“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are to weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are to strong.”

Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe — Immigration, Islam, and the West – p.326

Affirmative action was a foolish policy from the very beginning because,

1.) As Caldwell’s quote above implies, once affirmative action as a policy is pursued, it is nearly impossible to discontinue since special interest groups form around such a policy in order to protect it and to defend it. Such affirmative action special interests groups become roadblocks to ending affirmative action. Such an example of this is seen in the state of California which still has affirmative action programs designed to foster the hiring of non-whites even though non-whites now form a demographic majority in California.

2.) Affirmative action is a subsidy program. Whenever the government subsidizes something they get more of what they are subsidizing. In this case what they are subsidizing are people who are less qualified filling positions that would have otherwise been filled by more qualified people. A continued pursuit of such a policy leads inevitably to a culture that is less competitive with the world than it might otherwise be.

3.) Affirmative action creates and makes race pimping a profitable enterprise. Since affirmative action assumes the inequity of those receiving affirmative action a class of people arise who have it in their interest to professionally lobby in such a way that the putative inferior status of those receiving affirmative action can never be erased. Affirmative action policy creates men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who exist in order to ensure that the perception is that the recipients of affirmative action never cease in being victims that need affirmative action.

4.) Affirmative action communicates to the recipients of affirmative action that they can not compete without the scales being weighted and rigged in their direction. Affirmative action then creates a psychology in the recipient class that perpetuates the very inequity that it was created in order to remove.

5.) Affirmative action communicates to the majority population that those who receive affirmative action are indeed inferior. What else are they to believe given that the premise behind affirmative action is that the recipients of it advance not on the merits of their ability but rather because their inability doesn’t allow them to compete on a level playing field. In this case affirmative action perpetuates the perception of the inequity that it is seeking to address to the point where even if affirmative action was answering the problem of inequity nobody in the non victim class would believe it since the ongoing necessity of affirmative action continues to testify to the inferiority of those who it is extended to.

“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.

“That welfare states tend to arise only in conditions of ethnic homogeneity is a new version of a very old problem. ‘A State cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in any chance period of time,’ wrote Aristotle. ‘Most of the states which have admitted persons of another stock, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by sedition.’ What Aristotle calls sedition we, in a more relativistic age, would call dissent. Immigrants don’t have the same prejudices as natives. They have what we would call ‘fresh ways of doing things.’ That can make them valuable in a competitive society. But welfare is supposed to be a refuge from competitive modern society. It is a realm of society in which dissent, eccentricity, and doing one’s own thing are not prized — as any American who remembers the uproar in the 1980’s over ‘welfare queens’ buying vodka with their food stamps will grant…. If welfare recipients do not share the broader society’s values, then the broader society will turn against welfare.”

Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe — pg. 58-59

The remarkable thing about combining welfare with vast legal and illegal immigration is that the consequence is that the indigenous peoples end up subsidizing their own destruction. The pursuit of such policy is in reality just a version of ethnocide and culturalcide as the massive redistribution of wealth which welfare insures enriches the newcomers at the expense of the established citizenry.

Caldwell writes that “if welfare recipients do not share the broader society’s values, the the broader society will turn against welfare, but this is only true if the leadership of the broader society is willing to govern consistent with majority opinion. As it stands now what is happening is an attempt, through the current health care proposal, at the welfarification of the entire society. If that happens then society will never turn against welfare.

Recently a group of representatives from various groups considered to be historically Christian came out with a manifesto called the Manhattan Declaration. The Declaration, as such Declarations are want to do, has created a buzz in the Christian community. I have read the Manhattan Declaration (henceforth MD) and it is a document, in my estimation, that is concerned with the deterioration and the destructive pursuit of Christendom in America. The MD focuses on three specific areas of life, religious liberty, and marriage.

Having read the document, I also took the time to read Albert Mohler’s reasons for signing the document, as well as James White’s, John MacArthur’s, and R. C. Sproul Jr.’s reason for not signing the document. I even took the time to read Andrew Sandlin’s criticism of MacArthur’s reasoning. Having read all that I’m ready to have a go at the Manhattan Declaration.

