What I'm about to write would get me banned from a fair number of liberal websites for "racism." It's not racist at all, but it may well be an indictment of how far our culture has already fallen.
One thing I've found over the years is that comments by Koreans about the decline of the West track very closely with my views. I got used long ago to people saying some version of “He's okay, he's American but he's not immoral like too many American guys.” At times I felt like I was being evaluated like an educated black schoolteacher by white guys in 1920s Alabama, who decided I'm okay and “not like those other people of his race.”
Most of the time, what Koreans say (at least to my face) is to discuss the role of the Reformation, of the Protestant work ethic, and (more broadly) the role of Christianity in taking a highly developed Greco-Roman pagan civilization and turning it into a culture that valued the individual, not merely the citizen class to the exclusion of the vast majority of the enslaved population. They then apply that history to their own experience of large-scale conversion of Koreans in a pre-existing Korean culture that was highly civilized but pagan, and had thousands of years of cultural development before contact with the West.
What surprised me, when talking to highly educated multilingual Koreans with doctoral degrees, was to hear raw ethnic pride combined with great appreciation for the history of Western civilization and tremendous disrespect toward modern American cultural wickedness. Almost universally when people are candid, I hear Asian Christians (not just Koreans) commenting on the descent of the West into barbarism, with many saying that America and Europe are taking jackhammers to their own cultures which took hundreds or thousands of years to develop.
I'm not very optimistic about the future of Western civilization. On the other hand, the Bible requires me to be optimistic about the future of the church. What's happening in America is far from the first time that an entire society has rejected its Christian roots.
We're already to the point that there are more Presbyterians in Korea, most of whom are strongly evangelical, than the total number of liberal and evangelical Presbyterian and Reformed Christians in North America, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands — the major centers of Calvinist Christianity until the middle of the last century. Westminster Theological Seminary's campuses in the United States are filled with Korean students, and Chongshin Theological Seminary in Seoul long since surpassed any Calvinist seminary in the United States in terms of the number of students it trains. South Korea now sends the second largest number of foreign missionaries of any country other than the United States. I can point to long lists of problems in the Korean church, but clearly, something is working there that isn't working here.
By contrast, as someone who has lived in the inner city and attended an inner-city church, I can say without reservation that many things about our inner cities are not just falling apart but in an advanced stage of collapse.
The black church as a whole, with some important exceptions, bears a very significant share of the blame for failing to teach moral values, hard work, and the value of education (i.e., how you live your life after you're saved, not just what you need to do to come to Christ). Unlike a lot of whites, I have the credibility to say that, having actually lived and worshiped in that environment, and a fair number of black pastors I know wring their hands over the way white churches are adopting a model of entertainment and emotion rather than teaching and discipleship. In other words, white churches are all too often adopting the same bad approaches to church life that have borne bitter fruit in too many black churches.
My understanding is that Derbyshire is an atheist. If that is correct, then obviously he won't agree with me on the role of the church in society, but I strongly suspect that with a Chinese wife, he agrees with me on the relative strengths of Asian culture versus modern Western culture.
I don't happen to think those differences have very much to do with race. I think they have a great deal to do with the way churches (or other moral authorities) teach fathers and mothers how to raise their families, and the way that schools either reinforce or damage the role of parental teaching in the home.
But no matter what the cause of the collapse of the American family, something has to be done or in the very near future America won't remotely resemble the society which we have inherited.
There are two kinds of atheists: (1) the type that sees atheism almost as an alternate religion, and evangelizes about it endlessly while expressing extreme hostility to other religions and (2) the type that figures that if god/gods don't exist, it really doesn't much matter what anyone believes, as long as it fosters important civic virtues. And there's nothing like the prospect of eternal hellfire (or the draconian afterlife tortures common to other religions) to motivate believers to stay on the straight and narrow. Although he is an atheist, Derbyshire identifies with the Anglican faith as a matter of tribal affiliation, much as Ulstermen who might never attend church except for weddings and funerals identify with various Protestant denominations, in opposition to their Catholic counterparts who pledge fealty to what Protestants (only in moments of mischief) have called the Purple Whore of Rome.
Bottom line is that Derbyshire believes that Christianity is a good thing generally, and definitely a benefit to the West. I’m an atheist in the Derbyshire mold, which is why, like him, I support Santorum, the most openly-religious candidate in the GOP field. He’s a nag, but there’s nothing wrong with being one, given the tendency of modern churches towards cargo cult Christianity (prosperity gospel and mid-level marketing like heresies). In a world where the traditional virtues are being given short shrift, someone needs to make the case that libertinism and the shucking of personal responsibility are a dead end rather than the way forward.
Traditionally, racism has meant persecuting people of a given race. In this respect, both Jim Crow and affirmative action constitute racism - Jim Crow persecuted blacks and affirmative action persecutes races and ethnicities outside of the protected groups.
Leftists have extended the "penumbra" of the word (to borrow a word from the Roe v. Wade ruling) to cover noticing group differences between the races. It is now racist to notice that blacks are superior basketball players or that Jews tend to dominate the legal and medical professions. When Derbyshire called himself a racist (in ironic terms), this is what he meant - commonplace day-to-day observations have now been marked verboten by the race hustlers, who have spent the past 50 years promoting what he calls anarcho-tyranny - oppressing the virtuous (of all races) while promoting anarchy by coddling the criminals (of all races) among us. And a big part of the reason that the coddling of criminals was able to reach such an advanced stage was the repeated use of the race card. Self-promoting politicians and think-tankers of all races repeatedly reached for the race card - a bottomless well, given the disproportionate number of blacks who offend and are arrested - and in making it harder to incarcerate career criminals, have made both blacks and non-blacks alike less safe.
Don't believe that the 50's (and even the 60's) were much safer? If San Diego PD's stats are to be believed, per capita violent crime was much lower 50 years ago; better emergency medical care has turned many shooting and stabbing incidents that would have become murder cases back in the 1950's into aggravated assault cases today. In 2006, per capita robberies were 6x what they were in 1950. Per capita aggravated assaults (shootings, stabbings) were 15x.
The article was interesting. The real problem with blacks, just like every other race, is that most of them are atheists.
Men who fear God are not to be feared.
Matthew 12
48 But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
49 And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!
50 For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.