But the fact is that there have been plenty of philosophies and worldviews which have little or no concern for truth. In North Korea, truth is less important than what the Dear Leader says, even when the latter obviously contradicts the former. That should give us pause, because if such worldviews exist, then there is no reason that we and our descendants might not find ourselves slipping into such a worldview. The idea that truth should be valued by everyone instead of just philosophers – despite costs and consequences – is an exceptional one. This mindset pushed Western countries to develop modern science and integrate high philosophy into our religious traditions. With such a rich heritage stemming from our cultural devotion to truth, it’s worth asking what kind of societies develop such a worldview.

The individual attitude to truth begins in the family. Parents teach their children to tell the truth. But that doesn’t mean they always do, and how lies are responded to determines a child’s attitude to telling the truth in the future. First, imagine what happens when discipline is poor. Children get away with lying and the parents are unable or unwilling to curb this behaviour. The lesson the children learn – and learn very quickly – is that their self-interest can be better served by lying when it suits them. If they’re intelligent, they quickly learn how to lie convincingly and worm their way out when they get caught. For these kinds of children, truth is something to be taken up or discarded at will. It all depends on the payoff. How does that affect the atmosphere of the family? Instead of trust, parents must be suspicious of their children and children are in conflict with their parents. Conflict disincentivizes truth, and that further undermines trust. It’s a vicious cycle. What every parent desires is a child which will tell the truth. Punishment isn’t enough for that to happen; the child must actually want to be truthful. This requires trust. Good parents will give positive reinforcement, especially if the child remains honest even when they’ve done something wrong. With that kind of trust, the child comes to appreciate being honest with your parents as something a good person just does. They appreciate the truth because it is the truth. Trust reinforces truth in the family, and vice versa.

Let’s scale that up to a city. What sort of a city has high conflict? One with high diversity, close proximity, and great uncertainty. When a few neighbourhoods and skyscrapers house wealthy families while the masses starve, those wealthy families are going to value security. Armed guards will accompany them and walls will surround their houses. When cities undergo rapid ethnic shifts, conflicts break out between newcomers and natives. Cultural conflicts occur. Parts of the city become enclaves. This all becomes reflected in the politics of the city. Politicians must increasingly represent particular interest groups to rule effectively. This means that secrecy and intrigue will increase. Fighting corruption becomes an attack by one faction on another. It’s easier to ignore problems like crime by moving away than to face the uphill political battle of doing something about it. Truth, especially harsh truth, gives way to politics. On the other hand, people in high-trust cities feel safer investing in the community. If you’re certain that your tax dollars will go into better infrastructure and not councillor paycheques, you’re more willing to pay them. There are virtuous circles here too. Safe and prosperous cities attract families who invest in their children. Those children are less likely to commit crimes, and the city remains safe and prosperous. High-trust environments reinforce truth-telling and punish betraying social trust. The best ones reinforce the desire to maintain a high-trust environment. What attitude will the resident of such a city have toward truth? They must think about it in relation to business and politics. They are more likely to consider truth and honesty a social responsibility and not simply a private preference.

Finally, let’s consider an entire culture: an ingroup bound by common history, values, ways of life, and social institutions. As in our other examples, a low-trust culture will reinforce conflict. In low-trust cultures, one has to expend a lot of energy and resources on not getting stabbed in the back. Because the culture is low-trust, those who try to demonstrate faith in others become victims of their own good natures. But of course people need each other to survive, so cultural institutions are geared toward decreasing uncertainty. The difference is between cooperating voluntarily and cooperating because you have a gun to your head. Because low-trust cultures must mitigate a huge amount of uncertainty, norms and institutions micromanage interactions and punish eccentrics. In such a culture, social harmony is highly valued. In fact, innovators who violate social norms aren’t likely to last long – both socially and sometimes physically. How many great philosophers, daring scientists, or brilliant inventors will such a culture produce? Now consider a high-trust culture. The marker of such a culture is that social harmony doesn’t need to be enforced by harsh restriction. Because one can assume that others are acting in good faith, the culture allows for more spontaneity. A certain amount of heterodoxy can be tolerated without jeopardizing the culture as a whole. When people can be trusting and truthful in social interaction, those who bring innovation are believed to have the well-being of the group in mind. It seems safe to say that such a culture will be more willing to change in the face of new knowledge. It possesses a certain antifragility. This seems to be a culture where appreciation for truth can thrive.

Having considered these examples, where do our own societies seem to be headed? Millennials are quickly losing trust in both institutions and our fellow human beings, especially in America and Europe. Conflict resulting from mass immigration is rising. Ever tightening speech codes seem to indicate decreasing social trust – remember how our low-trust culture needed to compensate with heavy discipline? Nationalist parties in Europe respond to alienation and distrust. Economic inequality is once again rising. When you view yourself as part of a class in conflict with the rest of society, you won’t want to invest in your enemies – with wealth if you’re rich, or with trust if you’re poor. If a culture which declines in trust also declines in its appreciation for truth, then we are on a dark road indeed. You can’t solve problems when pointing them out and suggesting solutions is immediately interpreted as tribal conflict. Will such a culture maintain the idealism which characterized scientific endeavours? What of the vocational attitude which the most admired philosophers have to their life’s work? Given that many modern philosophers have already become mired in endless deconstruction in the service of Social Progress, the answer seems clear. No doubt there will be many individuals and groups with whom devotion to truth survives. But the minds of our brahmins may well not be among them. And where the brahmins go, the culture and the country follow.

The post The Flight From Truth appeared first on Social Matter.

“It looks so pretty.”

What the Americaness doesn’t notice is that behind the ghostly numbers telling the time, the cathedral is riddled with shrapnel.

