Posted on 08/25/2002 3:24:49 PM PDT by Noumenon
From Chapter 12, The West, Civilization and Civilizations - The Clash of Civilizations
Marxist Multiculturalism and the Fall of Western Civilization
Samuel P. Huntington
From Chapter 12, The West, Civilization and Civilizations - The Clash of Civilizations
Far more significant than economics and demography are problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West. Oft-pointed-to manifestations of moral decline include:
increases in antisocial behavior, such as crime, drug use, and violence generally;
family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teen-age pregnancy, and single-parent families;
at least in the United States, a decline in "social capital," that is, membership in voluntary associations and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership;
general weakening of the "work ethic," and the rise of a cult of personal indulgence;
decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity, manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement.
The future health of the West and its influence on other societies depends in considerable measure on its success in coping with those trends, which, of course, give rise to the assertions of moral superiority by Muslims and Asians.
Western Culture is challenged by groups within Western societies. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and culture of their home societies. This phenomenon is most notable among Muslims in Europe, who are, however, small minority. It is also manifest, in lesser degree, among Hispanics in the United States, who area large minority. If assimilation fails in this case, the United States will become a cleft country with all the potential for strife and disunion that entails. In Europe, Western civilization could also be undermined by a weakening of its central component, Christianity. Declining proportions of Europeans profess religious beliefs, observe religious practices, and participate in religious activities. This trend reflects not so much hostility to to religion as indifference to it. Christian concepts, values and practice nonetheless pervade European civilization. "Swedes are probably the most unreligious people in Europe," one of them commented, "but you cannot understand this country at all unless you realize that our institutions, social practice, families, politics, and way of life are fundamentally shaped by our Lutheran heritage." Americans, in contrast to Europeans, overwhelmingly believe in God, think themselves to be religious people, and attend church in large numbers. While evidence of a resurgence in religion in America was lacking as of he mid-1980s the following decade seemed to witness intensified religious activity. The erosion of Christianity among Westerners is likely to be at worst only a very long term threat to the health of Western civilization.
A more immediate and dangerous challenge exists in the United States. Historically American national identity has defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property. In the late 20th century, both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism, they have attacked the identification of he United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. They have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, "systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives," in education and "the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective." The multiculturalists are, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has said, "very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in Western heritage other than Western crimes." Their "mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures."
The multicultural trend was also manifested in a variety of legislation that followed the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, and in the 1990s, the Clinton administration made the encouragement of diversity one its major goals. The contrast wit the past is striking. The Founding Fathers saw diversity as a reality and as a problem: hence the national motto: e pluribus unum, chosen by a committee of he Continental Congress consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Later political leaders who also were fearful of the dangers of racial, sectional, economic, and cultural diversity (which indeed, produced the largest war of the century between 1815 and 1914), responded to the call of "bring us together," and made the promotion of national unity their central responsibility. "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of of its continuing as a nation at all," warned Theodore Roosevelt, "would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." In the 1990s, however, leaders of he United States have not only permitted that but assiduously promoted the diversity rather than the unity of the people they govern.
The leaders of their countries have, as we have seen, at times attempted to disavow their cultural heritage and shift the identity of their country from one civilization to another. In no case to date have they succeeded and they have instead created schizophrenic torn countries. The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country's cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the united States with an other civilization, however, they wish to create a country of may civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United states will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.
The multiculturalists also challenged a central element of the American Creed, by substituting for he rights of individuals the rights groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and sexual preference. The Creed, as Gunnar Myrdal said in the 1940s, reinforcing the comments of foreign observers dating from Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville, has been, "the cement in the structure of this great and disparate nation." Richard Hofstader agreed," not to have ideologies but to be one." What happens then to the United States if hat ideology is disavowed by a significant portion of its citizens? The fate of he Soviet Union, the other major country whose unity, even more than that of the United States, was defined in ideological terms is a sobering example for Americans. "The total failure of Marxism... and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union," the Japanese philosopher Takeshi Umehara has suggested, "are only the precursors to the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current of modernity. Far from being the alternative to Marxism and the reigning ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the next domino to fall." In an era in which peoples everywhere define themselves in cultural terms what place is there for a society without a cultural core and defined only by a political creed? Political principles are a fickle base on which to build a lasting community. In a multicivilizational world where culture counts, the United States could simply be the last anomalous holdover fro ma fading Western world where ideology counted.
