Occidents Don't Just Happen

It's true. Nor do Orients. Or Middle Easts. Or Upper East Sides. In each case, the culture in question developed around a distinct set of values that forms its deep psychospiritual structure.

In America we have a culture war between those who value our deep structure and those who merely wish to take advantage of its unique values in order to undermine our system from the foundation up. For some reason we call these hungry tenuremites "liberal," when their value system is illiberal to the core. For example, this accounts for the all-lieance all the time between the holy warriors Islam and unholy pacifists of the left:

"Hence it wasn't surprising for viewers around the world to see the Islamist militants in Europe taking to the streets alongside the 'bourgeois Neo-Marxists' to protest the governments that supported the War on Terror.... The jihadi manipulation of the bourgeois-Neo-Marxist 'struggle' has played a central role in the so-called 'mass demonstrations' in the West since 2002, and the demonstrations themselves are an important component of the War of Ideas against democracy. On campuses, both in North America and Western Europe, the jihadi-antiwar axis has planted deep roots, and thanks to the skills of university-based anarchist groups, the jihadists have found a cover they can hide under, instead of simply becoming members of the typical Wahabi-contolled Muslim Student Unions."

In short, the Islamists are parasitic on the left, which in turn is parasitic on the liberal West. Neither ideology is rooted in the Sovereign Good, because neither is planted in reality to begin with. Rather, in each case, they are more or less "distant" from the fulsomeness of reality, so that they are ideologies (or emotiologies) of "deprivation" (and eventually depravation) condemned to a Folsomprisonness of unreality.

In other words, the Amer-I-Canism of our founders is based upon the liberation of the innate creativity of the individual, who in turn mirrors the creativity of the Cosmic Center. But leftism appeals to envy, which is simply the pseudo-creative "activity of nothing." It is the cosmic Nothing wishing to fill its existential naughtiness by inappropriating the creative something of others. This is why, if wishes were hearses, leftists would ride in them. Which they do, really, for leftism is ultimately a death cult, in that you cannot serve two mysteresses, and there are only two on the men, you.

Or take this fine example today from Dr. Sanity. The Diagnosista' writes that "For the last 100 years, Islam has abandoned any of the precepts that may have once made it a vibrant and positive force in the world. Today's Muslim leaders for the most part, have hitched their religious wagons to a variant of Marxist ideology, infused by a powerful religious fanatacism and funded by oil." Whatever else it is, Islam is "a religion that justifies and glorifies the abuse and death of children; a religion that enslaves, oppresses and humiliates women; and a religion that justifies slaughter and martyrdom as a way of life is not even in the same moral universe as any of the other major religions on this planet."

LGF links to a piece by Melanie Phillips, in which she explicates the actual Muslim values which under-lie the recent bogus offer of "peace":

"The Islamic world -- or part of it -- has waged war on the Christian (and Jewish) western world. The Christian world is merely responding in self-defence. It is the Islamic world which says it wants to conquer the Christian. The Christian world does not say it wants to conquer Islam, merely that Islam should stop trying to conquer it. Yet the Islamic world pretends that the Christian world is engaged in an act of exterminatory aggression against it.

"That lie is the motor of the jihad. That lie is fundamental to the absence of peace between the religions. Yet this letter fails totally to acknowledge this seminal fact. It says: The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians. Very true; but for this piety to be any more than a meaningless truism, the Islamic world has to end its aggression. The letter makes no acknowledgement of this. All the emphasis is on the Christian world altering its behaviour. So its inescapable implication is that for peace to occur, the Christian world must abandon its own self-defence. In other words, there can be no peace without the Christian world surrendering to Islam."

Now, it is not actually possible to make any nontrivial statement about reality without an implicit or explicit metaphysical framework, usually a naive or bad one. The American revolution was the first explicitly metaphysical political revolution. In other words, it wasn’t merely rooted in blood, vengeance, land or treasure, but in clearly articulated ideas and ideals that continue to inspire spiritually normal people all around the world. The reason why America has been so successful and productive is because it comes closest to embodying the fullness of metaphysical truth in a political system.

For our founding document is rooted in the affirmation of the self-evident (because metaphysical) Truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are Life,Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. As reader Michael B. noted, “The reference to the Creator is, and was intended to be, a metaphysical basis for the argument made in the Declaration against the English Crown. Deny the metaphysics, and the charges against King George III become baseless.”

