-engine or a telescope. The dealer in small wares requires less knowledge than the merchant who exports and imports to and from all quarters of the globe. An ambassador cannot execute his functions with the stock of attainments or of talents sufficient for a parish clerk. Indeed, it is clear, that the want of adequate intelligence,–of intelligence commensurate with the nature of the duties to be performed,–will bring ruin or disaster upon any department. A merchant loses his intelligence, and he becomes a bankrupt. A lawyer loses his intelligence, and he forfeits all the interests of his clients. Intelligence abandons a physician, and his patients die, with more than the pains of natural dissolution. Should judges upon the bench be bereft of this guide, what havoc would be made of the property and the innocence of men! Let this counsellor be taken from executive officers, and the penalties due to the wicked would be visited upon the righteous, while the rewards and immunities of the righteous would be bestowed upon the guilty. And so, should intelligence desert the halls of legislation, weakness, rashness, contradiction, and error would glare out from every page of the statute book. Now, as a republican government represents almost all interests, whether social, civil or military, the necessity of a degree of intelligence adequate to the due administration of them all, is so self-evident, that a bare statement is the best argument.

But in the possession of this attribute of intelligence, elective legislators will never far surpass their electors. By a natural law, like that which regulates the equilibrium of fluids, elector and elected, appointer and appointee, tend to the same level. It is not more certain that a wise and enlightened constituency will refuse to invest a reckless and profligate man with office, or discard him if accidentally chosen, than it is that a foolish or immoral constituency will discard or eject a wise man. This law of assimilation, between the choosers and the chosen, results, not only from the fact that the voter originally selects his representative according to the affinities of good or of ill, of wisdom or of folly, which exist between them; but if the legislator enacts or favors a law which is too wise for the constituent to understand, or too just for him to approve, the next election will set him aside as certainly as if he had made open merchandise of the dearest interests of the people, by perjury and for a bribe. And if the infinitely Just and Good, in giving laws to the Jews, recognized the “hardness of their hearts,” how much more will an earthly ruler recognize the baseness or wickedness of the people, when his heart is as hard as theirs! In a republican government, legislators are a mirror reflecting the moral countenance of their constituents. And hence it is, that the establishment of a republican government, without well-appointed and efficient means for the universal education of the people, is the most rash and fool-hardy experiment ever tried by man. Its fatal results may not be immediately developed,–they may not follow as the thunder follows the lightning,–for time is an element in maturing them, and the calamity is too great to be prepared in a day; but, like the slow-accumulating avalanche, they will grow more terrific by delay, and, at length, though it may be at a late hour, will overwhelm with ruin whatever lies athwart their path. It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very laborious thing to make Republicans; and woe to the republic that rests upon no better foundations than ignorance, selfishness, and passion. Such a Republic may grow in numbers and in wealth. As an avaricious man adds acres to his lands, so its rapacious government may increase its own darkness by annexing provinces and states to its ignorant domain. Its armies may be invincible, and its fleets may strike terror into nations on the opposite sides of the globe, at the same hour. Vast in its extent, and enriched with all the prodigality of nature, it may possess every capacity and opportunity of being great, and of doing good. But if such a Republic be devoid of intelligence, it will only the more closely resemble an obscene giant who has waxed strong in his youth, and grown wanton in his strength; whose brain has been developed only in the region of the appetites and passions, and not in the organs of reason and conscience; and who, therefore, is boastful of his bulk alone, and glories in the weight of his heel and in the destruction of his arm. Such a Republic, with all its noble capacities for beneficence, will rush with the speed of a whirlwind to an ignominious end; and all good men of after-times would be fain to weep over its downfall, did not their scorn and contempt at its folly and its wickedness, repress all sorrow for its fate. . . .

In all nations, hardly excepting the most rude and barbarous, the future sovereign receives some training which is supposed to fit him for the exercise of the powers and duties of his anticipated station. Where, by force of law, the government devolves upon the heir, while yet in a state of legal infancy, some regency, or other substitute, is appointed, to act in his stead, until his arrival at mature age; and, in the meantime, he is subjected to such a course of study and discipline, as will tend to prepare him, according to the political theory of the time and the place, to assume the reins of authority at the appointed age. If, in England, or in the most enlightened European monarchies, it would be a proof of restored barbarism, to permit the future sovereign to grow up without any knowledge of his duties,–and who can doubt that it would be such a proof,–then, surely, it would be not less a proof of restored, or of never-removed barbarism, amongst us, to empower any individual to use the elective franchise, without preparing him for so momentous a trust. Hence, the constitution of the United States, and of our own State, should be made a study in our Public Schools. The partition of the powers of government into the three co-ordinate branches,–legislative, judicial, and executive,–with the duties appropriately devolving upon each; the mode of electing or of appointing all officers, with the reason on which it was founded; and, especially, the duty of every citizen, in a government of laws, to appeal to the courts for redress, in all cases of alleged wrong, instead of undertaking to vindicate his own rights by his own arm; and, in a government where the people are the acknowledged sources of power, the duty of changing laws and rulers by an appeal to the ballot, and not by rebellion, should be taught to all the children until they are fully understood.

