Posted on 02/16/2011 7:23:22 PM PST by TheConservativeCitizen
When asked what he thought about Western Civilization, Mohandas Ghandi replied, “It’s a good idea.”
He certainly wasn’t the first to take Western Civilization(WC) to the woodshed as there is a long pedigree of anti-Western intellectuals and ideas. Ironically most of it comes from the West. Many of these self-appointed anti-Western critics are doing their best to euthanise WC with an intellectual version of “Stop us before we kill again!”
Although Voltaire loved to denigrate Christianity, it was Nietzche who knew that being anti-Western wasn’t enough, one had to be pro-Eastern. Just as leftists realized that being anti-American wouldn’t bear much fruit, they had to invent a mythological beast called multiculturalism. No thanks, I’ll just take American culture, warts and all.
When one watches the knee-jerk progressives chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho western culture’s got to go” one cannot help but wonder, How many of the classics of Western culture have they actually perused? Have they followed Dante through the entire Divine Comedy or witnessed a play by Sophocles? Do they really resent Euclid all that much? Or are Augustine’s Confessions completely lost on them?
I believe that we are all well aware of the level of ignorance that abounds in academia even with something as basic as geography.
Progressivism is a weed that believes it can grow taller by chopping away at its own roots. If it was merely an intellectual parlor game that never crawled out of the local coffee bars that would be fine. The problem is that thes ideas find traction among those anointed revolutionaries that plague the arts and the humanities and I know that the disease is spreading.
Why and what are they attacking and is there a decent counter-attack looming? I have reason to believe so. I make myself say half-full rather than half-empty only to convince myself that I am an optimist. Some say I’m just whistling past the graveyard but I think there’s a chance that I actually may be one.
The two essential pillars of WC are Greek Philosophy and Christian Theology. The ancient Greek way of reasoning about the natural world and the Christian faith with its ethos and sense of redemption for a fallen world.
Progressives point at the worst faults of the West like an abusive aunt constantly deriding those messy children that she does not want to admit any relation to.
What to do about the plague of their ideology, one hardly knows where to begin. But begin we must and I shall throw down the gauntlet here: an old battered copy of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. My preferred translation: by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay.
I don’t know if we’ll save the WC, but it will be a good beginning.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that “civilization” is taken to be synonomous with “egalitarian ethics”. It just means “citification”, so you know, city folk can be just as mean as country folk. It’s just that they go to the opera.
And it’s NIETZ-SCHE ... Nietzsche. Learn it.
Musta been speaking of Herman Nietzche.
My thesis! I was considered most unpopular in university, but the Sikhs kept buying me drinks. I never understood why.
My favorite scrabble is Nietz-sche;God is dead—GOD Nietzsche is DEAD.Best sum of this excerpt is that bit about the ignorance that abounds in academia— sorta like that pop muzak song about “all the crap I learned in high school.Please forgive my edication I was a product of the progressive education thingy in the 60’s and my sense of humor was a bit warped by nearly 8 yrs as an army Medic.
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