Posted on 12/20/2006 6:26:57 PM PST by shrinkermd
One of the assumptions of Gestalt Psychology is ideas like needs move from the background to the foreground.
Rush Limbaugh as well as many of the posts on Free Republic surely document an increasing awareness of attacks on our common culture. Rush has even indicated such successes as are being made against the culture outweigh even the loss of the last election.
This lecture by Russell Kirk addresses this problem in a clear and convincing manner. It is seven pages long but the past paragraph sums up the problem:
"...America has overcome the ideological culture of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. In the decade of this victory, are Americans to forswear the beneficent culture that they have inherited? For a civilization to arise and flower, centuries are required; but the indifference or the hostility of a single generation may suffice to work that civilization's ruin. We must confront the folk whom Arnold Toynbee called "the internal proletariat" as contrasted with the "external proletariat" from alien lands. Otherwise we may end, all of us, as fellow-proletarians, culturally deprived, in a nation that will permit no one to rise above mediocrity.
(Excerpt) Read more at users.etown.edu ...
This essay is succinct, clear and evocative of the best in conservative feeling.
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Enemies of the Permanent things bookmark.
Read and later possible pingout.
You might enjoy this ping.
I've had tremendous trouble with the Bush presidency, and really little admiration for the president's leadership. Recently I decided to reaffirm my beliefs, and check whether I'm in the right place, by going back to basics, just as you suggest.
And guess what I'm reading -- today, and for the past week? The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. It's been a very soothing and reassuring experience.
Here's what else is on my reading list for the next few months, which I'll post for anyone who also might be in need of some refreshment:
That ought to keep me out of trouble for a while.
Yet another reason to hate Mario Cuomo. Of course, liberals like Cuomo don't object to the preservation of all cultures, just Western ones. Liberalism is a white hating genocide movement and nothing else, and confronting it on any other basis is useless. And btw, Mario (you ignorant ape, you), one famous use of the word "culture" in a Nazi play was the line "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety-catch of my Browning!", a sentiment not too far from your own.
bookmark...
"...A culture is a common way of life -- a particular adjustment of man to his natural surroundings and his economic needs.... And just as every natural region tends to possess its characteristic forms of animal and vegetable life, so too will it possess its own type of human society.... The higher culture will express itself through its material circumstance, as masterfully and triumphantly as the artist through the medium of his material
To Beckett:
Your reading list is commendable. Please consider adding Richard Frothingham's "The Rise of the Republic of the United States," (1872) (Third Edition, Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1881). Frothingham's history, unlike previous and many subsequent histories, focused on tracing the sources of the ideas which gave birth to the American Republic. It is regrettable that such a work has disappeared from libraries.
His conclusions dispute today's revisionists. Consider his summary statement concerning the Declaration on p. 558:
The Declaration, with its doctrine of fundamental equality, he says, "clothed abstract truth with vitalizing power."
He continues: "Its mighty sentences aver as self-evident 'that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as shall to them seem most like to effect their safety and happiness.' This is the American theory, expressed 'in words the memory of which can never die.' (Buckle's History of Civilization, I. 846). It includes far more than it expresses: for by recognizing human equality and brotherhood, and the individuals as the unit of society, it accepts the Christian idea of man as the basis of political institutions; (pp. 6 & 9 of Buckle) and by proclaiming the right to alter them to meet the progress of society, it provided for the results of a tendency to look, not to the past, but to the future, for types of perfection that was brought into the world by Christianity (Maine's Ancient Law, 71). To maintain such a theory were fought the batttles of the Revolution. To build on it a worthy superstructure of government and law, was the work entered upon by heroes and sages, and bequeathed to posterity."
Frothingham quotes Buckle's "History of Civilization in England," as asserting that "the (American) Declaration ought to be hung up in the nursery of every king, and blazoned on the porch of every royal palace."
The cultural warriors who, today, deny the facts of America's founding philosophical roots might take note of Frothingham's political party affiliation and credentials: "Frothingham, Richard, historian, born in Charlestown, MA, 31 January 1812; died there, 29 January 1880. He was for many years a proprietor of the Boston "Post," and in 1852'54 served as its managing editor. He was a member of the legislature in 1839, 1840, 1842, 1849, and 1850, and a delegate to the Democratic national convention of 1852, and in 1853 to the State constitutional convention. He served as mayor of Charlestown in 1851'3, and was for several years treasurer of the Massachusetts Historical Society. . . ." Biographical information source:(http://www.famousamericans.net/richardfrothingham)
Excellent point. We're about 40 years on from the real turning point, which was the 1960's, both for the US and for the Catholic Church, and we can see the truth of his words. Fortunately, in both cases, I think people are beginning to fight back - or rather, those who have been fighting back all along are no longer such lonely voices.
The question is whether a culture can be consciously recuperated.
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Thanks for posting.
And add my name to it.
ping for reading later.
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