So, to make popular democracy feasible, the common people needed an education similar to that given to the sovereigns of Europe in matters of state.

LAUGH TRACK

Even by the standards set by Mann, America’s public education system has veered into various ditches that he predicted it would. Standards have declined, the teachers unions have been captured by a single political party, and the broader goal of the system has run upon the shoals of essential human inequality.

More Mann:

Such being the rule established by common consent, and such the practice, observed with fidelity under it, it will come to be universally understood, that political proselytism is no function of the school; but that all indoctrination into matters of controversy between hostile political parties is to be elsewhere sought for, and elsewhere imparted. Thus, may all the children of the Commonwealth receive instruction in the great essentials of political knowledge,–in those elementary ideas without which they will never be able to investigate more recondite and debatable questions;–thus, will the only practicable method be adopted for discovering new truths, and for discarding,–instead of perpetuating,–old errors; and thus, too, will that pernicious race of intolerant zealots, whose whole faith may be summed up in two articles,–that they, themselves, are always infallibly right, and that all dissenters are certainly wrong,–be extinguished,–extinguished, not by violence, nor by proscription, but by the more copious inflowing of the light of truth.

As even a partisan of the current educational system would admit, we’ve veered away from its original goals.

Getting back to the ostensible point of this post, education tends to badly muddle the expectations that people have for life. On the elite side of things, they believe that everyone should become a hyper-educated bureaucrat like themselves. We have vast numbers of people who believe that they are too good for unskilled labor. On the regulatory side, we have an elite which has legislated entire sectors of the economy into illegality, and then gone ahead and rewarded those markets to foreign governments with fewer persnickety restrictions.

What’s a bit remarkable about the pro-immigration argument is the tacit acknowledgment of the perverting effects of the American educational establishment. If the educational establishment is failing at achieving its political mission as well as its economic mission, we should scale back the bold experiment.

In this we can say that Horace Mann and his antecedents did well in pursuing an impossible mission.

We should also consider whether or not it’s possible to educate hundreds of millions of people to high standards of political knowledge. If it’s difficult for the contemporary American government to even educate its ambassadors to an acceptable level, then how can we expect it to achieve the broader mission established by the founders of that system?

It’s not possible to address the problems of mass unemployment, welfare, mass immigration, offshoring, and other issues without also questioning some of the fundamental assumptions underlying the American civilization. This is why it’s not going to be done on a massive scale — civilizations continue until they run into crises that they can’t surmount without changing their essential nature.

It’s possible that there might be some reform at the margins, but the source of the problem, at least in America, is at the core of the American experiment in republicanism, rather than at the margins.

Lawrence Auster understood the link between liberalism and the seemingly irrational waves of sympathy towards third world peoples which seems to overwhelm so many Europeans today.

According to historian Arnold Toynbee, civilizations grow and survive by overcoming successive challenges, and break down when they fail to meet some new challenge. With regard to mass non-European immigration and its attendant problems of multiculturalism, Islamization, and globalism, America and other Western nations face a challenge unique in history: to save ourselves from open-borders chaos and cultural destruction without becoming, in our own eyes, “racist,” “mean,” “exclusivist,” and “un‑Christian.” This is a moral and intellectual dilemma that most contemporary Westerners—if we bother thinking about it at all—find paralyzing. Unable to solve it, we have opted for a state of active or passive surrender—a condition from which we are only intermittently stirred by shocking acts of violence such as the September 11 attack on America or the jihadist slaughter of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

In fact, the moral dilemma described above is illusory. It is based on the false premise, unique to Western and especially modern Western society, that to preserve one’s own nation or culture is somehow to be unjust toward other nations and cultures. Whenever this sentiment has gained ascendancy, as under the influence of ancient Stoicism or of modern leftism, it has led men to believe that the only just social order is a world state, in which there is no Other because everyone belongs to the same society. The problem with this idea is that a world state can only exist by depriving individual nations of their right of self‑government, indeed of their existence, and by subjecting all mankind to the rule of a distant and unaccountable regime. Therefore, based on all our experience of politics and human nature, a world state could not be just either. Traditional Christianity resolved, or at least managed, this conflict between the particular and the universal by locating true universality in the City of God, while recognizing the limited but real value of distinct societies on earth.