I know well enough, since I took the picture myself and poked the gashes and snarls of metal embedded in the doorway. Artillery shells exploded here within recent memory. Here, where German tourists now waddle around in flip-flops and souvenir t-shirts. Here, within fifty paces of the kind of beach described as “must-see” and “breath-taking.” Here, where you can sip a cheap cappuccino in the sun and enjoy the quiet rhythm of lazy tour groups shuffle into sight, into the cathedral, quickly out again, and off to the beach. Swedes; Englishmen; Americans; Germans (Austrians?); Englishmen; Chinese retirees; Japanese retirees; Germans; Slovaks? Not with that economy. Poles perhaps? More Germans. In smoky bars that liven up after dark this menagerie of tourists looks very homogeneous, but during the day the locals turn brown and the foreigners turn red.

This spot is so quiet, so peaceful, so welcoming to the wallets of all kinds of vacationers from all over the wealthy world. And yet this romantic scene of European integration (or shall I say, E.U. integration) belies much darker realities. The obese tourists from Germany sip Fanta Shokata™ by the Coca-Cola Company™ as they wander past twisted metal from 76.2 mm mountain artillery shells embedded into the building. One of these wayfarers’ parents might have done some nasty things to one of the Polish tourists’ grandparents. Possible too some nastiness was exchanged with the forebears of the locals. Likely even some shared nastiness with the locals against the people who launched the shells into this area. Not that it would matter to these Europeans now. They’re modern and progressive. They’ve overcome the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the past. They will all live among one another, in peace and harmony as brothers among nations. The motto of the European Union: “United in diversity.”

What I describe is, of course, not just ordinary in Europe, but in the world. Few places have escaped the judgment of Gnon. Anyone still alive today is descended from a group of people more vicious than the ones who now express themselves only in history books, if even — history is written by the victors, after all. It was not only the cathedral that was injured. In certain notorious parts of Southern Europe, damage from shrapnel can be seen fairly commonly on all sorts of buildings, residential and commercial both. The damage is left unrepaired out of poverty as often as it is left unrepaired out of spite, or defiance. In one Southern capital, NATO bombed a building of the defense ministry in the downtown area of the capital city. For a decade it stayed half-ruined, but no one left their posts or positions. Even in Northern Europe, large undetonated munitions from the last big kerfuffle are found buried among the cities of modern Western civilization.

All these signs are signs of Gnon. They are evidence of natural selection, not necessarily genetic, though often so. More often, and more importantly, they are evidence of the natural selection of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors, attitudes, delusions and outlooks. As right-wingers, we are familiar with the idea of Darwinism as it applies to free enterprise and evolution. These are just the two most obvious examples of the principles of natural selection. Nassim Nicholas Taleb does an excellent job of introducing the same principles of Darwinism and selection into many other domains of life, and does a good job of implying everything is always under natural selection, including the mundane things. One’s beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, delusions and outlooks are under constant selection, though the effect is not as glaring and well-studied as in biology or economics.

In practical terms, this means that if (for example) one is a little bitch, witnessing one’s childhood home turn into vapor will instill a good dose of stoicism into one’s psychology. The shocking, immediate, undeniably-real disproving of the childish pretensions that the world is fair, or that one is entitled to good things, or that the future is always bright and sunny — gone like smoke in a wind. All that will be left will be the communion with reality. Then again, it appears not everyone is equally capable of communing with reality. For some the communion is natural, for some it requires practice, and for some it requires monumental effort. And some unfortunate souls can only wish for mercy from Gnon in the form of a quick and painless selection out of the competition of life.

I note too that I purposely use the word “commune:” it seems that to immerse oneself in reality is the secondary state of man, secondary to the primary state of fantasy and easy delusion. To overcome the primary state, no less an effort than one comparable to the effort to commune with the divine is required — full of ritual, constant reminder, deep contemplation and a degree of faith and/or willpower. Just ask a bodybuilding fundie. Not coincidentally, we reactionaries and traditionalists might be inclined to argue that the divine is real and the real is divine. Communing indeed.

Far be it from me to pontificate on the material causes of an inability to commune with reality. I will, however, take the liberty of pontificating on a link between an inability to commune with reality and a lightening of the requirement to do so every once in a while. He who lives in wealth and comfort, by definition, is absolved of the necessity to “clean house” in his soul. Comfort, it appears, could be defined as a respite from confrontation with Gnon. And yet this definition is a denunciation too, for a respite from Gnon could never be permanent, only temporary — only a distraction. Without the constant confrontations with Gnon and his pressures for natural selection from the smallest habits and thoughts to the greatest civilizations, one cannot respond and adjust to Gnon’s new conditions for survival. One consequently only delays the potential for a permanently selective event, one that selects one soul, heart and body whole straight out of the race.

Deprived of the rough guiding hand of Gnon, someone like my Americaness can only see the pretty parts. Trained to be human not on the dictates of Gnon but of Elua, of human wish and folly, there can be no shrapnel in the pretty little church. Who would shell a cathedral? Why would they ever have a reason? Don’t they know we’ve reached a modern paradise of wealth and freedom and fraternity and comfort for all? Didn’t they get the memo? Who forgot to tell them?

Somehow, the West, which drowns in its own wealth, has become atrophied to the pushes and proddings of Gnon on a mass scale. Avoiding Gnon in the form of everything from STDs to staggering societal debt has become a popular past-time. It seems forgotten that denying Gnon sacrifice is unwise, for he can only return later with twice the vengeance. The West operates under the false belief that no selection will ever have to be countenanced again — equality shall rule, and no one shall ever have to judge anyone else for any reason. Not even Gnon may judge! This belief is clearly insane. Not that it would now matter to the Europeans milling around the cathedral. They’re modern and progressive. They’ve overcome the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the past. They will all live among one another, in peace and harmony as brothers among nations.

