- When I consider thy
heavens, the work of thy fingers,
- the moon and the
stars, which thou hast ordained;
- what is man, that thou
art mindful of him?
- and the son of man,
that thou visitest him?
- For thou hast made him
a little lower than the angels,
- and hast crowned him
with glory and honor.
Psalm
8
The perverse tendency among white Western elites to
welcome and embrace non-Western peoples and cultures
while refusing to defend their own people and culture
is no mere fashion, as superficial conservatives would
have it, but a natural and inevitable expression of a
new culture-a culture of nihilism-that has become the
dominant culture of the West. The organizing idea of
this nihilist culture is that abnormal and
transgressive conduct is normalized and celebrated,
while traditional moral norms and constraints are
either ignored or subjected to crippling social and
civil penalties. Hardly a day goes by when this
dominant nihilism does not announce its presence in
unmistakable terms, as seen in the following items,
selected almost at random from contemporary events
(the reader is invited to think of his own
examples):
High school pupils who physically attack
their teachers go unpunished, while a police
officer who slapped a boy he discovered having sex
with his daughter is suspended from his job.
Male and female students at elite colleges are
housed together in the same dorms, using the same
bathrooms, while religious students who don't want
to be forced to live in this libertine environment
are told they should have gone to school
elsewhere.
People who want the Unabomber executed are
described by the New York Times as "angry," while
people who consider the Unabomber a hero are
described by the Times in neutral, nonjudgmental
terms.
Hospitals are informed by federal courts that
carrying on hospital business in the English
language is "discrimination," while illegal aliens
using those hospitals are told they have a "right"
under the U.S. Constitution to be addressed in
their native languages.
Laws against disability discrimination punish
employers for failing to hire or make "reasonable
accommodations" for hostile or violent or
chronically late employees.
This systematic inversion of normal and abnormal,
of law and lawlessness, of good and evil, goes beyond
mere democratic leveling. It is a rebellion against
what philosophers call the order of existence.
Ultimately, it is a rebellion against God and the
belief that man is made in the image of God. When man
gets rid of the belief (which comes through revelation
and rational intuition) that he is made in the image
and likeness of God, man is not-as secularists
imagine-enhanced. He is degraded. If man is not made
in God's image, then he is made in his own image. If
God is not the measure of all things, then man is the
measure. But without a higher truth to raise him above
himself and his disordered impulses, man inexorably
sinks, finally becoming so contemptible that he can no
longer believe in God or in man. So he begins to
worship non-human, sub-human, anti-human behaviors and
forms.
|
The
organizing idea of this nihilist culture is
that abnormal and transgressive conduct is
normalized and celebrated, while traditional
moral norms and constraints are either
ignored or subjected to crippling social and
civil penalties.
|
The manifestations of this depravity can
be seen not only in our popular
entertainments (e.g., the Jerry
Springer Show and most prime-time
television) and "lifestyles" (e.g.,
face-piercing and vampirism), but in the
so-called high culture of post-1960s America.
Sculptures and monuments once embodied an
heroic-divine ideal going back to the ancient
Greeks. But today our typical public
sculptures portray grotesque shapes of
victimhood, human figures bedraggled and
twisted in pain, as though the universe were
one vast Auschwitz. It is an aesthetic in
which any sense of human dignity in suffering
is erased.
|
Alongside the depiction of human beings as hopeless
victims, we have now statues of monsters. In recent
years New York City has displayed in parks and squares
such "art works" as a 25-foot-long statue of an
insect, and a statue of a gigantic, hideous dog as
high as a man, with huge teeth projecting downward
like knives. These sculptures are our postmodern
equivalents of the terror-gods of the pre-Columbian
cultures. When man loses belief in God, he also loses
respect for man, and turns to non-human or anti-human
figures as symbols of the malign spiritual universe he
now inhabits.
The postmodern degradation of man and culture
begins with the modern idea of placing all human
beings, and even all of nature, on an equal plane,
free of the burden of transcendence. The essence of
this agenda has been put forth in a remarkable essay
by religion professor Steven
C. Rockefeller. Blending deep ecology with
multiculturalism, Rockefeller enunciates what is in
effect a new religion. "All life is sacred," he
writes, "[and] all life forms should be
respected as a 'thou' and not just as an 'it.' ... If,
as has been suggested, all cultures as well as all
life forms are of intrinsic value and also sacred,
then from a religious perspective all are in this
sense equal in value." [italics added].