But a moral tension that remains manageable so long as different peoples with their respective cultures are living in different societies, becomes insoluble when radically different peoples and cultures are living in the same society, especially if it is a democracy. If a democratic country has a large and culturally different immigrant minority, the native majority cannot readily announce that they are against the continuation of more immigration, because if they did so, the immigrant group, who are now the majority’s fellow citizens, would feel that the natives regard them as undesirable. As civilized, democratic people, the native majority do not want to insult the immigrant minority, or to deny their equal humanity, or to create even the slightest appearance of doing those things. So instead they—meaning we—surrender to the situation, accept continued mass immigration, and allow their country to be steadily transformed by an ongoing influx of unassimilated peoples and incompatible cultures.

Our challenge—the Toynbean challenge we must meet if we are to save our civilization—is to understand that the moral assumptions that have led us into this paralysis are false, and to break free of them. But this is extraordinarily difficult for us to do, because these assumptions, which are liberal assumptions, have over the past century become closely bound up with the Christian religion, the spiritual core of Western culture and identity. To work our way out of the present crisis, therefore, it will be necessary to criticize certain aspects of modern Christianity. This may offend some readers, particularly Christian conservatives who have come to identify Christian belief with American political virtue itself.

The problem would be lessened if people understood that Christianity is not a governing ideology, and that it is distorted when seen as such. The path and goal of Christianity is life in Christ, not the organization of society according to any particular scheme. Over the last two thousand years, Christianity has been compatible with any number of political forms, ranging from the Roman empire to medieval feudalism to modern democracy, so long as they have been reasonably benign and compatible with a Christian life. And here lies the paradox: though Christian faith is the center of the West’s historic being, it cannot by itself provide the enduring structure of Western society or of any other concrete society. As indicated by Jesus in his distinction between the things of Caesar and the things of God, religious faith must work in a proper balance with worldly concerns—among which are considerations of political power and of culture. The balance is delicate and many things can go wrong with the spiritual-secular partnership. For example, if the Christian community breaks free of the surrounding earthly society and ignores the ordinary dictates of political prudence, or if it becomes corrupted by bad ideas emanating from the society itself, such as those of modern liberalism, it can become destructive of the surrounding society and culture. It can easily spin off into utopian universalist notions, such as the open-borders ideology, that spell the death of any culture.

In the remainder of this article, we will first recount the process by which Christianity has become liberalized. Then we will look at the doctrines, particularly the “cult of man,” that define this liberalized Christianity and help engender the cultural radicalism that so threatens our society. Finally we will consider the role this liberalized Christianity has played in advancing open immigration and one-worldism, especially through its literalist reading of the Scriptures.

…

Some readers, especially those who are not religious, may wonder what all the fuss is about. Why is the cult of man a problem, they may ask. Why is it a bad thing to make humanity the ultimate focus of our religious as well as of our secular concerns? What harm does it do if we honor “man who makes himself god,” and so free ourselves from the weight of the traditional, judgmental God hanging over us? My answer is that the cult of man is harmful because it does not (as it promises to do) ennoble human beings, but degrades them. It is, in fact, a principal source of the cultural radicalism that is dragging down our whole society and making it incapable of defend itself from evil and from enemies. Three aspects of this cultural radicalism are relevant here: moral liberationism, cultural egalitarianism, and the worship of the Other.

Moral liberationism

From the traditional Christian perspective, God is our father, as well as the archetypal “father figure,” the source and structuring principle of our existence. Other and lesser “father figures” include our country, our culture, our government and laws, even the laws of nature. These are the biological, cultural, and spiritual givens of our existence. They place limits on what we can be, even as they provide us with the very world in which we can live and realize ourselves. To put man in the place of God implies a rebellion, not just against God as traditionally understood, but against all “father figures” and the structuring order of reality that they represent. If there no reality higher than ourselves, then there is nothing preventing us from releasing our lowest tendencies.

