MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

Bradley Birzer's words on the conflict that threatens to undermine our civilisation even more than it already has been:

"It’s a hard lesson for those of us who think so fondly of Christianity and the Christian tradition to know that even the barbarian pagans knew more and practised marriage better than we. And, yet, if we are to believe the recorders of the ancient West, they most certainly did. The republican Tacitus described the following mores and norms among the Germanic Tribes in his Germania:

The matrimonial bond is, nevertheless, strict and severe among them; nor is there anything in their manners more commendable than this…. This they consider as the firmest bond of union…. That the woman may not think herself excused from exertions of fortitude, or exempt from the casualties of war, she is admonished…. that she comes to her husband as a partner in toils and dangers; to suffer and to dare equally with him, in peace and in war…. [Further] To limit the increase of children, or put to death any of the later progeny is accounted infamous: and good habits have there more influence than good laws elsewhere.

The loss of the institution of the family over the last fifty or so years is a huge blow to the integrity of our civilization. Yet, it is not the blow that so many hysterical religious talking heads seem to think. The attack on marriage is not just an attack on the union of “one man and one woman,” but a vicious attack against every intermediary institution—from the neighborhood associations, to the Knights of Columbus, to the local mom-and-pop stores, to the elementary schools, to our medical doctors. Indeed, the work and predictions of Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, and Christopher Dawson have all come to pass.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

Unfortunate truth from Jeremy Sammut:

The breeding ground of the new intolerance is, of course, the universities, through which the Left has long marched and captured since the 1970s. Humanities academics across all fields present themselves as champions of diversity in everything from race to gender. But the vast majority have no time for the kind of diversity that really matters in a democratic society — political diversity.
They also like to think of themselves as pluralistic, and as critical and reflective thinkers open to new and challenging ideas. But in these circles, daring to think for oneself, to question the prevailing groupthink, is a recipe for alienation and marginalisation. The political is personal. Deviation from the charmed circled of allegedly enlightened opinion is punished with non-person status — with social and professional death.

Having experienced this first hand and with friends and colleagues facing the same zeitgeist, I would concur most emphatically,

But the decision we all face at this point is to either whinge, moan and thrash about or to move on and make the best of our circumstances by reconstructing an imaginative/intellectual ecology that thrives on open discussion, polite dissension and most importantly logic. I for one favour the latter irrespective of how spiteful and vindictive the left is towards those who differ from their groupthink
.
There appears to be some movement towards just such a conservative resurgence, a reawakening that I hope, trust and pray is real and not merely the dying spasms of an emaciated warrior.

GUN BARREL POWER

Peter Smith speaks an unpalatable[to the leftist mindset] truth:

The reaction of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Dallas when they became aware that shots were being fired is instructive. They scattered in all directions crying out in fear and panic. The police ran towards the danger. There are two lessons to draw I think.
The first is that untrained unarmed people are no match for a trained gunman. This is so obvious why say it? It’s worth saying because we civilians, but particularly progressives and those intent on feminising society, have to realise that power does come out of the barrel of a gun. A few ruthless bad guys with guns can subjugate and enslave many unarmed people (otherwise called ‘sheep’) without any difficulty at all.
Our safety (the safety of us sheep) in Australia is totally dependent on the police and defence forces. In America it is a little different because many millions of citizens have the capacity to defend themselves. I like the American model better because the resurgence of militant Islam is making the world a more threatening place, but that is by the way.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

What eloquence on such a sombre issue.
Edwin Dyga articulates a fundamental issue at the centre of the of the Wests intellectual suicide:

 Decontextualized calls to mercy without a sense of cultural fortitude or national identity eventually beget the politics of surrender. It leads to what is sometimes described as pathological altruism, a selective moral outrage, willing blindness and the inability to take one’s own side in a conflict of competing group interests, all under the impulse of compassion über alles. 

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2016/07-08/weaponising-weaknesses/

A SUICIDAL INDIFFERENCE

There is nothing earth shattering in declaring that public education in the West has sunk to disastrous levels. And the way out of that is not to throw more and more money at the problem because the statistics clearly indicate that money does not equate with quality.

Why is that?

Well it might be as Thomas Sowell opines when he said, 

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Thomas Sowell has identified a significant weakness, perhaps a result of the radical feminization of the culture? (Before you recoil in horror I am merely stating that sometimes a virtue overstated can become a vice). 

However I think that Patrick Deneen has nailed the core problem of our civilisation. 

This is a Notre Dame intellectual who having taught at Princeton University and Georgetown University is flabbergasted at the tragic state of learning and is not shy to say so in ways that might cause a few SJW's to head for the nearest 'safe space' and plunge their heads into an available sand bucket (emphasis mine):

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilisation, a civilisation that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

He explains why this has come about:

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

He continues:

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).

In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalised and deracinated commitment to “social justice”), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgemental”) are hindrances and handicaps.

I happen to consider the end goals of those who have accomplished this 'generational intellectual suicide' to be rather more dark than he gives them credit for, but that is another story for another day.

SOCIALIST UTOPIAS

Might this resonate with those who have been seduced by the socialist dream(nightmare):

""How Socialism Harms the Individual," Read explains how the forced transfer of wealth degrades and cripples everyone involved. In addition to being directly harmed, the victim of the transfer becomes less provident and charitable. The beneficiary becomes less self-reliant and capable. And the enforcer of the transfer becomes power-addled and contemptible. Power corrupts and captivity degrades. Read cuts through the weeds of public policy debate, and counsels the reader to renounce any role in the redistribution of wealth "for his own mental and spiritual health."

BENEATH THE MASK

Check out Brendan O'Neill's sobering account of the reactionary backlash taken by Europe's 'elite'  towards those who voted for Brexit. I mentioned in an earlier post that the left-wing makers of our current culture in their image, would not stand idly by and watch the 'little people usurp their power base and I have sadly been proved right...not that it took a genius to see what was coming down the turnpike:

This is as ugly an anti-masses sentiment as I can remember. And the consequences of it are likely to be dire. Ordinary people are effectively being told they're too dumb for politics. And democracy is being treated as a negotiable commodity that can be cast aside if we the stupid people make the wrong decision. This is a species of tyranny. The mask has slipped. Our normally conscientious elite, feeling bruised and aloof after the referendum, has dispensed with its usual platitudes about "respecting all views," and shown that beneath the polite veneer there lurks an ancient fury with the least and the dumbest; with the masses; with the people.

http://reason.com/archives/2016/06/27/elitist-rage-over-brexit