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2006-04-01 Home Front: Culture Wars

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Posted by tipper 2006-04-01 00:00|| || Front Page|| [5 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Ptah wrote about this on his blog. In summary, Ptah said, "That was then and there. Here and now we don't do such things." I quite agree.

Posted by trailing wife 2006-04-01 11:07|| 2006-04-01 11:07|| Front Page Top

#2 There are so many mistakes in this piece. Here a just two striking ones: It strikes me as the most tortured effort at moral equivalence that I have ever seen.

Europe's Christians could not summon up the "moderation" necessary to tolerate their Jewish neighbors until after 1945, when Europe was conquered and rebuilt by the Americans.

They may not have invited them to tea and they indeed lived in separate worlds, even if they lived next door to each other, but, for the most part, I'm not aware of the accepted practice of Christians burning Jews at the stake or throwing them to lions or chopping off their heads.

But the stubborn fact remains that if the English Separatists who founded Massachusetts had not deviated from Christian theology, and set out to become a new chosen people in a new Promised Land, we would not be talking about the United States of America to begin with. Christianity drew the notion of a People of God from the Jews, upon whose trunk it proposes to graft the reborn Gentiles. But the graft did not take except where radical Protestants emulated the Jews, and set out to make a new people in a new land.

What is he talking about? This makes no historical sense. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and probably the majority of the founding fathers were from the Church of England or Episcopalians. Their ancestors didn't originally come here for religious freedom, but for OPPORTUNITY, like most American immigrants. Maybe Spengler never heard of Jamestowne or the Virginia company. They came to find wealth and fortune. I don't know how many of the founding fathers were Puritans or Shakers, I'm sure there were some. But I can't even begin to guess what tortured point he is trying to make with this nonsensical and innacurate argument.

Posted by 2b 2006-04-01 11:23|| 2006-04-01 11:23|| Front Page Top

#3 Islam does not know moderation or extremism: it only knows success or failure.

The rest of the paper is, well, Spengler---but I like this.

Posted by gromgoru 2006-04-01 12:53|| 2006-04-01 12:53|| Front Page Top

#4 you are right, grom. That's probably one of those keys that unlocks the door to understanding how they think.

Posted by 2b 2006-04-01 13:34|| 2006-04-01 13:34|| Front Page Top

#5 Spengler's thought is pretty much orthagonal to most of the discussion that goes on here. He is attacking the same problem we are attacking but from an almost purely philosophical/theological basis. Read his comments section. almost nobody there argues facts. The debate is all about whether the Islamists are more like the Calvinists or Nihilists or whether Aquinas or Kirkegaard is more applicable to this or that point of theology. I think that his columns do a good job of establishing root cause, but are almost worthless if you are interested in exploring solutions. In fact, if you were to try to engage Spengler in a discussion on his board about solutions, he would almost cetainly turn around and point out that the current clash between Islam and the West was "tragic" and that nothing could be done to avert the killing and dying.

My main criticism of Spengler is that while he understands that the US is different than the Old World cultures, he is blind to what it is that makes us so different. Rather than really exploring what it is that makes the US culturally unique, he falls back on the old platitude that the US has _no_ culture. This is exactly analogous to the American travelling out of country for the first time (and I fit this description during my first long term sojourn overseas) who fails to understand the people among whom he was now living and labels them as not human or less than human.

Spengler realizes that American culture lacks a sense of the tragic, but fails to realize that we not only lack a sense of the tragic, we _are_not_ tragic. We are not a non-culture, we are a post culture. We don't destroy our enemies, we beat them then we rebuild them. We don't ignore our minorities; we try a fix and if that doesn't work, a generation later, we try another one. If you fail in one career, you keep trying until you find one where you succeed. You screw up in undergrad, you go to night school and get your BA.

Spengler always points to the Civil War as a tragic event in American history. Yet he doesn't seem to know (or perhaps he cannot address it because it would upset his world view) that 25 years later vets of both sides were quaffing whiskey side by side at big reunions. What other culture has ever achieved that degree of reconcilliation and overcome the tragic to that degree?