And yet, that’s what the Yugoslavs said in 1989. And would you just look at those cathedral doors?

The post Comfort Kills appeared first on Social Matter.

Source: Wikipedia.

Huntington himself offered some explanations for why civilizations clash in the typically modern, Harvard style of over-explaining fairly banal concepts, i.e. civilization is profoundly felt, profound differences cause conflict, etc. — not news to anyone who was socialized outside the coddling reach of the American progressive clerisy. More liberal-minded Westerners, especially ones who serve as functionaries of the American Empire overseas (what has been variously labelled the Cathedral, the Blue Empire or USG), tend to be unable to grasp these basic tenets of Homo sapiens, owing to the degree they themselves have actually evolved into another species, Homo economicus. Well-meaning progressive bureaucrats proselytizing on the ancient blood-soaked soil of the Balkans, for example, exit largely unsuccessfully, and with a progressive faith either deeply strengthened or fundamentally shaken. Adored Western celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch have to apologize profusely for using innocuous and vaguely outdated terms like “colored people,” for fear of offending the omnipresent Other. Elsewhere float around sectarian paeans with tenderhearted, tolerant lyrics such as:

Both women and children / Throw them off a bridge!

Your mosques will pay for each of our churches / … Let them kneel when they see Jesus on the cross

Soup from your blood / Cake from your flesh

And, as if purposely trying to further corroborate Huntington’s outlined clash of civilizations:

Serbia — on your feet, win many battles against …

Modern barbarians from America who nurture degenerates.

Even in the fairly neutered Federal Republic of Germany, an extremely popular rapper like Fler can brag about his “blue eyes, white skin” and proclaim “People say I’m a Nazi / I don’t care, say whatever you want.” Identity is not quite out of fashion yet, even for Europeans, though the thought of similar proclamations happening a little further West is nigh unthinkable. PEGIDA, despite internal drama, is making waves. These contemporary examples from the yet-to-be-enlightened parts of white Europe abound. But I digress — back to the clash of civilizations.

In the years since the early 1990’s, Huntington’s predictions of conflict have not been proven wrong, as a more extreme fan of Francis Fukuyama might have wished. The ‘bloody borders’ of the Islamic civilization have only intensified in violence. Various conflicts — political, military, economic or otherwise — can be identified at essentially all the limits of Huntington’s civilizations. Conflicts can be identified within them too, but the bloodiest and most inflammatory ones inevitably occur at the eternally-disputed boundaries between civilizations. Take another gander at the map above. Between Orthodoxy and Islam we get wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Caucuses. Between Islam and Africa we get Boko Haram. Between Islam and the Hindu civilization we get perpetual terrorism. Between Orthodoxy and the West we get wars in Croatia and Slovenia and the current crisis in Ukraine. Between the West and Latin America, we get quiet rumblings of future upheaval. And of course, between the West and Islam, we get Charlie Hebdo. The clashes of civilizations which are revving up between Huntington’s West, Orthodoxy and Islam will be the defining historical movements of this century.

Skeptics of the gravity of the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam ought to consider the fact that in a mere 14 years since the September 11th attacks in 2001, practically every major Western city has suffered some sort of Islamic attack. New York City, Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Brussels, Glasgow, Boston, Ottawa, Sydney, Stockholm — all have tasted the bitter brew of jihad. To that list we can even add smaller locales like Fort Hood, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Endeavour Hills and the French cities of Toulouse, Montauban, Dijon, Nantes and Joué-lès-Tours. Granted, these attacks vary significantly in form, organization and casualties. The highly-coordinated attacks of 9/11 were not quite the same as the incident involving the fanatic shouting “Allahu akbar!” and mowing down Dijonnais pedestrians in a van. Yet, somehow, I am not comforted knowing that, when strolling through the greatest centers of Western civilization, I can now expect a number greater than zero of Islam-inspired mass shootings, beheadings, bombings (suicide and otherwise), stabbings, hostage-takings, hijackings, assassinations and vehicular manslaughters — all of which, just since the start of the new millennium, have taken place on Western streets where blue-eyed, white-skinned children used to wander and play, at will, carefree.

A bit belatedly, French special police hunt for Islamists with whom to do the ol’ civilization-clashing.

Huntington’s Orthodox civilization has had its fair share of struggles with Islam as well, from Serbia’s tit-for-tat genocidal episodes with neighboring Muslims in the 90’s to Russia’s mindbogglingly violent Chechen saga. Chechens as a group are a bit of a crack team for Islamic civilization. Only Chechens could find time to nearly simultaneously terrorize both America and Russia in their own territory, while also leading the establishment of a brutally sincere Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East. Not bad for an ethnic group barely 2 million strong.

The Great Unspoken Truth in the West, that groups like PEGIDA are attempting to speak, is that the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is not one that could be traditionally regarded as inevitable. Efforts of Europeans long gone have put firm geographical barriers between the West and Islam. The poorest, most rural, most fundamentalist Muslims find not high walls and sentries at Europe’s proverbial gates, but secular governments welcoming them with patronizing words and generous benefits. These Muslims follow the money, slowly accumulate in urban ghettos, and, sooner or later, the clash of civilizations occurs. A couple of left-wing cartoonists are riddled with bullets. Alternately, Western interference in Muslim countries half-way across the world contributes to increasing proportions of dead, angry, and/or gun-toting Muslims. Sooner or later, some armed and aggrieved (usually by the same Western powers) Mahometans come up with a way to strike back at the Great Satan. A couple of skyscrapers experience — ahem — “controlled demolition.” The West, through a combination of schizophrenic foreign policies and reckless immigration policies, is forcing a clash of civilizations that was last settled at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

