Even More of the Way We Are Now
For quite a long span of history America was admired and loved by the world because it was a good country for us common folks. This won’t be so much longer. The future America will resemble Brazil—with one difference: Its rulers are nuclear-armed and crazed by delusions of omnipotence.
The New York papers and magazines have been straining themselves to understand why Giuliani seems to be leading the field for the South Carolina presidential primary. They know why enlightened Northern folks adore the Mayor, but South Carolina? They have at last decided it must be that Giuliani is admired in these regions for his authoritarian tinge and demeanor. The real explanation is much simpler: South Carolina Republican leaders, like their colleagues everywhere, are principleless opportunists who hope to get on a winning team.
Why are so many Americans so afraid of silence? If we knew the answer to that, we might have a clue to the decline of our civilization.
John McCain's popularity as a Presidential candidate seems to have waned recently. Some say it is because of his support for illegal aliens. Others blame his support for Bush's warmaking. I have another explanation. The revelation has got out to the voters that McCain's middle name is Sidney. Nobody named Sidney can ever be President. It is even less likely than an honest man being nominated. In this context Sidney is even worse than Gerald, although not as bad as Adlai or Hubert Horatio.
"Our" President has launched an unconstitutional, illegal, unprovoked, preemptive war of foreign aggression on his own whim or from a conspiracy of unelected courtiers. Do you really think there is any constitutional or democratic government left? The Rubicon not only has been passed but has been wiped off the map.
Your benevolent government will spend $1 billion next year to encourage children to eat more fruits and vegetables. A medical expert complains that this will be useless or even counter-productive. It depends on what you mean by useless. Some people will make a lot of money, which is the real purpose anyway.
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And as well, Sid, such accusations constitute a common and vicious libel of all our Southern forebears.
1. Racialism didn't lead to totalitarian criminality?
2. Were it true, could it be libel? It wasn't true about Dixie, to be sure, as C. Vann Woodward's _The Strange History of Jim Crow_ and Thomas DiLorenzo's _The Real Lincoln_ prove. People like Gov. Wade Hampton (no Yankee he!) were on the road to getting ride of it. Then something happened. We were on the road to getting rid of it in the early 60's. Then something else happened.
Dr Wilson, your statement about so many Americans being so afraid of silence is quite insightful. This is a hard subject to discuss or express clearly (at least for me). Essentially, a noisy mind needs distraction from it's own incessant internal chattering, and silence forces it to pay attention to all that chattering going on inside. That's why people fear silence, because it forces them to face themselves they way they really are, internally. People who have a religious, spiritual background or upbringing have no fear of the silence because they intuitively recognise it as somehow pointing to something higher, to God, even though they may not understand this fact clearly.
A spiritual mind is a quiet mind. Turning away from God turned us away from silence, and fear of the silence keeps us away from God.
We live in a civilisation that has turned away from God and therefore has nothing but intellect (internal chattering) to guide it. Spirit is out the door, and so therefore is silence. When a mind is somehow able to organise all that internal chattering into an organised pattern of beliefs, we get ideologies, and crusades to remake the world into the image of these ideologies. Others simply distract themselves with external noise to avoid the internal noise. At least the latter group is mostly harmless most of the time. The former group has destroyed civilisation, and the latter group is too distracted to notice, or know the difference in the first place.
I know that what I've said sounds rather fruity or pop-psychological, but as you said, this issue holds a clue to the decline of our civilisation. What if Karl Marx, instead of bringing all that chattering of thoughts inside his head together into a ridiculous, though to him coherent, pattern that became an ideology, had instead just quietened down all those thoughts to begin with?
This doesn't mean that we should reject rational thought, but we shouldn't let our thoughts tell us how to view the world, we must rise above that and let spirit and a good heart leaven them, and that is impossible without God.
If this sounds condescending or preachy, I apologise, it's just hard to express all this and I dont really understand it all that well myslef.
In the interest of not piling on and moving on, I will make one last comment, and then I will happily drop the subject. I formulated a reply in my head before I had a chance to reply, but Dr. Wilson basically said what I was thinking.
I thought that conservatives were generally skeptical of "vain philosophies." That conservatives looked at the world around them and the way things are and went from there. That liberals are the ones who worry about the way things ought to be (riding the world of bias or injustice or inequality or whatever) and attempt to impose their ideas on reality. Is not one of the conservative complaints about the Enlightenment that it suffered from an excess of philosophizing? That we (and traditional culture) are now currently paying the price for that philosophizing. (I learned this partially from Dr. Fleming's The Politics of Human Nature. Since you have made suggestions about what I should read, perhaps you should read that.)
Sid, I see what you are attempting to do as quintessentially liberal in that respect. You have a philosophical bias that you are attempting to impose on reality, and you have the mindset of the fanatic. Marxist - Any private ownership leads inevitably to oppression and slavery. Feminist - The man holding open a door or paying for dinner leads to genital mutilation. Likewise Sid - Any recognition of the reality of ethnicity/race leads to Nazism. It does not have to be that way, and I dare say seldom is.
