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19 comments to Why the West is worth saving |
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I’ve been a fan of Konstantin’s for a while now. It’s been interesting watching Triggernometry evolve as a channel. He’s really come to the fore. He’s intelligent, articulate, and funny. Not a bad combo, all in all.
Yes, this is a video well worth watching. He knows whereof he speaks. We should be proud of our Western intellectual legacy.
Not sure about that jacket.
Great stuff but, “Worst Geography teacher evah!” was worth price of admission alone. Spot on!
I rather like the jacket – in principle – but it doesn’t fit him – that is the problem. In short it is not a fail in styling as much as the technical tailoring.
Of course the West is worth fighting for. It is all we’ve got. What is the alternative? The deranged rantings of a pseudo-Tsar who wants the Empire of Catherine or Peter? The set of suits full of bugger all in Beijing?
They aren’t the problem, really. The problem is a lack of faith in a civilization which has eclipsed ecerything. Putin, perhaps, has a point about decadence… I live just outside of Manchester. Trans-activists in balaclavas attacked feminists at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in St Peter’s Square.
Now, OK it’s not the Banquet of Chestnuts (certainly not as fun!) kinda decadence but it is still demented and also decadent in the sense of being totally morally incoherent.
The number of self-confessed pacifists I’ve heard expressing violent intent against like whoever (the rich, the polluters, those who disagree cordially with them) is stunning. I was once physically threatened by a “Palestinian” (actually a Jordanian but facts are of course much less important than self-identity) who showed me his (hideous) knuckle-duster of an Allah ring and said he’d use it to punch any “Jew lovers”. I was, at the time, dating an American Jew and he knew that. I told him to “fuck off”. He did. Full of piss and vinegar, like the barber’s cat.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– WB Yeats, “The Second Comming”.
@NickM, the geography teacher comment was funny but surely the winner was:
“This is my wife, as you can see she is pregnant — SHE is pregnant not me — because we are old school.”
Can’t have the fruits without the roots.
The free, democratic, humanist West grew out of Jewish monotheism. Humans created in the image of one deity have inherent worth and equality. They know one Good and Evil, and have free will. Serving this G.d means respecting His other children – an earth shaking pardigm shift from paganism. Christendom built these ideas out to their temporal, political conclusions.
The 20th century in Europe showed that none of this is permanent – when people no longer explain themselves or others this way, it’s a short slide back to pagan inhumanity, utilitarianism, materialism, corruption – even for a highly sophisticated Western bastion like Germany.
Europe is now in the final stages of a neo-pagan revanchism. The Commune and the Nazis have won the cultural battle – Europe is now post-Christian, probably irredeemably so.
Political solutions start in mid-story, and are useless patches. The West only has a chance if the churches are as full as the mosques – if enough people still live with real committment to the Judeo-Christian worldview.
Question for @Perry — the video link in this post is fine, however, I was going to go back and read the lend lease one from a few articles back, but it seems to point to this same video. Not sure what happened there.
Ben David,
If monotheism was the root of all good then a Yemeni girl who had just had her clitoris hacked off by her granny with a broken Coke bottle would truly possess the secret of joy.
What we have has fuck all to do with a bunch of desert moochers* way back when (and alas, still). It is to do with looking at the stars. I rate Israel not because of a bunch of legendary beardies but because of Iron Beam. I couldn’t give a fuck about all that Bible stuff… But a laser that can take down HAMAS rockets for $3.50 a shot… That is gorgeous.
*I almost used a different term.
Fraser, the Lend-Lease video link works fine for me.
NickM (May 19, 2022 at 10:56 pm), your comment seems an example of ‘how not to persuade people’, as a recent post put it. Ben David expressed a wish for fuller churches, so you upbraided him with an example of what happens when mosques are full and churches are dhimmi at best. Ben can clarify his phrasing (or correct me) if he wishes, but your take does seem a stretch.
BTW, in China, women’s feet were bound (for reasons that had nothing to do with any religion: of societies that were advanced pre-industrial-revolution, China is by far the most religiously indifferent that I know). Many a Christian missionary raised money in the west by showing a model of what that did to a woman’s foot, then went out to China to try and put a stop to that, amongst other things. So the correlation with monotheism is in both directions weak.
Also BTW, as regards your link, my understanding (from memory) is that Alice Walker (who wrote ‘The Color Purple’ and the book you mention) is a standard woke anti-semite whose literary fame was puffed by the like-psyched. Her imaginings of historical and cultural events should not be trusted as a guide. (That said, your basic point about what can happen in Yemen could of course be easily supported from other sources, though not of course in Walker’s fictional African nation of Olinka)
Hey NickM – Many “beardies” like me serve in the elite units and work in the hi-tech companies that developed Iron Dome… With clear consciences *because* our Biblical values allow us to see clearly the value of our civilization. We’re replacing Israel’s Leftist elite, who are too decadent and confused to defend us.
Get it?
Hey I don’t blame you – that hipster laid-back radical-chic dismissal of religion was modeled numerous times by cool media personalities and/or academic mentors. So you just adopted it.
Unfortunately it leaves you less than useless in the current cultural crisis…
(Like “radicalized” Western women who think Judeo-Christian marriage – demonstrably the Best.Thing.Evah for women and children – is oppressive, and that a return to concubinage is “empowering”. Less than useless – actively destroying the West.)
…perhaps you think “defending the West” means saving girls from Muslim groomers and Christian priests… So they can be “affirmed” by GLBT “mentors”…?
The religious people you’ve been trained to sneer at – beardies in Israel, Poles opposed to the LGBT agenda, and American Christians battling woke moral relativism – actually see some things that fall in your blind spot:
(Let’s try this one more time…)
– Freedom OF religion is not freedom FROM religion as a source of values.