The once-imagined “Third Way” of Mitteleuropa was mortally wounded by the Boot of Progress in 1918, and put out of its misery in 1945. Western “Progress” and Eastern “Progress” stared each other down until the East buckled under the weight of its Marxist delusions in 1991. The West, triumphant, sounded its own death knell with talk of the “end of history.” History, the cheeky little scrub that he is, came back as quickly as he disappeared upon hearing victory bells. Now the civilization of the West is contending with an Orthodox jihad and an Islamic one, neither of which it is adequately prepared to face, since it can’t even admit it has any opponents left to face. The Islamic civilization, held at bay for more than 300 years, is invited into a West deeply doped up with an ersatz eschatology. The Orthodox civilization, now a quarter-century after the ignominious death of its own ersatz eschatology, is flexing new muscle. The problem with progressivism is that reality doesn’t progress — only narratives do. From TIME:

“This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into,” [U.S. President Barack Obama] said in his 36-minute address. “After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology. The United States and NATO do not seek any conflict with Russia. In fact, for more than 60 years we have come together in NATO not to claim other lands but to keep nations free.”

Any perceptive watcher of the world will notice there are more than a few ideological differences between Russia and America to complement the geopolitical ones. Considering NATO’s aggressive expansion since 1991 into Eastern Europe and the otherwise post-Soviet space that was Russia’s proverbial backyard, the claim that NATO is not about “claiming other lands” seems suspect, to say the least. Every great empire in history has tried to frame its own expansion as anything but temporary naked conquest. The American President’s words are in any case as disingenuous as can be. The ruling class of the United States, the Cathedral, the self-organizing consensus of academia, the media and the state bureaucracy (that, for far more complicated reasons, conveniently organizes around chauvinistic left-wing progressivism), viciously hates President Vladimir Putin, Russia, and the Russian people. The politically correct descendants of America’s Puritans cannot stand the forthright, alcoholic Russians, who refuse to join the “international community” and don’t see why anyone would want to sacralize the act of shoving male penis into male anus. For this transgression against progressivism, Russians deserve to burn alive. Russians, surprisingly, aren’t too fond of the choice the “end of history” has offered them — your ass or your life! — and are rather vehemently organizing, opposing, and combating the West’s latest intrusions into Orthodox civilization.

On the bumpy road towards a clash of civilizations.

John R. Schindler (a.k.a. “The XX Committee”), former U.S. intelligence spook, has more than a few interesting things to say about the Russian perspective of this ongoing confrontation.

If nothing else, the current crisis has demonstrated to Russians, with Kremlin prodding, that the United States remains their Main Enemy that it was for decades, now led by the arrogant and weak Obama, who is hated by the Russian public. [Author’s Note: 76% of Russians “personally hate” Obama.]

[…]

To the shock and dismay of hopeful Westerners, including nearly all NATO leaders, the hard hit of sanctions has caused Russians to hate the West, not Putin. Most Russians view their war in Ukraine as a legitimate defense of Russians and Russian interests, certainly nothing like America’s aggressive wars of choice halfway around the world, and they are backing the Kremlin now.

[…]

The Kremlin now believes they are at war with the United States, an Orthodox Holy War in the eyes of many Russians, and that struggle is defensive and legitimate.

[…]

…what they are battling against is not the Ukrainian government, nor American neoconservatives, rather the Devil himself.

President Putin inaugurated the New Year by signing off on a new military doctrine designating NATO as Russia’s #1 adversary. It emphasized Russia’s right to respond to conventional threats with both nuclear and conventional weapons. Schindler does not see good things in the future of Poroshenko’s Ukraine. Huntington’s Orthodox civilization advances consciously on the West.

Serbia — on your feet, win many battles against …

Modern barbarians from America who nurture degenerates.

The West (and Europe in particular), Russia and Islam form a dueling trio in the 21st century iteration of the clash of civilizations. The problem for the West is that it seems to be the only participant unaware that a contest is underway. The Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris occurred on the very same day rebel French writer Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Soumission was published — of all things, the novel’s plot concerns a future France ruled by Islamists. God apparently has a sense of humor, if only a sick one. Houellebecq’s fictional (or are they really?) Islamists take power over the nationalist opposition with the crucial support of France’s left-wing establishment, dutifully following its progressive directives all the way to the graveyard of civilizations. Following the non-fictional Paris attacks, Western mainstream media duly warned us that the real danger was not swarthy fanatics from the hostile continent across the Mediterranean, but Islamophobia.

In a sense, they are only rejecting one half of the truth for the more palatable half. If you’re a progressive leftist or liberal, especially one in Europe, you’re going to be targeted by both Islamists and Islamophobes. Anders Behring Breivik, Europe’s only notable right-wing terrorist in recent memory, bombed Norwegian government offices then shot up 69 people at the youth summer camp for Norway’s Labour Party. He did this because the Labour Party was supporting Islamic immigration to Norway, a typically leftist thing to do. Breivik did not bomb a mosque and he did not shoot up a madrasa. The motley Islamists who perpetrated Paris’ most recent attacks targeted Charlie Hebdo, a police officer, some random passersby, and a Jewish grocery store. They did this because Charlie Hebdo was blaspheming (a typical leftist thing to do), because the police officer was French (a typical leftist thing to be), because the Jewish grocery store was Jewish (another typical leftist thing to be) and because the random passersby were French (don’t make me repeat myself). The Islamists did not target: Front National, neo-Nazis, Varg Vikernes, Catholic churches, far-right-wing bloggers. Funny that, innit?

