Decline of the West – Page 9 – Maverick Philosopher

Madeleine Albright Dead at 84

I will now have to leave off calling her 'Madeleine None-Too-Bright,' at least for a time. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, et cetera. This Revolver piece covers the essentials.

Unfortunately, Madeleine Albright’s long career represents all the failures and mistakes that, in just thirty years, have taken America from its superpower apex to the brink of imperial collapse.

Be it in Eastern Europe or the Middle East or East Asia, a United States that followed the exact opposite of Albright’s foreign policy vision would almost certainly be a richer, happier, and less divided nation than the fading colossus America has become in 2022.

Albright embraced America’s disastrous pattern of global interventionism

As Christopher Caldwell wrote of Albright back in 2003, “For her, every conflict is a replay of the Munich conference of 1938, with a camp of the ‘farsighted’ on one hand and a bunch of ‘appeasers’ on the other.” The best way to be farsighted, it turns out, was to be aggressive in using U.S. force abroad. Albright enjoyed referring to America as “the indispensable nation,” reflecting an assumption that every dispute and every crisis the world over needed, and would benefit from, U.S. meddling and oversight.

According to her own 2003 memoir, during her days as Secretary of State Albright feuded with then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, arguing in favor of more frequent and aggressive use of American military power abroad: “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”

For more than two decades, Albright’s toxic enthusiasm for military force has been the closest thing there is to conventional wisdom in Washington. It is not only the attitude that gave us the Iraq War and 20 years in Afghanistan, but also missile strikes in Syria, undeclared drone war in Yemen, and useless regime change in Libya.

But what really angered me about Albright was her talk of 'fascism' in connection with Donald J. Trump. She was a European who didn't know what fascism is:

Perhaps it makes total sense that such a feminized, passive-aggressive foreign policy tool was instituted by a female “trailblazer” with the childish view of international relations as a bunch of schoolchildren playing in the schoolyard with the United States as the schoolmarm spanking the “schoolyard bullies.”

Albright was a neurotic who saw “fascism” lurking everywhere, in need of aggressive confrontation

Ever since Donald Trump descended the escalator in 2015, America’s most powerful media and tech outlets have been shrieking about the danger of “fascism” in America, and have used this phantom fascism to justify ever-more-restrictive crackdowns on free speech and freedom of association. And Albright, for her part, was proud to lead the chorus in yelping about a fascist danger lurking everywhere, at home and abroad.

For Albright, fascism was indeed lurking everywhere, and the leaders of enemy states were nascent Hitlers in waiting. Fear of lurking fascism drove Albright’s desire to intervene in Kosovo and to contain Saddam Hussein. More recently, it motivated her attacks on domestic political foes. In 2019, in the twilight of her life, Albright published “Fascism: A Warning”, where she argues that fascism “now presents a more virulent threat to international peace and justice than at any time since the end of World War II.” Naturally it’s all Donald Trump’s fault:

“I am drawn again to my conclusion that a Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have. Throughout my adult life, I have felt that America could be counted on to put obstacles in the way of any such leader, party, or movement. I never thought that, at age eighty, I would begin to have doubts.

The shadow looming over these pages is, of course, that of Donald Trump. … Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history. On too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself. If transplanted to a country with fewer democratic safeguards, he would audition for dictator, because that is where his instincts lead. This frightening fact has consequences. The herd mentality is powerful in international affairs. Leaders around the globe observe, learn from, and mimic one another. They see where their peers are heading, what they can get away with, and how they can augment and perpetuate their power. They walk in one another’s footsteps, as Hitler did with Mussolini—and today the herd is moving in a Fascist direction.

Of course, a lack of concern “with the rights of others” and a willingness “to use violence and whatever other means to achieve its goals” would describe both the foreign and domestic policy of the Globalist American Empire. But for Albright, just like the rest of the D.C. elite class, the “fascist” danger was always among her foes, who needed to be crushed.

Albright is a leading example of how the diversity agenda quashes reasoned thought.