Yes "racialism" has lead to totalitarianism, although it is much more complicate than just that. But it need not inevitably.
Red, read Burke on
-- slavery and the slave trade ("Sketch of a Negro Code"),
-- Catholic Emancipation in Ireland ("Tract on the Popery Laws", "Address on the Gordon Riots", "Letter to a Peer of Ireland", ""Letter to Richard Burke on Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland", "Letter to Hercules Langrische",
-- India and Warren Hastings ("Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill", "Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debt", and selection from speeches impeaching Warren Hastings)
-- taxation and capitalism ("Thoughts and Details on Scarcity", "Speech on American Taxation", "Conciliation with the Colonies")
He wished to change things too. If Burke's a "liberal", then the word now has no meaning. Soon I'll be hearing that he's a Jacobin. And he rightly feared than a small slip would soon have an bloody end, the very point of the "Reflections". And Paine indeed said that he had "the mindset of a fanatic".
Of course Burke lived before the day of scientific racialism, and thus, not infected by that virus, he judged Africans, Catholics, Irishmen, and Indians as equals.
To Mr. Wilson (the other, doubtless younger and better-looking one): Well said, and thank you for responding to the actual article.
Sid,
I would suggest that you are making the wrong distinctions with regard to race, and I do not believe Red's characterization of race has any meaning that leads to Nazism. Neither is the state in and of itself a creation of Signore Machiavelli, but it should take reams to address what is the state and what it is not and who created it. Arguably Plato's conception of the State in Republic is more totalitarian than Machiavelli's.
It is one thing to say that ascribing positive and negative qualities to someone based on race is a form of racialism, or that denying them rights and/or personhood is a form of the same. However, to claim that race has nothing to do with a person's make up or has no contributing factor to their culture I find rather silly. I studied under Dr. Crosby and have a healthy appreciation for Personalism, even as a Bonaventurian, though I have some disagreements. Yet I fail to see how identifying race as such does such violence to the human person. It certainly is not everything, yet neither is it meaningless.
Now, more importantly, to actually react to Dr. Wilson's article, I should say it is odd that Giuliani, or Romney should be as popular as they are, since most Americans are frustrated over the Iraq war, most are tired of it and want it to go away, yet those who supported it all along, and even support attacks against Iran such as those named supra, are still at the top of the polls. I think the real reason is the fact that 50 years of television has rendered the average American incapable of cognitive thought beyond what is for dinner and what in the world is going to happen now that the Sopranos is over? They fit into a mold, Republican good, Democrat bad, or vice versa, or a healthy disgust for the whole system and refuse to vote. No one seems to gauge that a third party may in fact succeed if it was begun at a grass roots level, with a clear and obvious platform of limited government and well divided property, protections for American businesses and workers. First elections could be held locally in several states, before energy and money was to be burned off on a national campaign slated for failure before it is off the ground. Then with seats in local legislatures, state legislatures, and some congressional seats, then the party has recognizability beyond a tv ad, especially if candidates are appearing at the local level and not depending on expensive TV ads which will only be "Teeboed" (I have no idea how that is spelled, I don't own a tv and have never had the need for such a device!) Then it might be possible to put forth a presidential candidate, after working for several years toward that end.
But it is probably too late, we're out of time. We'll go to war with Iran, gas will be $12 a gallon, all our jobs will be outsourced to slave labour in China, the economy will stagnate and slavery will be proposed as a means to keep things running (under such nice names as service), the compassionate way to keep people alive, and as Belloc predicted we will return to the slave economy of the classical world. Oh well. I'm too cynical for such an endeavor, but if anyone else is game!
Mr. Candido,
Alas, I do know how it is spelled: TIVOed.
May I return to and respond to Dr. Wilson's original column ?
From what I see and read of what is going on in the Throne City, the American Empire is not going to be Brazil with delusions of grandeur. A closer analogy would be Argentina, but on a much larger scale. The unsustainable burden of entitlements will see to that, and quite soon. (Make no investments in US companies that will mature past 2020; you heard it here first.) The delusions of the leadership cadre will be brought crashing down about 90 seconds after the Red Chinese decide to call the trillion or so dollars in US Treasuries they own.
Concerning the motley collection of GOP candidates: the American commonoriate recognizes the difficulties it faces, at least subconsciously, and is looking for a candidate that will give it the sense of security it craves. The problem is that there is no such candidate out there---the political system is not designed to produce one. McCain's position on immigration is but a small part of the problem; he has no platform that addresses the real difficulties the country will face in the future. In my opinion, Giuliani is ahead in the race for two reasons: his perceived "toughness" immediately after 9/11 and the desire on the part of many Republicans (even the so-called "social conservatives") to abandon what they see as the political albatross of abortion. The average rank-and-file GOPer sees a pro-life stand as being morally right, but politically wrong. Perhaps the front-line Republican Party reptiles are finally coming around to the fact that they live in an essentially libertine, anti-Christian milieu.