This bizarre convergence of interests among radical rightists in Europe and radical Islamists has hardly escaped notice. None other than Michel Houellebecq examines this increasingly incongruous situation in the novel Soumission. Still only available in French and German (an English translation is scheduled for September 2015), yours truly had to rely on this little compilation of reviews by Steve Sailer for enlightenment (yours truly was not about to spend upwards of 22 EUR on the German version — not with a time preference as aristocratically low as yours’ truly!). I will assume you read the linked compilation of reviews, and I will highlight only the most important parts, which are substantial nonetheless:

The new university President, Muslim convert, and rising political star Robert Rediger is revealed as a former identitarian [Read: nationalist] who has quickly advanced up through the ranks and is becoming one of the ideological leaders of the Islamic movement.

[…]

As the novel goes on, the mystery concerning the identitaire role in the new regime only mounts. There were already questions during the “civil war’ as to the various motivations of the jihadi youth and the identitaires. Since they were almost always hooded, it was hard to tell who exactly was attacking whom and there were debates over which side had more of an interest to disrupt the elections. But slowly it is revealed just how much ideological influence Roger Rediger has on the new Muslim government. The clincher is that next door in Belgium, a new Islamic regime comes to power headed by an ethnic European who has well-known roots in the identitaire movement. In Lenin’s classic Who/Whom framework of power relations, it becomes increasingly clear that far from being the weak and subjective Whom, at least some European far right nativist identitaires are actually on the power-holding Who side of the struggle.

But why would the right-wing nativist identitaires want to help push Muslim overlords into power in their country? Jacques searches the internet and finds a very interesting article written by none other than Roger Rediger:

The whole article was an appeal to his former identitaire and traditionalist comrades. It’s tragic, he pleaded fervently, that irrational hostility towards Islam prevents them from recognizing the obvious: they were for the most part in perfect agreement with the Muslims. On the rejection of atheism and humanism, on the need for the subordination of women, on the return to patriarchy: their struggles from any point of view were exactly the same. But this fight to establish a new and natural phase of civilization could not now be conducted in the name of Christianity. No, it’s only with Christianity’s newer, simpler, and truer sister religion Islam that this battle could be waged.

Therefore it was Islam which now had to carry the torch. Because of all the dainty rhetoric, cajoling, and shameful stroking by progressives, the Catholic Church could no longer resist moral decadence. It was now unable to clearly and vigorously resist gay marriage, abortion rights and women moving into the workforce. We had to face the facts: the church had reached a repugnant degree of decline. Western Europe was no longer in any condition to save itself – just as ancient Rome had not been able to so the 5th century. The influx of massive numbers of immigrants — who were still under the influence of traditional cultures which not only accepted natural hierarchies, but also obliged both the submission of and respect due to women — was an historic opportunity for a moral and familial realignment of Europe. In fact this opened the prospect for a new golden age on the old continent. While these new immigrant populations were sometimes Christian; but we must admit they were mostly Muslim.

Roger Rediger was the first to admit that medieval Christianity was a great civilization whose artistic achievements remain forever alive in the memory of men. But little by little it lost ground, medieval Christianity was forced to compromise with rationalism and submit to secular power, and by degrees, was doomed. And as to why? Basically, according to Rediger, it was a mystery; God had simply decided it would be so.

 

Deus vult?

Houellebecq’s identitarians use the mantle of Islam to finally subvert and defeat the decadent Western order. Western civilization, decrepit but poisonous, is finally replaced by Islamic civilization, with the twist that Islam’s existing adherents from the warmer climes only do half the job of replacement — the other half enthusiastically accomplished by native rightists! Whereas today Leftists use the Muslims to buttress their electoral margins contra the Right, tomorrow the Right will use the Muslims to buttress their cultural margins contra the Left. Instead of fighting the Left head-on as the elitist progressive’s low-status, hated country bumpkin, Houellebecq’s rightist simply converts to Islam and enjoys his role as the left-winger’s minority dominatrix, meting out white guilt and otherwise enjoying traditional life.

As a Eurocentric Catholic chauvinist, I take great issue with this prophecy. I am unwilling to sit idle while Europe turns into Saudi Arabia (or worse, Syria) and the United States turns into Brazil. It is lucky, then, that Houellebecq’s perfect timing less provides an argument for Islamism than it illuminates the clash of civilizations soon coming to a head. For Houellebecq’s insightful prophecy is not that Islam will inevitably replace Western civilization, but that Western civilization will be necessarily replaced soon, by something. Islam provides just one convenient path to explore for a writer of fiction. I will now point out that in the same way that France’s rightists, nationalists and identitarians share some uncomfortably similar interests with jihadists, they — crucially — share just as many, if not more, with the other “jihadists” –Huntington’s Orthodox civilization. “Europe’s Far Right and Putin Get Cozy, With Benefits For Both.”

“In Russia today there is a mix of exalting nationalism, exalting the church and Christian values,” says Lellouche. “They are now replacing the red star with the cross, and they are representing themselves as the ultimate barrier against the Islamization of the continent.”

The Christmas tree outside of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral is traditionally purchased by French groups and worshippers. This year it was a gift from the Russian government.

Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front, has made no secret of her admiration for Putin and has traveled to Moscow on several occasions. It seems to have paid off. Last month a Russian bank lent the National Front $11 million.

Two more salient points:

1. “Lellouche” is Pierre Lellouche, a “member of a mainstream conservative party.” His dismissive tone of Front National and its Russian orientations tells me all I need to know. You can always be sure a “conservative” is doing the opposite of what he should be doing if he wanted to defeat the Left, and will always be thinking the opposite of what he should be thinking. Don’t be a “conservative”– remember the rules.