Moral Progress in the West and its Benchmarks

A London correspondent writes,

A question for you: is there a set of verifiable practices that would act as a benchmark for the Western Enlightenment? I can think of (i) widespread (but not universal) respect for science (ii) separation of church and state (iii) end of judicial torture (iv) abolition of slavery, etc.

1) I will assume that moral progress, both individually and collectively, is possible, both in moral theory and in moral practice. This is not obvious inasmuch as one might insist that while there has been moral change, there has been no moral progress. Progress, by definition, is change for the better, and a moral/cultural relativist will claim that there is no better or worse with respect moral beliefs and practices.

2) If moral progress is possible, is it also actual? I would say so. Holding as I do that slavery is a grave moral evil, I also hold that we in the West have made progress in this regard. The same goes for penal practices. We in the West no longer punish in the barbaric ways still employed in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Example are easily multiplied.

3) Is overall moral progress consistent with a certain amount of moral regress? I would like to say so. Mass murder and mass enslavement in Germany 1933-1945 are recognized in the West for the moral abominations they were. The Germans have come to their moral senses. But what about the situation in the East under communism, in particular the communism practiced in China as we speak? I am thinking of the forced labor in China's Xinjiang region.

4) We cannot overlook the moral degeneration of the West, which suggests that while we made progress in the West, it is now being undone. The Biden administration, for example, is the most lawless in American history; as a matter of policy it aids and abets criminality and then lies about what it is doing.

5) As for the benchmarks of progress, the ones listed by my correspondent are essential. I would also add the following: religious liberty, limited government, the rule of law, equality of all citizens before the law, due process, universal suffrage, open inquiry and academic freedom, free markets, and the right to free speech and freedom of assembly without fear of reprisal.

Is America Heading for a Systems Collapse?

It would appear so. An historian marshals the evidence.

More Malcolm on Mass Formation

Here at Motus Mentis, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack. Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below. More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness essay, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that

. . . he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism. Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse.

I assumed that he would accept my mild criticism and he has (emphasis added):

Alas, in such times as these – in the growing heat of a simmering civil war – for an observer to comment on social tectonics from such a remote altitude makes him seem almost blithely unconcerned with the great battle shaping up on the plain far below. As a result, commenters and correspondents have taken me to task for being too even-handed in my description of the phenomenon; for making it seem as if the craziness here in 2022 is symmetrically distributed between both factions in our current social and political conflict. Our old friend Bill Vallicella was among them; you can read his post, and my response (from which some of this post is adapted), here.

I think that’s a fair critique, and in my article I should have made it clear that right now, when it comes to the psychological manipulation of public narratives in order to focus an anxious and atomized public’s attention on objects of fear and loathing, there is no equivalence at all between the two great factions. “Mass formation” in today’s America is overwhelmingly a “Blue”, not a “Red”, phenomenon.

Readers of American Greatness, and of this blog, will need little convincing on this score, but a few points are worth mentioning:

First of all, it is a tremendous advantage in the manipulation of mass opinion to control the flow of information, and for many years now the American Left have controlled mass media, social media, internet-search technology, and education to the point of near-total information dominance.

Second, the artificiality of the public narrative blaring from the towering minarets of our institutions is shown by its transience: as soon as one story collapses (remember “Russian collusion”, and “hands up, don’t shoot”?) another takes its place (think of Jussie Smollett, or “two weeks to flatten the curve”). Likewise, the extent to which these narratives are in fact calculated propaganda offensives is given away by the aggressive censorship of dissenting views. (Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, the old saying goes – “Truth is great, and will prevail” – but to make falsehood prevail requires some assistance.)