Rejection of the Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the United States as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western Civilization. If he United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without the United States the West becomes a minuscule and declining part of the world's population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of he Eurasian land mass.
The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is, in James Kurth's phrase, "the real clash" within the American segment of Western civilization. Americans cannot avoid the issue: Are we a Western people or are we something else? The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. Internationally it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calls to identify the United States with Asia. Whatever economic connections may exist between them, the fundamental cultural gap between Asian societies and American societies precludes their joining together in a common home. Americans are culturally part of the Western family; multiculturalists may damage or even destroy that relationship, but they cannot replace it.
In 1909 a book of essays appeared in Russia under the title Landmarks. The contributors included the religious philosophers Nikolai Berdyayev, Sergei Bulgakov and Semyon Frank, the legal theorist, B. A. Kistyakovsky, the literary critic M. Gershenzon and the eminent economist, publicist, and liberal politician Peter Struve.
All of these men, well-known at the time, had grown up under the populist and Marxist-dominated trends then fashionable among the Russian intelligentsia — and all had turned against this tide. Berdyayev and Bulgakov were ex-Marxists. Struve had written the founding manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1898.
In Landmarks, however, all the authors rejected the Marxism of the intelligentsia and called for a regeneration of Christian oriented culture.
Their arguments in favor of such a renewal created shock, anger, and outrage in liberal and Marxist circles. As we today know so well, these are circles that will not endure dissent. At the time, Lenin called Landmarks “an encyclopedia of liberal apostasy.” When the Bolsheviks seized power from the Social Democrats in 1917, Landmarks was immediately placed on the forbidden list.
The horror that is Communism did not envelop all Russia immediately, however. In 1918, the authors of the Landmarks articles, now joined by some others, published a second book in Moscow under the title De Profundis (From the Depths).
In this second volume, the authors of Landmarks, joined by some others, spoke of the October Revolution as “the inevitable consequences of the intelligentsia’s thirst for revolution.” As Berdyayev put it in his contribution, Russia had now been seized by evil spirits like those in Gogol’s nightmarish tales, or by the “possessed” of Dostoyevski’s prophetic imagination. “It was not simply a change of regime, but a spiritual disaster, a self-willed descent into the abyss.” (from Under the Rubble, p. VII).
De Profundis was confiscated and banned at once. Only two copies survived in the West, unknown and unobtainable until 1967. One came to the attention of Solzhenitsyn, who — after his exile — subsidized the publication of a new series of articles by Soviet dissidents, under the title of From Under the Rubble, — a phonetic echo of the Russian for De Profundis (Little, Brown, 1974).
As befits a nation where Svetlana Stalin’s picture, adorned with a mustache, appeared on the cover of Esquire magazine, and a nation where Solzhenitsyn’s warnings have created great resentment among liberals, From Under the Rubble received only token attention. We have not yet reached the stage where works with a spiritual purpose are banned, but we have long since passed the stage where such works are treated with respect.
What is remarkable about Landmarks, is not only the prescience of its authors, and the accuracy of their forecasts, but the fact that literally thousands of scholars poring over the pre-revolutionary literature of Russia managed to overlook its accuracy, and to ignore its remarkable foresight. No notice is taken of it in the celebrated writings of Isaiah Berlin, by Isaac Deutcher, or by countless others.
Instead, these individuals admire the historical vision of Lenin, who only a few weeks before the February 1917 rising, wrote to some workers in Zurich that “such a revolution could not succeed in Russia, the most bourgeois-minded country in Europe” (From Under the Rubble, p. 281).
Of course, selectivity in writing history has now grown into the rule rather than the exception. It would be naïve to expect admirers of catastrophe to point out its defects.
But it is truly remarkable that religious groups, both Jewish and Christian, should so signally overlook the spiritual catastrophe of old Russia and the relatively new USSR — and its history.
Over 300,000 Orthodox clerics were murdered by the Bolsheviks, and those who today recall these statistics and martyrs are largely restricted to White Russian circles of aging émigrés. The National Council of Churches, which bleeds so ostentatiously for the “liberation forces” and terrorists of Africa and Central America, have yet to organize even a memorial service for their coreligionists in the “Worker’s Paradise.”