I will offer some criticisms thus explaining why I could not sign the document, though I wholeheartedly agree with the necessity to defend the idea of Christ’s Lordship and authority over civil-social institutions. Further, even though I could not sign this document I would be more than happy to work hand in hand with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Communists, Muslims, Hindus, and followers of the Stay-puff Marshmallow Man as well as any and all others who would subscribe to what is being pursued in this document in a matter of co-belligerence. However, I would be telling them the whole time they must repent, confess their sins, and turn to the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved.

Criticisms

MD soon moves to this line,

A.)

We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities.

There is a great deal of presumption that is loaded into that opening pronoun. Since “We” collectivizes the Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical into one big pot one begins to wonder if the different members of the “We” have put aside their historic differences on what makes a Christian a Christian. The Drafting committee of the MD might have made the manifesto easier to sign for those of us who want to uphold Christendom if they had instead said, We, as those who are the inheritors and now defenders of a Christian Ethic, have gathered … As it stands the document assumes far to much common ground that doesn’t really exist between Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical distinct faith communities.

B.) MD later compliments Christians by noting that,

And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement.

It should be noted that there were likewise many Christian women who stood against the woman’s suffrage movement. They stood against the woman’s suffrage movement because they understood that such a position was not in keeping with historic Christendom. The reader can access this link for one such impassioned and well reasoned trope.

http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/susan/suffrage.html

It is passing strange that a document that is a defense in favor of traditional Christian ethics has in it a reference to the glories of woman’s suffrage, for the accomplishment of woman’s suffrage was a great success in the early assault on Christian civilization. Susan Fenimore Cooper, in the link previously cited nailed the problem exactly when she wrote,

“An adventurous party among us, weary of the old paths, is now eagerly proclaiming theories and doctrines entirely novel on this important subject. The Emancipation of Women is the name chosen by its advocates for this movement. They reject the idea of all subordination, even in the mildest form, with utter scorn. They claim for woman absolute social and political equality with man. And they seek to secure these points by conferring on the whole sex the right of the elective franchise, female suffrage being the first step in the unwieldy revolutions they aim at bringing about. These views are no longer confined to a small sect. They challenge our attention at every turn. We meet them in society; we read them in the public prints; we hear of them in grave legislative assemblies, in the Congress of the Republic, in the Imperial Parliament of Great Britain. The time has come when it is necessary that all sensible and conscientious men and women should make up their minds clearly on a subject bearing upon the future condition of the entire race.”

Cooper understood, as seen in the emboldened portion above, that Female suffrage that the draft committee of the MD so boast in was but the beginning salvo in the attempt to dismantle Christendom of which the MD laments.

Consistent with this one of the things I find disturbing about the MD is the number of women signatories. This alone shows the egalitarian emphasis, which has led to the very issues the document seems to decry (and which some of the signatories who are on the Biblical Council for Manhood and Womanhood ought to find troubling).

I would go so far as to say that the egalitarian emphasis that bleeds through this document eviscerates everything that the MD is trying to accomplish. It is a poison pill.

C.) “We have compassion for those (homosexuals) so disposed (to their illicit vices); we respect them as human beings possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity.”

There is a great deal of talk in the MD about the inherent dignity of humans and most of it is couched in language that ascribes that inherent dignity to being image bearers of God. But there are a few places where that isn’t articulated and this is one of them. It should be clearly said that the only being who has inherent dignity is God. Any dignity that humans have is derivative dignity that comes from being it being assigned to them by God. (Hat Tip R. C. Sproul Sr.)

D.) The Section on Religious liberty

This section seems to assume that a society and culture can be successfully built upon a idea of religious liberty that allows all religions to be equally valued and allowed. Let it be observed that no culture has ever been successfully built or maintained where all religions are equally predominate and where no one religion has preeminence. Such a belief would result in utter societal chaos.

For a proper understanding of religious liberty I offer these two links,

https://ironink.org/index.php?blog=1&title=the_difference_between_toleration_aamp_r&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

https://ironink.org/index.php?blog=1&title=a_christocratic_nation_w_o_an_establishe&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

E.)

“There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself.

I find it odd that the drafters of the MD cited Martin Luther King as an example. Martin Luther King was no more a Christian than Mahatma Gandhi. Is it possible for someone to write from an explicitly Christian perspective who denied the fundamentals of the Christian faith?

Overall the document has some stellar points and solid reasoning. However these weaknesses, especially the first two, prohibit me from signing the document.