Third, that the dominance of the Left’s message in America today relies upon a widespread psychological vulnerability is further demonstrated by the extent to which it has managed to override both tradition and common sense in getting large numbers of people to deny what, until now, have been understood by everyone everywhere to be objectively existing features and categories of the natural world. To participate in polite society today – or, to put that more accurately, to be able to keep your job, get a college degree, or avoid being deplatformed from most media – we are expected to go along with things that most people know in their hearts are simply not so: that sex and race are purely social constructs; that men can become pregnant and bear children; that biology and heritability have nothing to do with human traits, and with their statistical distribution in populations; that cultures and peoples can be mixed and jumbled together at random without affecting the cohesion and stability of formerly homogeneous societies; that “equality” means that people cannot vary in talents, abilities, and aptitudes; that the greatest threat to American society is “white supremacy”; that everything in the modern Western world, from mathematics to nuclear families to pumpkin-spice lattes, is racist; that intelligence is a meaningless and unquantifiable concept; that when different identity groups perform differently on qualifying tests for education and employment, those tests should simply be discarded; that for nations to control their borders is inherently immoral; that the interests of criminals trump those of law-abiding citizens; that parents should have no say in how their children are educated; that members of various, designated groups are not to be considered responsible agents; that the way to deal with rising crime is to stop arresting people; that the 2020 election was squeaky-clean; that the January 6th protest was an assault on a par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (while the three-day siege of the White House by BLM and Antifa, in which hunrdeds of officers were injured, and the First Family had to be evacuated, was not); that the protests of that summer were “mostly peaceful”; and no end of other obvious falsehoods and absurdities.

Above all, what marks the current mental state of the American Left as psychologically abnormal is its suicidal self-abnegation. I can think of no other example in all of history of a coherent, prosperous and homogeneous society, with a robust civic culture and a proud historical mythos, suddenly deciding en masse to reject and denounce its heritage, declare its cherished cultural traditions shameful and immoral, fling open its borders to engage in deliberate ethnic, religious, and cultural dilution, and cheer on the accelerating displacement of its majority population and the gradual decomposition of cohesion and civil order. This all seems, when compared to the normal behavior of human societies, completely insane.

Considering all this, then, I hope it is clear that, although the phenomenon now being called “mass formation” has been observed in all ages and cultures, and must be considered in some sense a “universal” feature of our nature, its current manifestation in the United States is anything but symmetrical, and is overwhelmingly an affliction of the Left — and that those of us who wish to have any chance of preserving the great American experiment must, in this hour of crisis, fight it with everything we’ve got.

We Must Work with Atheists to Defeat the Left

America is is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide. The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost. It is falling asleep under the soporific of 'wokeism,' the latest and most virulent form of the leftist virus. To assure victory we theists need to work with atheist conservatives. I agree with the following characterization of conservatism, apparently written by Jillian Becker, at The Atheist Conservative:

B. On Conservatism

1. Individual freedom is the necessary condition for prosperity, innovation, and adaptation, which together ensure survival.

2. A culture constituted for individual freedom is superior to all others.

3. Only the Conservative policies of the post-Enlightenment Western world are formulated to protect individual freedom.

4. Individual freedom under the rule of non-discriminatory law, a free market economy, the limiting of government power by democratic controls and constitutional checks and balances, and strong national defense are core Conservative policies.

A conservatism along these lines navigates a sane middle path between leftism and reactionary, throne-and-altar conservatism.

I am a theist. But as I have repeatedly maintained over the years, atheism is a reasonable position. The reasonable is not the same as the true. The reasonable is sometimes false, and the true is sometimes unreasonable. To ascertain the truth is not easy. Reason is a weak reed indeed. And despite my use of 'ascertain,' if we attain the truth we are rarely if ever certain that we have when the truths pertain to substantive matters. Humility is not just a moral virtue; it is an epistemic one as well.

Nowadays there is talk of a 'postliberal' conservatism. We shall have to take a look at that. I suspect that it is a form of reaction insusceptible of resurrection, as a matter of fact, and even if patient of resuscitation, not worthy of it. It is a Lazarus that won't be raised and ought not be.

I have heard it said that a conservatism infused with classical liberalism is 'unstable' and will inevitably transmogrify into the madness of 'wokeism.' But that is a slippery slope argument, and they are all of them invalid.

The Erasure of History at the University of Leicester

Another incident in the suicide of the West. And in England of all places. The battle appears to be lost in the mother country and in the rest of the Anglosphere with the exception of the United States of America. Here is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide.