– The free, secular public space of Western society depends on the personal commitment of individuals to the Judeo-Christian ethos – like the flying buttresses that support the cathedral. The West is free *because* of its Judeo-Christian values.
-Only these beliefs proved strong enough to check the self-interested pagan within us all. Western freedoms are not obvious, not humanity’s default. The past century taught that the West only *stays* free if citizens have a vital, binding connection to those Judeo Christian values.
The Left convinced fools like you to blow off, flip off, throw off the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is not progress – it is *why* the West is collapsing.
Get it?
You wrote that “the best lack conviction” – so what convictions will save the West?
Ben David,
No, I don’t “Get it”. It is entirely possible to live a fine, productive and moral life without that tradition. You say “save the West”. From what? Maybe I’m just an optimist but I simply don’t see a catastrophe on the horizon.
What exactly are “Judeo-Christian” values?
As to academic mentors. I studied Physics and then Astrophysics. God (or hipsterism) never came-up. Maxwell’s Equations and Green’s Theorem in the Plane did but not, alas, God. I am self-employed in IT and find a laptop, a set of screwdrivers and a knowledge of how Windows works* enormously more useful than any theology. To put it bluntly, I’m not gonna get my fee for fixing a knackered Compaq by praying over it. I shall if I re-jig the hard disk. I don’t think you’ll find anything about that in the Bible. So why rag on about it? I am part of this World but I have no use for religion. It isn’t so much something I disbelieve in as something that I find at best quaint. If you think that Nick here is some leftie hipster then you are utterly deluded. I am a classical liberal who believes very strongly that the values of “the West” (however that is defined – I’m typing on a Taiwanese machine) are the reason I have a nice life and am not a gong-farmer. Up to a point, maybe, those structures had some roots in Christianity and Judaism but that was a very long time ago. You could easily argue much the same for all sorts of things. I really don’t have the time now but you could make the same argument about Aristotle. Or any number of others. Personally, I regard Baruch Spinoza (who wasn’t torn apart by she-bears – unlikely in Amsterdam**) a great moral philosopher but on other stuff he’s like whatever…
Anyway, Ben, what is your solution to the “collapse of the West”? National Servivce? Censorship? What? Has it occurred to you, at all, that your seemingly innate, (small “c”) conservatism is just the mirror of what you are accussing me of (of which I’m not guilty – let’s meet for a drink and then judge me)… simply recycled because tradition is the glue, right? What if it isn’t? Thought of that? Did the World End with gay marriage? Nah, but florists made a killing!
Let’s get this straight. You seem to argue that tradition (however defined) is a good thing in and of itself because it keeps a society stable. At no point do you make any claim that the (and it is a vague term) “Judeo-Christian tradition” is actually true. Instead you seem to regard it as socially useful. That is the “Noble Lie” that characterised Leninist thought and goes back to Plato.
The lack of conviction shall save the West.
*Well, sort of. But then again can anyone say more than that?
**How many curses are there in the book of Deuteronomy?
So you think it is completely normal to be fired because your company have political commissar …or that “racial” political violence before US elections were okay…or that in US TV series the only Evil people are always white, or that anyone that questions Global Warming – sorry Climate Change – has no chance of a career?
So after all this time you did not noticed that the Liberal State is finished?
This is Vaclav Klaus recent text. I am not conservative has him.
https://www.klaus.cz/clanky/4934
Russia in 1916 had it’s own version of threatening wokeness. It was likely full of regular people who saw no threat, who could never bring themselves to believe that those loud sloganeering activists could ever upend and take over their country. The masses would never fall for their idiotic views. Oops.
We’re now in a very similar position. Fortunately, I think we have a better, more accurate view of where wokeness leads, and more people become aware as time passes. So, I think we stand a better chance of fending off the revolution than did those Russians. We caught it earlier.
But that’s the “from what” to which you refer.
Was going to reply at length to Ben David but NickM pretty much did it for me 😀
If religion does it for you, well I am totally fine with that, but I take the same view as David Deutsch that the idea of “God” does not help develop theories about reality.
bobby b (May 21, 2022 at 2:03 am), the first revolution in Russia was by liberals.
They also were less than brilliant at economics.
After some months of this, Lenin managed to reach Russia. By Autumn, he realised that
The communist takeover involved small forces of unionised workers who were not merely politically illiterate. It succeeded because the liberals in power had managed to quarrel bitterly with their army commander, so had only a battalion from the women’s army guarding their government.
It helped that three years of WWI had left a lot of people, who might otherwise have fought the communists harder, tired of fighting – those who were not dead. However they still faced the task of converting a coup in the capital into rule of Russia. Lenin’s theory was
and they all knew they faced the certainty of joint annihilation if they failed in their war of “little courage and less mercy”. At one point, Lenin was told (incorrectly, alas) that (just) two British divisions had landed at Archangel, whereupon he concluded that everything was lost!
As this summary indicates, Russia in 1917 faced some problems we don’t have, over and above its less happy history. But we have more problems than we did and, as bobby b is hinting, they include a group very focussed on seizing power and effecting revolution.
Oh yes it does. A bigger reality that sometimes makes it possible to overcome despair.
It always seemed to me that the existence of an omniscient being anywhere would, by logical necessity, preclude the existence of other sentient beings anywhere else. Sentience requires the ability to choose (else not sentient), and an omniscient being would already know every choice you were ever going to make (else not omniscient). But if your choices are already predetermined, you aren’t really making them.
Well if it helps you overcome despair, that’s great. But it doesn’t help when it comes to developing better theories about physics.
Perry,
Cheers!
Ferox,
That is a very interesting point. I have kinda thought along similar lines but never with such clarity. Truly excellent.