In the National Post, Barbara Kay wonders if conservative democracy can shore up the civilizational boundaries that liberal democracy has abandoned:
The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.
The historian Arnold Toynbee warned that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” He said they begin to disintegrate when they abandon moral law and yield to their impulses, which in turn brings about a state of passivity, a sense that there is no point in resisting incoming waves of foreigners driven by confidence and purpose.
Since Toynbee, other writers, notably James Burnham in his influential 1964 essay, “Suicide of the West: An essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism”, have picked up on the theme. In every case in which the word “suicide” features, the root cause comes down to the effects of a universalist liberal democracy over time. These observers are not trading in fear-mongering for its own sake. We must pay respectful attention to their warnings.
Liberal democracy is, broadly speaking, a political doctrine consecrated to the belief that reason, universally accessible and everywhere the same, can by itself create the conditions for enlightened progress in human affairs.
With social justice as the end and social transformation as the means, liberals are not perturbed by the erosion of Christianity, the traditional family and the cultural particularism such transformation requires. The instinct to jettison cultural babies in order to refresh our cultural bathwater is a feature, not a bug, of liberal democracy.
Conservatives, even those who don’t embrace social conservatism, view the crumbling of these building blocks of civilization with anxiety and fear. Their view is that reason alone, without spiritual ballast and deference to the traditions that created our civilization, can produce social instability and even violence. Nobody considered himself more reasonable than Vladimir Lenin. Nobody considers herself more reasonable than a minister of sport who conflates subjective gender identification with biological sex.
Conservatives’ fears are driving the nationalist/nativist counter-movement liberals view with disgust and anger. Conservatives find it difficult to get an unbiased hearing in the prevailing progressive zeitgeist. Liberals have been successful in linking nationalism with history’s most odious incarnations of racism and imperialism in the popular imagination, while ignoring the equally tragic history of internationalist movements, because Marxist utopianism casts a spell they find irresistible.
So in the matter of immigration, for example, liberals are not concerned by mass immigration from countries with different religious and cultural traditions, because they rely on the universal appeal of liberal principles to even out the initial wrinkles. Conservatives regard these different traditions as deeply entrenched and likely to be negatively transformative to our own culture. They are inclined to impose strictures that encourage integration into, along with recognition of, our own culture’s dominant status. Far from being racist, conservatives view this precaution as a hedge against the kind of inter-cultural tensions spilling over into expressed hatreds that are presently roiling Europe. But as we saw in the last election, even the mildest criticism of mass immigration is the kiss of death to a politician.
Recently, I posted a Quote of the Day from Sarah Hoyt that emphasized the persistence of culture, which is a warning to those who think unlimited immigration from other cultures won’t have negative impacts on the receiving culture:
Societies don’t work that way. Culture doesn’t work that way. In fact culture is so persistent, so stubborn, it leads people to think it’s genetic. (It’s not. A baby taken at birth to another culture will not behave as his culture of origin.) It changes, sure, through invasions and take overs, but so slowly that bits of older cultures and ideas stay embedded in the new culture. It has been noted that the communist rulers of Russia partook a good bit of the Tsarist regime, because the culture of the people was the same and that came through. (They just dialed up the atrocities and lowered the functionality because their ideology was dysfunctional. They blame their failure on Russia itself, but considering how communism does around the world, I’ll say to the extent countries survive it’s because of the underlying culture.)
A good textbook for this whole concept is Conquest and Cultures by Thomas Sowell. He makes the point that conquest is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, as in the case of the Roman conquest of Britain, the more primitive culture was improved by the imposition of Roman culture. And that’s true. And also, sometimes more barbaric but war-like cultures conquer peaceful high cultures. In many of these cases, the barbaric culture ‘absorbs’ the superior parts of the conquered culture. But we don’t want to allow the grand experiment that the democrats and liberals want to impose on America. There has never been a case of an ‘insane’ culture like liberalism going the historical distance. If, I believe, the Left succeeds in conquering America and imposing their culture on the country, it will be a very short lived victory and experiment, for more barbaric and absolutely more intelligent cultures will watch for this and then pounce, America ending up under Chinese or Jihadi domination.
Comment by Paul Clayton — November 30, 2019 @ 15:34
I was about to say I’d read that Thomas Sowell book when I realized I was thinking of Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. You can understand why the title seemed familiar…
The difference between the current Liberal “invasion” from historic cultural invasions is that today’s draws from so many different cultures (although in certain areas, that’s not as much the case … the US/Mexican border areas for example). Canada is taking in proportionally greater numbers compared to the existing population, but they’re not all from one foreign culture. Instead, we’re getting the old monocultural ghetto problem writ very large indeed. I’m actually not anti-immigration myself, but I do find it disturbing that Canadian Liberals actively encourage these expanded, almost self-sufficient single-culture enclaves and appear to think they’re always and in all circumstances a “good thing”. While it may make it easier for urban hipsters to find authentic cuisine from all these different cultures, it’s being done in such numbers that there’s no chance of peaceful assimilation without some significant cultural conflicts.
Comment by Nicholas — November 30, 2019 @ 18:29