Is the meaning of 'last stand' such that the defenders, fighting against overwhelming odds, always lose? That is what 'last' implies. Custer's last stand was the end of Custer. He stood no more. Or does the meaning of the phrase allow for the defenders to sometimes prevail? Onkel Ludwig taught us that meaning is use. I take it to be an empirically verifiable lexical point that the phrase is used in both ways. Sometimes linguistic prescriptivists such as your humble correspondent have to acquiesce in the ways of a wayward world. Kicking against the pricks is somethimges pointless. I am tempted to dilate upon 'kicking against the pricks,' but I will resist temptation.

Jillian Becker: A Terrorism Archive Lost:

If one of the primary purposes of a university is to protect and hand on intellectual heritage, commitment to archive preservation is fundamental to that purpose. Perhaps the reason why the University of Leicester did not protect the IST archive was because it is now committed to erasing the past. An indication of this is in reports that the administration wants to “decolonize” the teaching of English literature by eliminating medieval studies (so Chaucer, inter alia, is to be removed from the curriculum), and “focus on ethnicity, sexuality and diversity,”

Ceasing to teach something does not necessarily entail the destruction of materials used for teaching it. Is it likely that a university entrusted with documents of national and international importance would deliberately discard them because they are no longer useful to its teaching? Would it choose to waste the fruits of long, hard, even dangerous effort exerted against a malign force threatening the Western world? Sadly, I suspect it would if it came to believe that the Western world was systemically at fault and needed to be transformed. But if therefore it would no longer protect documents of public importance, should it still be funded with public money?

The loss of an archive, whether by negligence or decision, is a calamity. To lose it by negligence is barbarously callous. To discard it deliberately is an act of intellectual vandalism, the equivalent of book-burning. If, in either case, a university is responsible, the disgrace must leave a permanent stain on its reputation.

Jillian Becker self portrait (early 1970s)

Other photographs of Jillian Becker

Diversity Worth Having

Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal, if not greater, claim on our respect.

Example. ONE language only in the public sphere makes possible MANY voices to be heard and understood by all. To communicate our differences we need a common language.

Talking with one another is preferable to shooting at each other. Polyglot 'cultures' are more conducive to shooting than to talking.

I predict more shooting and less talking as the nation declines 'thanks' to the destructive leftists who have infiltrated the once-respectable Democrat Party.

Gun and ammo are flying off the shelves, even in the toniest enclaves of the bien-pensant:

In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.

Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.

“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear, which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”

You know things are getting bad when the super-rich who can easily afford the best in private security are buying firearms.

Can it Happen Here?

It is happening here. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we haven't been for a long time. Most Americans are now willing to give up their birthright, liberty, for a mess of pottage. Safety and security are their main concerns. The orchestration of fear by the powers that be is a primary tool for forcing us into political dhimmitude. The masked masses, complicit in their own cancellation, are proving easy to control.

Dreher explains in under six minutes.

While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' — while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist — plays right into the hands of the enemy.

Totalitarianism: Can It Happen in America? | PragerU

Vito Caiati responds with a little help from Winston Churchill:

Your comment on Rod Dreher in this morning’s post (“While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' — while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist — plays right into the hands of the enemy”) brought to mind Winston Churchill’s broadcast of June 22, 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. His words, those of one of the most stalwart opponents of communion of the inter-war years, are worth remembering when dealing with “conservatives” such as Dreher and his kind, who confront nothing comparable to the hard and unpleasant political choice of the British Prime Minister:

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no words that I've spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. . . .

We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land; we shall fight him by sea; we shall fight him in the air, until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its people from his yoke.

Any man or State who fights against Nazism will have our aid. Any man or State who marches with Hitler is our foe. . . .

It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and Allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end.

We have offered to the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power and which is likely to be of service to them.”

We are indeed in a “war” with an implacable domestic enemy in which the tide of battle has dramatically and rapidly turned against us. What is most frustrating about Dreher is that he spends every day reporting on the assault by the Left on our culture, traditions, institutions, and freedoms, and yet he believes that we have the luxury of waiting for the coming of some pristine conservative leader, someone più raffinato e puro than Trump. While he waits, the Republic is further undone by its enemies.

