gswann@primenet.com
Posted on 12/06/2002 12:48:57 PM PST by Greg Swann
East
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A sign of our times from The Daily Californian at UC Berkeley:
Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates has admitted responsibility for stealing and trashing about 1,000 copies of The Daily Californian that carried the student newspaper's endorsement of his opponent, police said yesterday.The news here is not really news, alas, not in the man-bites-dog sense. We have long since been afflicted with book-burners and newspaper-dumpers on college campuses. The fact that the newspaper-dumping was done by a mayoral candidate is mildly interesting, and his Clintonesque non-denial denials and non-apology apologetics are amusing if not novel. One supporter defends him by saying that, "He let his emotions take over." This is not a happy thought, should Berkeley every resolve to do something serious about the vicious exploitation of coffee-bean pickers. Another supporter insists that, "Getting rid of the mayor because of this would basically be the same as capital punishment." Not quite the same, but the hyperbole is only necessary because the newspaper-dumping Mayor does not have the grace to resign after having been caught in his crime, having been caught lying about it, and having done nothing at all to set things right.
We read about a five-year-old fellating a fellow kindergartener and we think that this is what the Clintons have wrought, this is the depth to which our culture has sunk. This is false. Both of these incidents, and hundreds more I could name, are symptoms of a much worse disease, the reversion to barbarism. Our Islamic friends are without doubt aghast at the five-year-old fellatrix, but their indignation surely could not extend so far as to condemn Mayor-elect Bates; if he made any error it was not in disposing of the newspapers but rather in failing to dispose of the newspaper's editor.
Either way, Islam has nothing to teach the West. Our problem, and one which we must correct, is that the West is forgetting what it has so painstakingly learned over the centuries. There are many crucial differences between East and West, but the most vitally important differences are fundamental to the philosophies of these two divergent cultures. The East, of which Islam is an merely an exigent if virulent symptom, governs human behavior by a morality-of-proscription--the 'thou shalt nots' of our own Eastern forebears. Until lately the West, of which the United States may not be the best-ever specimen, has governed human behavior by reason, by each individual's knowledge of good and of evil, of the greater and the lesser, of the desired and the shunned, of the sublime and the ridiculous, of the righteous and the corrupt. Our Eastern forebears condemned us for having eaten fo the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the fathers of the West, the fathers of the best within us, have nourished us for more than two millennia on precisely that self-same fruit.
No more. Or not enough, in any case. Where before our classroom Clodia could not happen, not because sexualizing children was forbidden-by-writ, but because sexualizing children was unconscionable in a civilized society, by now we have neither the inviolable proscriptions of the East nor the reason of the West, nor even the aversion-by-appetite that people call 'conscience' (which word actually means knowledge or wisdom). Where once Americans had the wits to condemn censors, by now we coddle them, much as we do for the far more vicious censors of Islam.
Actions--and inactions--have consequences. The West is not without vice, and the East is not without virtue. But the ideas that uniquely define the West--in epistemology, in ethics, in politics, in economics--are under siege--from without and from within. Mayor-elect Bates states an obvious fact when he says, "tossing newspapers is absolutely inappropriate and unacceptable." The corruption of the West, so far uncorrected, is that we are willing to accept so much that is so obviously unacceptable. |
This is a subversive plot you weave, Mr. Swann. We nourished ourselves for two milennia on the evil of sex?
Greg Swann
That would be a mistake, both the recollection and the equation.
That would be a mistake, both the recollection and the equation.
You had said:
Greg's remark that "The West is not Christianity." I'm sure you could squeeze some truth out of that, but not much.
Perhaps I misunderstood you. FWIW, I use the West to mean Hellenic culture. Christianity is a hybrid of East and West, with her best exponents, IMO, being the most Hellenized--St. Jerome, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Ignatius Loyola, etc.
As to this:
Eve was the victim of a serpent.
You might read the text. It's interesting. Anti-humanity, anti-rational-animal, but interesting.
I wrote a novel about the idea of the fall of man, actually. Very much pro-humanity. And unlike Genesis 3, it is concerned with sex. It's called The Unfallen. You can download it at no cost if you're interested.
Best,
Greg Swann
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