Religious scholars have not, so far as I know, devoted much effort to acquainting congregations and church hierarchies with the specifics of Communist and Socialist antireligious activities. From Under the Rubble, which updates the situation, is not now extolled from pulpits, so far as I know, nor is it included among stacks of worthy reading for mainstream congregations in the West.
Yet From Under the Rubble warns, it points out, it compares, it points a finger toward the path upon which we are unwittingly embarked — and it makes its case by calling attention to not only Landmarks, but to what has happened since, which proves — beyond question — the arguments made by Landmarks.
From here
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn has said: "Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities. The very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention."
Why would Hispanics be considered a threat to "western civilization"? They are probably more religious than most US citizens, and they derive their culture primarily from Spain and Portugal. Argentina and Chile are particularly European.
Considering Huntington's carefully, I conclude that he is referring more to the potential for cultural alienation among Hispanics. No one would argue that there are distinct cultural differences between Mexico and the United States. Those same cultural differences do much to explain Mexico's poverty and stagnation as opposed to the much more dynamic culture and economy to the north. Huntington is doubtless aware of the efforts by liberal socialists to pad the voting rolls with a flood of emigres.
Consider the relentless pursuit of bilingual 'education' by the same liberals scum, even in the face of outcry from Hispanic parents who know that the best chance their kids have to succeed isto speak and write in English and to do it well, even in the face of hard evidence that such bilingual programs do just the opposite of what the program originators and administrators claim they do. It is also likely that Huntington is aware of the 'La Raza' and Aztlan separatist movements. All of these things are tremendously destabilizing.
For the most part, Hispanic immigrants bring a lot to the table - their innate sense of family and hard work ethic are key elements of those who succeed here. But their numbers have been heavily diluted by the Clinton-mandated subornation of the INS to the service of delivering the least and the worst that Mexico has to offer to the Democrat vote.
"The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your [TV] screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses.The entire speech, "A World Split Apart," is a masterpeice. Wasted on the crowd, too."Two hundred, or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic."
"There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a de-spiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness. "It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism."
"Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction."
I expect it'll take another wake-up call from hell. It's coming. You can feel it just as surely as you can feel an approaching thunderstorm.
I'm not a big follower of Huntington but I think he's onto something here. Only I don't see multiculturalism as nearly as monolithic as it appears - it is, after all, profoundly reactionary (if we didn't exist they'd have to invent us) and very much a movement of a fat, peaceful population that enjoys the luxury of not having to decide between value systems in order to survive. That's something of a historical anomaly, and in the absence of of a clear need to decide the adherents of the movement can afford to spend their entire lives in a state of suspended judgment.
Where I do agree with Huntington is that radical Islam has little use for this suspension of judgment, and in fact where it is in control there is no room for multiculturalism whatever - women are covered, representative art is disallowed, music is censored, period, and the religious judges are in absolute control. There is no room in this system for multicultural broad-mindedness; the reason that the multiculturally broadminded haven't quite grasped this yet is that their worldview disallows that - too judgmental. They're food.
No way Jose. The concept that Western Civilization will decline and will end as its enfeebled countries become too weak to resist invasion and subsequently become overrun by other cultures it's not realistic in our case.
The fact is that the American culture dominates other cultures and we can see that in the US. Despite the many cultures that exist here there is only one that predominates. It is clear that in one way or another it is the American culture, which dominates, or attempts to dominate the rest of the word. The result will be an Americanized world far away from extinction.
Remember that the cohesive elements of our culture - the American Creed as Huntington describes it - is utterly despised by those who shape the ideas that inform our society. That matters. It matters perhaps far more than most of us would like to admit even if we fully understood its implications.
Remember Ayn Rand's justifiable contempt for the 'man in the middle'? Those who make no judgement are the true nablers of evil.
There is no room in this system for multicultural broad-mindedness; the reason that the multiculturally broadminded haven't quite grasped this yet is that their worldview disallows that - too judgmental. They're food.
Yeah - ironic, isn't it?
Yeah, you can.
And we are succeeding magnificently. A bitter harvest...
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