Precisely. The metaphysics of the English Crown rested on the divine right of kings -- a bad, blood-based metaphysic that was taken for gruntbrains then as now, because, as Dennis Prager emphasizes, most human beings have always valued blood over morality. In this regard, nazi metaphysics are more or less embraced by most people who are not specifically infused with and shaped by the alternate view -- that blood is not only unimportant, but meaningless. One is not an American based upon blood, but based upon whether one assents to a common set of immaterial ideals. This was an entirely new psycho-spiritual, evolutionary development in the world, one that the world continues to resist, most conspicuously among the blood-worshipping savages we are fighting in the Arab Muslim world.

For example, the Palestinian objection to Israel is not “physical.” Rather, it is purely metaphysical, rooted in their nazi-like metaphysic that objects to a single drop of Jewish blood “polluting” their blighted nobohood. Consider how a normal human being would react to the Jewish presence in the Middle East: “Of course we want the Jews here! They bring knowledge, education, technology, wealth, prosperity, liberal ideals, jobs, human rights, democracy, comedy, decent delicatessens. Who wouldn’t want them?”

Indeed, who wouldn’t want them? Someone who -- like the vast majority of human beings in the past -- values blood and tribe above all else. This is the all-consuming metaphysical and existential problem for the Arab Muslim world. They are obsessed with it. It is their metaphysical dream (or nightmare). All else can wait, but the liquidation of Israel is of the utmost urgency.

Of course, we have our own watered-down versions of blood-based metaphysics in the forms of totalerantarian multiculturalism, diversity, and racial quotas. One of the primary reasons why contemporary liberalism is so illiberal is that it has abandoned the liberal precepts of our founding documents and is obsessed with race and blood. Although this noxious matavistic flies under the banner of “multiculturalism,” it is not really about culture but about blood. It is about valuing someone not because of the content of their character but the color of the container -- because of their membership in a privileged racial group.

In America’s past, Jews and Asians were prevented from attending college because of one kind of racism. Now they are prevented from doing so by another kind of racism that goes under the misleading rubric of “diversity.” I personally wouldn’t care if every single student in the UC system were Asian American. Being that I am a liberal, I would not conclude that this had something to do with race. Rather, I would assume that it had something to do with Asian values. If I were a member of a culture that did not produce such academic excellence, I would want to find out what it is about Asian values that makes them excel, and then imitate them. But this is as foreign to the liberal mind as it is to the Palestinian mind to imitate Jews, as opposed to butchering and maiming them.

One way to eliminate the painful distance between oneself and another is to attack what one feels the other possesses. This primordial impulse, rooted in envy, is as old as the human race. Genesis, preternaturally astute as ever in its metaphysics and anthropology, places it in Chapter Four, in Cain’s murder of Abel. It is the first human crime and the recurring human crime, for Genesis doesn’t just tell us what happened “once upin a timeless” but what happens every time. (The Fall, of course, was worse than a crime -- it was a blunder.)

So, my fellow Raccoons, I have a dream -- a metaphysical dream which barbarians in all times and in all places are asleep to. My dream is that there is a world of ought that is more real than the world of is. My dream is that a belief is not true, nor an act virtuous, if it fails to conform to this transcendent clueprint. My dream is that our God is a God of liberty, and that the same God that gave us life gave us liberty -- the liberty to freely discover truth, love and beauty, and to align ourselves with these transcendent realities. My dream is that there are only two races, the decent and the indecent. (Oh, wait... that last one was Dennis Prager's dream of Victor Frankl's quintessentially Jewish dream.)

Tell me your metaphysical dream, and I will tell you where your eyes are fixed and where your treasure lies or your lies are treasured, and whether your life and mind are ascending or descending on the inwardly mobile ladder of darwhiggian evolution and salvolutionary deveilupmount. For as it pertains to mankind's collective vertical ascent, there's no such thing as an unfree launch.

The most important goal for one to arrive at is this imaginative picture of what is otherwise a brute empirical fact.... How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct?... Without the metaphysical dream it is impossible to think of men living together harmoniously over an extent of time.... The dream carries with it an evaluation, which is the bond of spiritual community.... It must be apparent that logic depends upon the dream, not the dream upon it. --Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Coonsequences