Exactly right, Vito. Dreher shares the characteristic referred to in your penultimate sentence with many so-called conservatives. They are waiting for someone "more refined and pure" to come along, a 'true conservative,' in a bow tie perhaps, who speaks and writes elegant English and displays all of the social graces, a clubbable man, a man cut from the same cloth as a George F. Will, or a Bill Kristol, not a boorish, mean-tweeting alpha male from the mean streets of NYC willing and able to slice into such effete opponents as Jeb! Bush with mockery and derision. These pseudo-cons are flummoxed and distracted by Trump's style so much so that they cannot pay attention to the deeply American substance of his words and his (not merely promised, but implemented) policies, policies they themselves pay lip service to but lack the cojones to implement.

What are we to make of people like David Brooks and David French? Human behavior is multi-motivated and these two are undoubtedly complex and many-sided men with much good in them; I can't shake the idea, however, that a not inconsiderable driver of their behavior is a desire for social acceptance by the elites and invitations to the most exclusive of Beltway soirees.

French, for example, opposes abortion. A man comes along, a man much lied about and maligned, a patriotic American, who, though something of a sybarite in his personal behavior, yet accomplished much to stop the slaughter. So what does French do? He throws in with Biden and the pro-abortion gang.

If the distinction between style and substance were a stick, I would hit these pussy-cons over the head with it in a vain attempt at knocking some sense into them.

Our Unprecedented Cultural Predicament

Michael Anton says here what many of us have been saying for years, but no one that I know of has ever said it better. One question that has been exercising me of late is: How long can a nation last that erects monuments to the worthless while destroying the memorials of the worthy? Here is Anton on George Floyd:

But in terms of what we choose to elevate, nothing illustrates the perversity of present America more than the deification of George Floyd. There are now monuments to him all over the country that are treated as sacred. In a rare instance when one is defaced, the resultant outcry resembles the Athenian people’s reaction to the desecration of the Hermai. One may insist that George Floyd did not deserve to die the way he did and still see that neither did he live his life so as to make the possibility remote. He was convicted of eight crimes and charged with or detained for at least nineteen (though one must here concede the difficulty of finding reliable relevant information, since unflattering facts about Floyd’s life are effectively suppressed and are taboo to discuss). The worst of his crimes was an armed robbery in which he pointed a gun at the belly of a woman who may (or may not) have been pregnant. Floyd’s admirers insist she wasn’t, but more careful sources assert only that no one has ever definitively proved she was. Floyd was the father of five children, from whose lives he was by all accounts absent, and none of whose mothers he ever married. At the time of his death, Floyd was in the process of being arrested for yet another crime and was not cooperating with the arresting officers. A serial drug abuser, he had in his system not just methamphetamine but a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl—an extremely dangerous synthetic opioid—which may well have contributed to his death. Even if one fully accepts the trial court’s finding that the drugs played no role, one must still admit that had Floyd only gotten into the back of the police vehicle as officers instructed, he could not have died in the way prosecutors (and the media) alleged. Above all, we must confront the painful fact that Floyd did not, according to moral standards that for centuries were taken for granted, live a life worthy of admiration, much less of veneration. Yet our society treats him as a saint, if not something higher. The pagan gods were not always well-behaved, to say the least. But has any people ever chosen such an undeserving object of worship?

I urge you all to study Anton's erudite essay. Comments enabled.

The Trial of Kyle

The Rittenhouse trial was not about the 17-year-old primarily, but about one's right to defend oneself with lethal force against a lethal threat. Hence the great significance of this case. An absolutely crucial moral and legal principle is at stake. The righteous Right won this time, but the fact that the pernicious Left tried to railroad and destroy the intelligent, decent, and well-meaning kid shows that they will stop at nothing to destroy our Anglo-American system of justice, the best the world has yet to see. Leftists smeared him as a 'white supremacist' against all evidence, and against all sense: Kyle and his assailants are all white. The Democrat 'president' of the United States, Joseph Biden, joined in the smear. Rittenhouse's defensive actions, and the ensuing show trial, had nothing directly to do with race. And given all the clear video evidence, Rittenhouse should not have been criminally charged in the first place.