2. One of Houellebecq’s details in his story of France’s Islamization is the new role of far-off, foreign, resource-rich Islamic nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia in providing funding for France’s elite universities (presumably suffering financial difficulties). Am I too optimistic to see the parallel with a far-off, foreign, resource-rich Orthodox nation like Russia providing funding to a French institution like the Front National, or to the Notre Dame Cathedral’s Christmas Tree?

Houellebecq’s prophecy for France’s future under Islam ought to be reconsidered with the three-pronged clash of civilizations in mind. It is not Islamic civilization, but Orthodox, that stands the better chance of rescuing the ruins of the West. The two faces of European civilization — Western and Eastern, Latin and Greek, Roman and Byzantine, Catholic and Orthodox — have shared a fraught, but fraternal, history. The Russians put an end to the madness of Napoleon. They put an end to the madness of Hitler. They may, perhaps, put an end to the madness of Obama. Trapped in the abyss of its own vast wealth, the West lobotomizes itself with mad ideologies that dissolve families and all other organic bonds, replacing them with sub-optimal publicly-produced substitutes. It normalizes insanity and pathologizes health in the quest for eternal equality. Sickness, sterility and death are touted as moral advancements, while all expressions of natural virility are feared, medicated, suppressed, diverted, or finally quashed by the State. The results — such as plunging fertility rates — speak for themselves. I myself hear it now already; but in thirty years, the silence of a missing generation shall be deafening. I can only hope that the silence, once in a while, will be interrupted not by the shrill howls of the muezzin, but by the ringing and chiming of old church bells — and perhaps even the laughter of children playing in the streets, carefree.

The post The Clash of Civilizations in 2015: The West, Russia and Islam appeared first on Social Matter.

The professor was an excitable and amiable middle-aged man, fairly chubby by North American standards. His swarthy complexion, gleaming bald head and bushy mustache betrayed his foreign ancestry — an Egyptian Coptic Christian from Cairo, long since emigrated to the New World, and long since employed at his hallowed American university, though he had never quite managed to master that standard, saccharine accent of the American Midwest. His Arab speech was deep and gravelly, yet still uniquely colorful. He could not utter a sentence so much as perform it, effortlessly gesturing and gesticulating, hopping and hawing with each sentiment he expressed. Simple questions were whispered, furtive inquiries, well-wishes were joyous spasms. Ordinary greetings, from this Middle-Eastern Santa Claus, looked to lifeless American onlookers like two long-lost brothers reuniting after a lifetime apart — except the one portly, bespectacled, mustachioed brother was obviously far happier than the other one, who invariably seemed confused or surprised. Professor Al-Santa ibn Claus’ verve was nonetheless infectious, and I would be shocked to learn he was anything but beloved by his students. Born and raised on the ancient Nile, this smiling pedagogue was a living reminder of a bygone era when the sad stereotype of the bitter Marxist academic still didn’t exist.

The young lady conversing with him — if memory serves correctly — was an undergraduate student at the university. She was an international student, a Turkish girl from Istanbul, Turkey’s largest and liveliest metropolis, geographically (and culturally) bridging two continents. Her social lineage, much like that of most Turkish immigrants to the United States (and deeply unlike that of the infamous Turkish immigrants to Germany — but I digress!), was borne from the European half of Istanbul. Turkey, though now making sensational headlines as a rising power sliding into Islamic fundamentalism, still has a significant, wealthy, secular upper-class; liberal cosmopolitans who wish Turkey could join the European Union, and who explain to non-Turks the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President Recep T. Erdoğan the same way pious American liberals used to explain the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President George W. Bush. These Turkish Europhiles and Occidentalists, concentrated in Istanbul, spawned this idealistic young woman who joyfully gushed about her future plans to work in non-profits aiding Palestinian refugees and Kurdish orphans. Like all true liberal, upper-class E.U.-peans — or, in her case, aspiring ones — her tender bleeding heart couldn’t countenance the horrors the Zionist apartheid state imposed on her downtrodden brothers and sisters in Palestine. Her English — likely carefully nurtured by her urbane parents, who likely put her in one of Istanbul’s many French, British or American international schools — was impeccable, with only the slightest veneer of Anatolian staccato modulating the same American accent the animated Egyptian could only shovel out in bursts of Cairene vim. This scioness of Turkey’s aspiring class of secular Eurocrats was the kind of girl who would soon spend nights hunched over her laptop screen in champagne-revolutionary fervor, impulsively tweeting #OccupyGeziPark.

(No such literary introduction will be given of yours truly, I am afraid. In this anecdote, I am but the anonymous catalyst for a revealing conversation.)

Rather poorly read on the contemporary Middle East, but curious to no small degree, I asked the professor about the level of social conservatism in Egypt. Do Muslims pray often? Is there a large black market for alcohol? Is there religious tension because of the Copts? In my pre-reactionary, progressive-by-default naiveté, I even asked “Are women in Egypt oppressed?” The professor answered my questions eagerly, with all the expected gesticulations and mini-dramatic-performances. The Turkish girl and I listened, rapt, as one is when witnessing such a masterful union of entertaining affectation and unornamented truth. Finally, he informed us of the state of women’s liberation in Egypt:

(I strive to convey his affable, slightly-broken English.)

“In Egypt, there is no girls living alone; single girls alone, this — it is not allowed socially! It is unapproved in Egyptian society. Egyptian girls must always live with the family if they are not married. The married girls live with the husbands, yes, but the single girls always live with the families.”

The female Istanbulite’s eyebrows leaped up in anticipation of news of an incoming women’s rights violation. “Trigger warnings” weren’t a thing back then, so far as I can remember, but even if they were, this bombastic professor would not have come with one. Asks the Turkess: “Women can’t live alone? Why? What if they’re students?”