Thus the humanistic distortion of religion is only one part of the picture I am describing. The rebellious cult of man may begin with the denial of God’s supremacy, but it doesn’t end there. It ends with the denial of all things higher than human desire—law, morality, culture, nation, and even nature itself.

Cultural equality and the double standard

Another consequence of the cult of man is radical egalitarianism, particularly in the area of culture. If there is no truth higher than humanity, then there is no objective basis on which to determine the relative value of various human things. All human things—all cultures—must be of innately equal value. But if all cultures are of innately equal value, how then can we explain the persistently backward state of some cultures? At bottom, there is only one answer to that question: the backward cultures must have been artificially placed in their inferior situation by the better-off and more powerful cultures, namely our own.

Thus the denial of higher truth makes all things seem equal, which in turn requires an explanation for why things are not actually equal, which in turn leads to a belief in some all-pervading oppression to account for the actually existing inequalities—an oppression that is always blamed on the West, or America, or Christianity, or capitalism, or the white race, or white men, or the patriarchal family, or George Bush, or what have you. And the attack on the West does not end there. Since the less advanced condition of certain other peoples and cultures is our fault, we must, in order to raise them up, excuse them from normal standards while subjecting ourselves to the harshest standards. This is the leftist double standard, of which I’ve written about previously at FrontPage Magazine.

 Worship of the Other

Finally, and most dangerously, the cult of man leads us, not just to put down our own culture and sympathize inordinately with other cultures, but to worship other cultures. Again, we need to think about why this is so.

Central to Western culture, in both its Jewish-Christian and its Greco-Roman forms, is the experience of God or truth as transcendent, beyond the material, beyond man. A similar experience is central to other cultures. Man partakes of, and is perfected by, a truth whose source lies beyond himself. If we lose or reject this experience of transcendence and start to glorify human rights and human desires as our highest value (an attitude that the ancient Greeks would call hubris and that traditional Christians and Jews would call idolatry), we will still feel the need for the divine quality of “beyondness,” but, since man has now become for us the highest value, we will inevitably begin to seek that quality in human beings.

But what quality do human beings have that can stand in for God’s transcendence, his quality as beyond and wholly other? Simply this, that other human beings are other and different from us. If we combine this divinization of man (which is already harmful enough) with the liberal belief in the equal freedom of all persons, or, even worse, if we combine it with leftist notions of Western guilt and multicultural equality, then the more “Other” the others are,—that is, the more different, foreign, alien, incomprehensible, or even dangerous and evil they are—the more “transcendent” they will seem to us, and the more we will worship them. In the most extreme form of this attitude (though it is terribly common today), secular or Christian liberals laud a terrorist murderer like Yasser Arafat and cast a sacred glow around everything connected with Islam, while reviling conservative Christians as a monstrous threat, simply because Arafat and Islam are radically Other from America and therefore seem to stand beyond the suffocating confines of our radically secularized society.

To put this idea another way, as human beings we are free to deny God, but we are not free to do away with our need (because it is built into our nature) for something that is beyond us, that transcends us and provides the meaning of our existence. So, when people deny God, who is, as it were, the “vertical” transcendent, they start to look for a “horizontal” transcendent as a substitute. This horizontal transcendent is, pre-eminently, other people. Furthermore, as I said, since God is that which is most Other from ourselves, the more different other people are from us, the more they seem like God or fulfill the function of God in our psyches. Thus the worship of man devolves into the worship of other men, other cultures,other peoples, combined with a contempt for our own. This is the mystical cult of multiculturalism—the uncritical identification with the Other, whoever the Other may happen to be.

This is the reason why the leadership and higher class people in the West are so difficult to reach through appeals to reason. Progressives worship foreign people regardless of who those people are — it’s their foreignness that makes them holy and worthy of service. It’s not about these particular groups of people, but about the worship of the other. The foreigners seem like God in the minds of the progressives, so to criticize them is to blaspheme against the Godlike imprint in their minds.

Faith in the ability of rational argumentation to move minds is radically misplaced when it’s applied to the masses in a mass political system. It’s insane to think that this new wave of religious belief can be suppressed with logical appeals, because the enthusiasm is illogical and immune to rational persuasion. It would be comforting if there was a rationalistic evil conspiratorial agenda behind it, because then you’d at least be dealing with sane but evil people who might be persuaded out of their political positions.

So, it’s wrong to think that this is a rational debate problem to be resolved with charts, statistics, and rhetoric. It’s a wave of heretical madness type of problem, which requires different methods to contain.