But again, it is not primarily about Rittenhouse. As bad as the Left's policy of personal destruction is, far worse is their policy of political destruction: the hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, aims to "fundamentally transform" (Obama), i.e., destroy, the American polity and system of government by, among many other things, opening the borders to any and all, eliding the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, giving the franchise to non-citizens, conspiring to give the vote to felons while still in prison, defunding the police, emptying the prisons, eliminating cash bail, transforming the public schools and the universities into culturally Marxist seminaries, erasing the historical record, putting up statues to criminals . . . .

The battle lines have never been clearer. Get ready.

The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast

The slow one now will later be fast

As the present now will later be past

The order is rapidly fading

And the first one now will later be last

For the times, they are a-changin'.

The Biblical Dylan in prophetic mode. The civil rights battles of the '60s were fought and won. Now a different civil rights struggle is upon us, and Dylan's words again resonate and apply.

Related: Victor Davis Hanson, Can the FBI be Salvaged?

Colander Girl

With apologies to Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl.

A 'pastafarian' idiot was allowed to wear a colander in an official DMV photo in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Bring on the hoodies, the sombreros, the ski masks . . . . Story here.

Does this have anything to do with the decline of the West? Something. It is just another little indication of the abdication of those in positions of authority. A driver's license is an important document. The authorities should not allow its being mocked by a dumbass with a piece of kitchenware on her head. But Massachusetts is lousy with liberals, so what do you expect? A liberal will tolerate anything except common sense and good judgment.

A penne for her thoughts as she strains to find something to believe in. If only she would use her noodle.

Civilization Requires Deterrence

Wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson. There is precious little of it on the Left. We are awash in the deleterious consequences. Excerpt below the fold.

Continue reading “Civilization Requires Deterrence”

Two Related Political Mistakes

1) One is the idea that we can all live together and get along despite deep differences in language, race, religion, culture, political convictions and basic values. This, the contemporary liberal position, either is or tends towards the idea that there are no limits on productive and mutually beneficial interaction among very different types of people. It either is or tends toward the conceit that a viable One can be made out of any Many. This is e pluribus unum taken to an extreme and reduced to absurdity. The Latin dictum on our coinage has a rather more moderate meaning: it means that out of many individuals and geographical regions and states one nation can arise, provided that there are deep commonalities of language, culture, religion, and values. Whose values? Well, not the values of sharia-supporting Muslims whose values are antithetical to traditional American values which are, in the main, the values of the Enlightenment. The Founders, for example, were anti-theocratic but not anti-religious.

2) The other mistake is the idea is that those who have, or believe they have, a superior worldview are justified in imposing it on others, by force if necessary, for their own good. Forced religious conversion is one form of this. A second is the ill-starred attempt at nation building which has played a central role in the current debacle in Afghanistan. You cannot impose upon people whose backward culture is downstream from an inferior religion a way of life that cuts against their grain and for which they lack the prerequisites. They would have had to have gone through something like our Enlightenment to to be able to benefit from our tutelage when it comes to setting up a viable system of governance.

3) The two mistakes may seem to pull in opposite directions. The first presupposes that we are all the same, have the same values, and want the same things. The second presupposes that some need to be 'straightened out' and taught the right way of doing things. But the mistakes share a common element, that it would be good to bring people together and that it is possible to do so. This is a failure to understand that there are irreconcilable differences. There is no way we can straighten out the Taliban and teach them how to live, especially when we are collapsing under the weight of our own decadence. 'Woke' madness and Western decadence is no cure for Islamist fanaticism any more than National Socialism is the cure for Communism.

Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline

So what can we teach the Muslim world? How to be gluttons?

Another sign of decline is the proliferation of food shows, The U. S. of Bacon being one of them. A big fat 'foody' roams the land in quest of diners and dives that put bacon into everything. As something of a trencherman back in the day, I understand the lure of the table. But I am repelled by the spiritual vacuity of those who wax ecstatic over some greasy piece of crud they have just eaten, or speak of some edible item as 'to die for.'

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man. He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do. Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.