All of this is, of course, a total inversion of
Christianity and Judaism, which tells us that God is
holy, not the world, and that human beings can become
holy by orienting themselves toward God: "Be holy, for
I the LORD your God am holy." But according to
Rockefeller's gospel, everything that exists-plants,
animals, humans, and (most of all) Third-world
cultures-is not only holy, but equally so:
If one employs this kind of religious argument in
defense of the idea of equal value, one should
recognize its full implications. It is opposed to
anthropocentrism [the idea that man is higher or
more important than animals or plants] as well as
to all egoisms of class, race, or culture. It calls
for an attitude of humility. It encourages a respect
for, and pride in, one's own particular identity only
insofar as such respect and pride grow out of
recognition of the value of the uniqueness in the
identity of all other peoples and life forms.
Furthermore, if what is sacred in humanity is life,
which is not something exclusively human, then
humanity's primary identity is not just with the human
species but with the entire biosphere that envelopes
planet Earth. 
It is no longer God above man, and God's spirit
working within man, that is divine, but mere
biological life, in respect of which man is equal with
crustacea, worms, and viruses. Instead of being humble
before God and the nobler manifestations of mankind,
we are supposed to be humble before plants and animals
and primitive cultures. Most importantly, our own
culture has no right to self-respect unless we first
have total respect for all other cultures and
life-forms. Rockefeller continues:
The call for recognition of the equal value of
different cultures is the expression of a basic and
profound universal human need for unconditional
acceptance. A feeling of such acceptance, including
affirmation of one's ethnic particularity as well as
one's universally shared potential, is an essential
part of a strong sense of identity.... The politics of
recognition may, therefore also be an expression of a
complex human need for acceptance and belonging, which
on the deepest level is a religious need.
Unconditional acceptance as a sacred right of every
person and culture [sic]. Try to imagine what
this would mean in practical terms. Of course, there's
a catch, which Rockefeller makes explicit elsewhere in
his essay. Only some cultures and life-forms (namely
white Western males) are actually obligated to extend
this unconditional acceptance to other cultures and
life forms, while those other cultures and life-forms
are only expected to receive such recognition, as is
their divine right.
|
In Steven Rockefeller's mad
epiphany, we seem to hear the final,
degenerate gasp of the Protestant spirit that
made America. In the earlier stages of this
devolution, the Protestant loses his
Christian faith, which eventually leaves him
with nothing but "niceness." Then this
"niceness"-cut off from the religious faith
that was its source and discipline, but still
in need of a "divine" sanction-spreads out
indiscriminately until it embraces the whole
universe, ultimately taking the form of
nature worship, the belief in the equality of
all cultures and life-forms, and the
totalitarian religion of "unconditional
acceptance."
|
The
essence of this agenda has been put forth in
a remarkable essay by religion professor
Steven C. Rockefeller. Blending deep ecology
with multiculturalism, Rockefeller enunciates
what is in effect a new
religion.
|
But the religion of cosmic equality, as crazy as it
is, is not the end of the process. The attempt to
eliminate all hierarchy and transcendence leads
inevitably to an inverted hierarchy, in which man,
particularly Western man, is at the bottom. The Bible
placed man near the top of a divinely ordered
universe, only a little lower than the angels. But now
the radical egalitarians tell us that man is no better
than animals, who (it is argued), also communicate and
reason, and are less destructive than humans. "And as
with animals," remarks the late literary critic Peter
Shaw, "so with primitive man and with societies less
developed than our own: both are closer to the sources
of natural wisdom, and both wreak less damage upon the
ecosystem and biosphere than does Western man." As an
extreme example of this inversion, Shaw quotes the
popular left-wing paleontologist Stephen Jay
Gould:
Evolution is a copiously branching
network, not a ladder, and I do not see how we, the
titular spokesmen for a few thousand mammalian
species, can claim superiority over three quarters
of a million species of insects who will surely
outlive us, not to mention the bacteria, who have
shown remarkable staying power for more than three
billion years.
"Here we have very nearly the ultimate demotion of
man," comments Shaw, "the inferior not only of
primitive peoples, other mammals, and the cockroach,
but even of bacteria."