The professor continued gracefully with his energetic explanation: “Aha, yes, sometimes if the girls are students they live in the dormitory. But this is rare, very rare. Not common, I think. Girls who are studying at the university also live with the family mostly. In Egypt it is not acceptable in society for the girl to live alone. If girls will live alone in an apartment, this will be shocking, it will be disgraceful. Even sometimes the janitor in the building, or the electrician, or the neighbor, he will knock on the door or he will find the girl, and he will say ‘Hey, you! What are you doing? Where is your husband? Where is your father? Why are you living alone here? Are you having men come in your apartment? Do you meet men there? Do they pay you to come there? What are you doing there alone?'”

The Turkish girl’s eyebrows at this point were practically detached from her head, so wide were her eyes with shock: “That’s… that’s horrible! Women have a right to live by themselves if they want to! Women have a right…” More high-pitched, futile cosmopolitan protests followed, but the conversation had essentially ended there, with an unperturbed professor shrugging his shoulders and rushing off to a meeting (with a dramatized wave, a hint of a bow and a gracious “Ma’a As-Salaama!” [“Good-bye!” in Arabic] — as always) and an amused me, softly smiling outwardly, and inwardly chuckling the kind of mischievous chuckle one can only enjoy after witnessing a truly monumental yet unintentional trolling. The disquieted young lady turned to me slack-jawed for reassurances for her offended liberal sensibilities, but I too had places to be, and quickly emulated the professor’s neutral exit. “Well, I guess that’s just how it is over there! See ya later!”

- – -

I love interacting with people from cultures that an effeminate Harvard sociologist would consider “hopelessly backwards.” These cultures, though often deeply alien in many ways to our own Western/European tradition and civilization, nevertheless share large similarities with the old Western world one reads about in history books. Though I doubt this fine site’s astute readers will need the point of the anecdote explicitly repeated, I will repeat it for the sake of the stray left-wingers who sometimes stumble into our territory: in Egypt, a girl living alone is immediately and automatically assumed to be a prostitute. And, hilariously, by the standards of Islamic Egyptian society, single girls living alone in the West are invariably precisely that: whores. And, distressingly, single girls living alone in the West are invariably whores by the standards of the Western society of 1950, of 1850, of 1750, 1650… and every century of Western society all the way down to 50 BC, and earlier. Women have four lifetime sexual partners on average, says The Telegraph. I will venture a guess that this figure is far below the actual amount — nobody wants to admit to being a slut or a whore, after all, even anonymously to a researcher. Despite abysmal modern sexual mores, even four is about three more than millennia of human civilization would have considered appropriate for a properly-reared young maiden. I can hear the protests already: “Not all women are like that! Some women who live alone aren’t whores!” Averages, baby, averages — I’m not here to talk about outliers, who always exist. The strong, independent, feminist woman high off women’s liberation sleeps around like a man, and this makes her a whore by any standard of civilization.

Whore of Babylon: Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Just kidding; she’s been around since 1969, corrupting your daughters and fighting manspreading, mansplaining, manterrupting… no, no joke, Google any of one the three.

Average age at marriage for Western women only ever increases, and the divorce rate likewise only slowly climbs upwards and upwards. More fornication, more adultery, more divorce, more bastard children, more fatherless children, more broken families, more pornography — not to mention more public (and even state-backed) sexual perversion of all kinds of vile multicolored stripes. The only related metric that is decreasing is total fertility rate. To maintain a stable population, a nation’s fertility rate would have to hover around 2.1 children per women — enough children to replace the parents, and an extra 0.1 children to make up for all the people who die prematurely from accidents, war, disease, excessive masturbation, and what-have-you. A nation with a fertility rate below the magic number of 2.1 will steadily shrink in population until it disappears from the Earth. How is the West doing with fertility rates then? United States: 1.97. United Kingdom: 1.88. France: 1.98. Russia: 1.53. Spain: 1.50. Italy: 1.48. Germany: 1.42. Tiny Iceland is managing 2.08, but Portugal a dismal 1.32. Poor Bosnia is at 1.28, one of the lowest in the world. Austria, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Cyprus and Slovakia are all below 1.50. These countries are quite literally slowly disappearing from the map. For a sobering comparison, the smoldering crater known as Afghanistan is at 5.00, war-torn Iraq is at 4.06, and the dysfunctional Congo is at 5.98. Even North Korea is managing a 2.00 fertility rate — the same country where amassing a nuclear arsenal and luxurious liquor cabinet for the Supreme Leader is more important than preventing mass starvation and widespread famine. A North Korean family could probably survive for a year on one of their Supreme Leader’s many chins, and they’re still reproducing more than Americans ostensibly living in the vast land of plentiful bounty and limitless opportunity.

Seriously, just look at this guy.

This 21st century Bacchanalia is flashy and fun, bursting with a vibrant hedonism of clubs, bars, festivals, conventions, easy sex, easy drugs, easy booze, easy desserts, easy work, constant novelty and stimulation from the Internet, the television and from Hollywood, but it will end us all. If everyone is avoiding family life and child-rearing so that they can spend more time doing what our grandparents (and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, and great-great-great-grandp…) would have called “mortally sinning,” we’ll all be gone without a legacy before the end of the century. When one speaks of “mortal sin,” one must remember that the very English word “mortal” is derived from the ancient Latin word for death, mors. Our forefathers are looking down on us as we commit the most pathetic and protracted suicide in history. Rather grim, innit?