Old World cultures have written and unwritten laws and rules that cannot be broken. Tragedy occurs when those rules force society into conflict from which there is no backing down. In the US, we simply change the rules. We're on the verge of a race war? No problem. We'll rewrite the laws, open up the schools, and invent affirmative action.* People are getting tired of living in crowded cities? Piece of cake. We'll build freeways, change zoning laws, even change residency laws.**

Look what's happening in France right now. There is an example of culture at it's most tragic. After months of rioting by Muslim youths, the French youths cannot accept a solution that would help to ameliorate Muslim unemployment and help prevent future unrest. There is no thought, no deliberation, and no debate. Just culture acting blindly through people arrogant enough to believe that they are beyond culture. Tragedy and irony compound.

I find it sad that Spengler understands American post-culture so poorly. But since I', an American, I never give up hope that he will figure it out. Tragedy after all is for losers. Post-cultural Americans find solutions.

* No, I'm not in favor of affirmative action. It didn't work well, and we are finding new solutions now. They'll probably be better ones.

** Pre-WWII residency laws would have left most Americans disenfranchised due to longish residency requirements. We addressed this issue quite easily at the local level. Contrast this with European efforts to make the Single European Act work. The only way a foreigner can find work in another country is if he is a corporate executive or a sex worker in the black economy. Again we see the blind hand of culture undermining good policy.

Posted by 11A5S 2006-04-01 17:39|| 2006-04-01 17:39|| Front Page Top

#6 in other words, he's a clueless idiot. :-)

Posted by 2b 2006-04-01 17:47|| 2006-04-01 17:47|| Front Page Top

#7 Point well taken 2b. I personally think that he's missing One Big Clue and has a lot of other clues. He _does_ want Western Civ to win this war. I consider him to be an ally, though not a particularly effective one.

Posted by 11A5S 2006-04-01 18:13|| 2006-04-01 18:13|| Front Page Top

#8 Something else in the mirror: projection of Western religious values onto Muslims.
http://www.sj-r.com/sections/opinion/stories/82522.asp

No educated Muslim would tell a Christian that the latter is going to heaven, unless they did so to cultivate dhimmism. We will all learn that, in time.

Posted by Listen to Dogs 2006-04-01 18:41|| 2006-04-01 18:41|| Front Page Top

#9 Thanks TW.

However, the case I made at Orrin Judd's posting of this article by Spengler is a bit more damming: Spengler wanted us to think that Islam and Christanity are the same TODAY, because Islamists do TODAY is what Christians did over 180 years ago. He HAS to go back 180 years ago, because Christianity TODAY does NOT do today what Islam does today. In doing so, he demands that we have to ignore the CHANGES that took place in Christianity, the internal debates, the schisims, the arguing, that took place over that period THAT CREATED THE CHANGE.

I came up with an illustration of what Spengler (and a lot of other people) are doing to make it a bit clear. An employer has two candidates: a 20 year old drop-out with a 10th grade education, and a 40 year old with a Master's degree and 15 years of experience. Mama wants her dear little boy to get the job, so she argues that her boy is SO much better educated today than the 40 year old WAS 35 YEARS AGO. True, but it ignores the fact that the 40 year old man is no longer 5 years old. Also, the point of the exercise was to determine who is better for the job based on education and experience: by demanding that the 40 year old be judged by the way he was 35 years ago, the mother is saying, "Ignore the experience this guy has accumulated. Ignore the learning that took place in that 35 years." Ignore, in short, that very thing that, if taken into account (NOT IGNORED), would award the job to the 40 year old.

The question whose answer spengler is trying to answer for us is "which religion is superior?" Clearly, Christianity TODAY is better than Islam TODAY because they don't kill apostates today, but he doesn't like that conclusion, so he compares Islam today with Christianity 180 years ago to show one is not superior to the other. "Ignore everything they did in the past 180 years" he asks us, "to become better than Islam." "Ignore" mama asks, "everything this man learned and did over the past 35 years to become more qualified than my drop-out son."

Same fallacy is involved when talking about America today by citing what happened before the civil war.

Posted by Ptah">Ptah 2006-04-01 21:24|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2006-04-01 21:24|| Front Page Top

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