But, as Shaw points out, there is just one little
problem with this belief in the superiority of
primitive cultures: It is not true. Therefore it can
only be sustained by ceaseless mental gymnastics.
Embarrassing evidence, if it can't be suppressed, must
be re-interpreted so as to make it fit within the
egalitarian paradigm. It came to light some years ago
that the ancient Mayans
-long thought of as an exemplary, peaceful
civilization-engaged in horrifying practices. Before
going to war, reported The New York Times, "the king
would puncture his penis with a stingray spine, while
his wife drew a thorn-barbed rope through her
tongue."
The Mayans waged war in order to capture
aristocrats for torture and sacrifice; the captives
would sometimes play ball games using the decapitated
heads of the losers as balls. The Times admitted that
the evidence of these practices had been available for
decades in stone reliefs and paintings, but that
scholars had explained it all away in order to keep
the Maya on a "mist-shrouded pedestal," where they
could be idealized as an austere and enlightened
people. But while the new evidence has shattered that
peaceful image, it has not ended the need to portray
nonwhite and non-Western cultures in a positive light.
Anthropologists now argue that the Mayan practice of
royal self-laceration indicates "a cooperative, sacred
relationship between the elites and the commoners." In
other words, remarks Peter Shaw, "if the evidence
shows a society's aristocrats obsessed with
self-mutilation and torture, a bit of interpretation
will help us see beneath the surface to the class
solidarity so characteristic of pre-Columbian America
and so lamentably missing from the modern world."
More recently, the human sacrifice cult of the
pre-Inca Moche
culture of Peru, memorialized in the ubiquitous image
of the Decapitator (a demonic grimacing figure holding
a severed head in one hand and a curved blade in the
other), has been interpreted by Stanford
anthropologist John Rick, not as the sacred core of
the Moche culture (which it obviously was), but as a
temporary expedient through which the Moche ruling
class solidified its political power over a
recalcitrant populace.
|
The
New York Times referred to car thieves and
police in Newark, New Jersey as two
"cultures" that were "clashing,"
|
Once the Moche elites were safely
established through the use of violence,
Professor Rick told The News Hour, they were
"no more violent than ourselves." Thus, in
the practiced manner of a contemporary
liberal academic, Rick effortlessly made it
seem that there is no essential difference
between this ancient cult of death and the
"oppressions" of modern America.
|
What anthropologists write in their academic
journals, public school teachers, judges, reporters,
and social workers are disseminating through the whole
society. When the New York Times referred to car
thieves and police in Newark, New Jersey as two
"cultures" that were "clashing," and spoke of a
deranged woman sitting on a sidewalk as having a
"culture" that was different from the "culture" of the
shoppers walking past her; when a New York City case
worker refused to investigate a Nigerian immigrant who
had been torturing his son for months, on the grounds
that such beating were part of the father's culture;
when American teachers excuse the Japanese for their
inhuman brutalities during World War II, while damning
the U.S. for the wartime relocation of
Japanese-Americans in California; when the national
media covers up an endless series of horrifying racial
murders of whites by blacks, while generating national
hysteria over a non-existent white racist plot to burn
black churches, the underlying idea is always the
same: never to allow a non-Western or nonwhite people
to be portrayed in a critical light, while portraying
whites and Western culture in the harshest light
possible.
As David Shipler, an apostle of racial correctness,
inadvertently reveals in his recent book A Country of
Strangers: Black and White in America, this systematic
denial of plain evidence by "right-thinking" whites is
achieved through a deliberate act of self-hypnosis:
This is the ideal: to search your attitudes, identify
your sterotypes, and correct for them as you go about
your daily duties. This, at its Orwellian core, is the
mindset that enables contemporary whites never to
entertain a negative conclusion about blacks, while
always making whites themselves responsible for
blacks' moral and intellectual failings. This (in
Joseph Sobran's useful coinage) is alienism: "a
prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the
dispossessed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in
the attempt to 'build a new society' by destroying the
basic institutions of the native." This is the
intellectual and spiritual environment which, combined
with racial diversification, has turned America into
the opposite of itself-into the anti-white,
anti-Christian, anti-rational, anti-American
anti-nation that is Multicultural America.
Lawrence Auster is the author of
Huddled
Cliches
published by American Immigration Control
Foundation, Monterey, Virginia.