As to the Constitution; the entire notion of limited government was repudiated with America's entry into World War I. Statists of both parties, having tasted military and political victory in 1917, were able to embark on a program of expanded government and "hollowing out" of other intermediating institutions, until today we have the centralized, top-heavy Imperial state that plies our elderly with "entitlements" while it suffocates their working relatives with murderous taxes.
The American character has been denatured, Dr. Wilson. The elites have tasted real power, wealth and (especially) control and become even more corrupted than they traditionally have been. The commoners have gone from being individual, whole people to being soft and pampered employees who all too easily defer to their corporate and bureaucratic masters. The Boston Tea Party would not be possible today; it might cause someone to miss the next episode of "American Idol" or damage someone's self-esteem. God knows we can't have that.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
To say that “race” is so self-evident that to deny it would be “silly” is to say that it is equally self-evident that the sun revolves around the air, that my desk is not largely space but solid, and that space is not curved but straight just as Euclid said; ergo, how “silly” were Copernicus, Galileo, Dalton, and Einstein!
Nonetheless, let me be educated: Pray tell, Dr. Wilson, Red, et al.: If “race” is so self-evident to "universal observation", then the number of them most be equally self-evident, yes? Then just how many “races” are there? Here are your choices:
1. three? – the view of Gobineau, so risible that every other scientific racialist rejected it at once, including Francis Galton, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, George Schönerer, and Adolf Josef Lanz, and ol Adi himself, because #2 infra replaced it. Or find me, please any scientific racialist/racist who still believes in three races. Hell, find me any scientific racialist.
2. Several hundred? – the view of Georges Vacher de Lapouge, William Z. Ripley, Madison Grant, Joseph Deniker, and Alfred Ploetz. Even the groupings Teutonic, Celtic, Slavic, Italic, Bantu, Nilotic, Khoikhoi, Khwe are, for this view, just collections of races. If this view is true, then I wish to make a shocking and wondrous revelation to the world: I myself am a product of "miscegenation". For I am a Borderer/Backcountry (misnamed “Scots Irish”; we are neither), we have our origin on the Borders of Scotland and England, we go back at least a millennium, and we are mixed.
Our “race” first was most likely the (1) aboriginal Britons, the folk that built Stonehenge. Then came the Celts, and that Celtic race that mixed with us the most were the (2) “Britons”, pushed to western England later by the West Teutons. Another Celtic race, (3) the Gaelic speaking Scots, invaded Scotland from Ireland, drove out the Picts, and mixed with us as well. The West-Teuton (“Anglo-Saxon”) race that next mixed with us were the Angles, specifically those Northumbrian Angles called (4) the Bernicians. In time (5) the Mercians, the (6) East Anglians, and (7) the Saxons (East, South, West) interbred with us. Then came the North Teutons: First the (8) Viking Danes of Danelaw, then the (9) Normans. In the reign of James I of England, some of us were moved to Ulster, a process that was accelerated by William of Orange (thus we’re called “hillbillies” to this day), and we mixed with (10) the local Irish. We started coming in droves to America c. 1717, and went straight to the Southern Piedmont and Northeastern Backcountry, and we’ve been moving west ever since. Some “indentured servants” of the VA Cavaliers, originating in (11) southwest and midland England, fled from the Tidewater to the Backcountry, and interbred with us. Then (12) Aboriginal Americans (“Indians”) interbred with us too, the Indian Removal Bill notwithstanding.
Go to an SCV meeting and look around. Dixie’s army was overwhelmingly Backcountry. Survey your SCV camp as to eye color, hair color, body-build, facial shape, head shape, height, and whether they turned to lobsters in the sun or to Indians. Result: We’re all types. If if these traits aren’t “race” then what the hell is race?! Skin color? With the eye at the camp you will see a skin variety from ghostly pale to swarthy. So, were one to follow this numbering of “races”, these folk would be mulattoes.
3. Six Billion? – the view of anyone who is a professional molecular biologist, since this is the most tangible and observable category, and thus the most scientific. It is also the view most in harmony with Personalism. Each person is his own race.
4. One? – the logical consequence of #3.
I subscribe to ## 3 and 4. If you subscribe to 1 or 2, please present first your credentials with respect to molecular biology, and thus to organic chemistry, and thus also prove to me that you have Mendeleev’s Table memorized. Any "competence" in Craniometry doesn't qualify you.
"please present first your credentials"
Sid, what are your credentials. Exactly what credentials does one need to be a race denier? Most are social scientists who are embarrassed by the stubborn facts of hard science.
To me it sounds like you have a PhD in Sophistry from PC University.
I think Mr. Cundiff asks a pertinent question concerning the number of races and I notice that Dr. Phillips has not answered it. If the answer relies on the definition of race in a given case, this would support the notion that the whole concept of race is pretty arbitrary. As far as Dr. Phillip's statement that people can almost always identify their own race, note that there are Brazilians by the tens of millions who would identify themselves as either white or mulatto, who in the US would be identified as either black or "African American". And the overwhelming majority of American blacks would be called mulatto in Brazil. Some would even be called whites. This would seem to indicate that different societies have different standards of race membership and even of race itself and people will simply call themselves whatever the other members of their society call them.