“Diversity meant rooting out traditions that excluded people and trammeled the liberties of (immigrant) newcomers. All cultures have many such traditions. But while Europeans could easily dismantle their own prejudices, the prejudices of other ethnic groups were, quite naturally invisible to them….
Europeans who considered churches houses of stupidity, sexism, and superstition didn’t know enough about mosques or ashrams to form a judgment, and left them unmolested. They abolished the old and much mocked nationalistic school lessons about the virtues of nos ancetres les gaulois, but absorbed the new lessons about the virtues of other cultures, and the justice and nobility of exotic political causes, with a childish credulity. Immigrants could indulge certain comforting prejudices, myths, and traditions that natives would be disciplined, chastised, and ostracized, or jailed for indulging. Effectively, diversity meant taking old hierarchies and inverting them.
The European obsession w/ Third World ’causes’ was a function of Europe’s new guilt based moral order. Immigrants and their children were at liberty to express politically their wishes as a people, in a way that Europeans were not….The only nationalist claims that could be made w/o provoking accusations of nationalism, racism or xenophobia were those of foreigners….
Where it interacted w/ immigration, there was an illogic at the heart of diversity. If diversity ‘enriched’ and ‘strengthened’ nations as much as everyone claimed, why would any nation ever want its immigrants to integrate into broader society? That would be drawing down the nation’s valuable fund of diversity…. European leaders defended large-scale immigration in one breath by saying it would make their countries different (through diversity), and in the next by saying it would leave them the same (through integration).”
Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
America is trodding many of the same paths that Europe has worn down before us.
1.) We have and continue to dismantle our cultural traditions in the rush to be “fair.” However in doing so we have not realized that it is impossible to be w/o cultural traditions. So, in the rush to be culturally neutral (whatever that means) we dismantled our own traditions (marriage is for two people each coming from the opposite sex, Ten commandments posted in the public square, Creches on government lawns, etc.) we have at the same time erected traditions that are familiar to those who we were trying to be neutral towards.
2.) Like Europe we have heaped pejoratives upon the idea of Christian Church, our heroes from our history and being a Christian people. And while doing so we have, though it is hard to believe, quite w/o knowing it, embraced the ideas of being a pagan people, with anti-hero heroes who despise the Christian church. We, (and especially our “leadership”) like Europe, have had a credulity that can only be labeled as childish.
3.) Like Europe, our whole politically correct atmosphere, is one that has given to us a guilt based social order where weakness is a tool by which those who are correct are defeated through manipulation only because they also happen to be in the majority.
The West is failing because it has lost confidence in who it is and the beliefs that made it. For 30 years it has embraced self loathing as a virtue and has prized the hostile stranger and alien over the cherished family member.
Chris,
I have occasionally read the site you reference but I have been more influenced on this subject by Samuel Francis.