If you are a standard, milquetoast, liberal-by-default Westerner, this might all sound like racist, sexist and homophobic vomit. I would remind you then that, in our culture, we have multiple mainstream, high-tech systems for helping complete strangers prostitute each other. Take Seeking Arrangement, a popular service that helps young females, typically college students (the girls who, in any other era, would have been nobly raising society’s next generation), whore themselves out to unscrupulous and wealthy men for expensive gifts and money. Like Monty Python’s rude French sentry, I vomit in the general direction of this service. Prostitution is still largely illegal in the West, de jure. It seems we make some exceptions, however, when the pimps and prostitutes can satisfactorily rationalize their whoring to us — just enough to soothe our dwindling consciences and atrophied probity.

Alternatively, consider the extremely popular mobile phone application Tinder, “rumored to have upwards of 10 million daily users” making 15 million “matches” a day. What purpose does Tinder serve? Perhaps the “Tinderfessions” Twitter feed, with a mind-boggling 188,000 followers, can shed some light. Looks like Tinder is useful for supporting adultery (“Met my boyfriend on Tinder. Pro: so hot, great in bed. Con: has a wife…and 3 kids. – Emma”), taking the hassle out of fornication (“Swiped right on a girl that was ahead of me in line at Publix. Heard her phone go off when we matched. We banged 2 hours later – Chase”), helping modern-day troubadours build harems (“Been hooking up with a match for a month now. On my way to front stage seats cuz the lead singer of this band is in love with my pussy – Kas”), and most nobly of all, helping all-American sweethearts become home-wrecking, blackmailing whores: “Blackmailing a match I fucked who tried to hide the fact he was married. Can’t wait for my new Macbook Air to arrive. #ThanksTinder – Kim.” Thank you, Tinder, thank you indeed! “Mother of 3 slept over and fucked all night while their dad babysat them at home. She was Constantly cumming, and came in her pussy twice -F” Good Lord. When did the West run so low on self-restraint, virtue, shame, guilt, conscience, charity and kindness that 56 people felt a need to “favorite” the kind of morally reprehensible behavior that destroys the lives of three children? 15 million matches a day: when you hear someone say Cthulhu is digesting our civilization, this is what they mean.

Paraphrasing the admirable James A. Donald, the West of the 18th century considered women so lacking in continence that they would crawl through nine miles of broken glass to fornicate with their demon lover if not restrained by their husbands, fathers, brothers and pastors. In Egypt, a sexist, homophobic, hopelessly backwards Islamic society, girls living alone, beyond the reach of their family, are assumed to be whores. The Egyptians, I think, are not as backwards as we chauvinistically presume, since it seems their intuition about the behavior of unrestrained females has been more than comprehensively vindicated by the state of Western society today, where all girls can live alone (and do much more besides) — and where all girls are whores. Feminism failed. Modernity failed. We got women’s liberation and ubiquitous technology of unimaginable power and complexity, and the result was not a new Golden Age for civilization, but a new Golden Age for depravity.

“Modern,” “enlightened,” “liberal,” protestations aside, the situation in the West of 2015 is clear. Females can live alone, vote, run for office, commit infanticide, get away with murder, work men’s jobs, receive preferential treatment in universities and corporations, deny fathers their children, ruin innocent men with false accusations of rape & assault, and almost anything else they want to do — with the full support of the educational system, the media and the exponentially-expanding police-surveillance state. The dream of women’s liberation has been achieved, and then some. And then some. And then some more. And even some more after that! Females can live alone, unlike in Egypt. Females can live alone, and they do exactly what our 18th century forefathers, and 21st century Egyptian fellows a continent away intuited that they would do — they whore themselves. “Women’s liberation.” Women’s liberation is women’s prostitution. We should have known better.

If I miraculously became the Supreme God-Dictator of the West tonight, and upon finishing my gourmet breakfast of bacon, eggs and the finest Caspian caviar the next morning, I issued an edict that no woman may live alone, what would happen to the West’s marriage and divorce rates? The fertility rate? The bastardy rate? The amount of fornication, adultery, pornography and sexual perversion? The number of broken families? The number of kids shuffling between Mommy’s house and Daddy’s house on alternating weekends? (Or, more likely, just watching Mommy shuffle boyfriends while Daddy contemplates the taste of gun metal with a restraining order trembling in his hand.) What would happen to the rates of suicide, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, mass shootings, herbivore men, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders, self-radicalization, depression, gambling, drug abuse, obesity, cat-lady spinsters, gang violence, self-harm, ethno-religious tension (and violence), juvenile delinquency, social alienation and hollow shambling wrecks of human beings one missed medication away from walking off the edge of a thirty-story building?

A metaphor for Western society: not really working out as planned.

Quite simply, if we put every woman back in the home, back next to the hearth, and gave her one son and one daughter to educate, civilize, inform, teach, nourish, protect, cultivate, cuddle, cherish and love, what would happen to our society? What if we gave her a fit, cultured, intelligent and loving husband who could teach his son baseball and read Cinderella to his daughter? A husband who didn’t spend his boyhood drugged out on ADD medications, his teenage years drugged out on cannabis, and his young adulthood drunk out of his mind? A husband who was taught to appreciate Beethoven, recognize Van Gogh’s Starry Night, recite a little poetry in French, and recognize a Biblical quote in Ancient Greek? A husband who was taught to shoot a gun, punch a drunkard, row a canoe, and hike up a mountain without complaining? Who kept a library where the television might’ve been, and who knew who his father was, his grandfather, and their fathers and grandfathers before them? Who worshiped the same God as his most distant ancestors, and lived on the very same land they conquered long ago? Who maintained and honored the inheritance bequeathed to him by his forefathers, both material and spiritual, and left it in better condition than he received it, and passed it on to his own sons and daughters? Might we see a resurgence of the stable, loving family? Might we actually see — trigger warning – a better society?

Dramatized wave. Hint of a bow. Knowing wink. “Ma’a As-Salaama!“

The post Women’s Liberation is Women’s Prostitution appeared first on Social Matter.