Thursday, February 25, 2016

You Can’t Ponder Social Pathologies...

     ...without simultaneously being struck by their correlations with race, ethnicity, and identity.

     In a recent article, John Derbyshire considered at some length whether those three conceptions, which are interrelated in ways both obvious and subtle, are relevant to the question: What does it mean to be an American?

     The article is too rich with important observations for me to do it violence by pulling any of its meatier bits free of their context. It deserves your undivided attention from top to bottom. However, one early passage strikes me as excerpt-able: Derbyshire’s probe of whether America is a “proposition nation:”

     Suppose I were to trek up into the highlands of Ethiopia, get myself invited into the hut of some illiterate Amhara goatherd, and explain our founding documents to him; and suppose he were to respond with enthusiastic agreement. Did he thereby instantly become an American?

     Conversely, here is a U.S. citizen every one of whose forebears arrived here before the Revolution, and whose male forebears fought with distinction in our country’s wars. He strongly disagrees with the principles of the Founders, and would have preferred we become a Christian theocracy. Should he be stripped of his citizenship?

     I regard this as important because it bears on the frequently derided concept of an American culture.

     Take that Ethiopian goatherd and drop him into Nebraska, perhaps on the outskirts of Lincoln. (Yes, he can bring his goats.) Would he be able to survive, much less flourish? More important yet: Would he abide by the behavioral norms, positive and negative, that characterize the American culture:

  • The legal “thou shalt nots:” no murder, theft, fraud, perjury, false accusations.
  • The cultural “thou shalts:” public decency; a certain minimum of neighborliness; adherence to the rules of civilized behavior in public accommodations (e.g., a grocery store).

     Note that the advocate for a Christian theocracy would have no problem with any of that. He’s a product of the American culture, having absorbed it from birth. Would our Ethiopian goatherd pick it up in time to avoid being jailed or lynched?

     The social pathologies of our era derive from the rejection of the American culture, as summarized above. That rejection correlates powerfully with race, ethnicity, and identity:

  • The preponderance of violent crimes and crimes against property are committed by Negroes.
  • Exclaves where American law is not honored are dominated by Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and African immigrants.
  • Persons who identify as other than American account for a great deal of the tension and disorder in our cities.

     The most important contrast here is between the above-named groups and the Eastern European immigrant waves of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Those persons arrived knowing only that they were leaving their homelands. They knew little about America; many believed much that was not so. They had little or no acquaintance with the Christian-Enlightenment heritage upon which America is based. Yet they assimilated swiftly, became sound, law-abiding citizens, and flourished.

     They were powerfully influenced by the institutions of the time, especially the public schools, which had as a principal mission the assimilation of immigrant children. They were not accommodated in maintaining the cultures from which they came:

  • They were expected to learn English.
  • They were expected to abide by American laws and customs.
  • They were expected to transfer their allegiance to the United States.

     Those late 19th and early 20th Century Eastern European and Asian immigrants did all those things. They didn’t even regard them as impositions. Yet today we make excuses for rapists and molesters on the grounds of their “culture.” We condone riots in our cities because of “the legacy of slavery.” We refrain from criticizing the practices of any culture, preferring to treat all as “equally valid.” If there’s any single development that underlines how far into reverse we’ve gone, it’s this: Instead of expecting the residents of the United States to speak, read, and write English, our governments print their official publications in more than90 different languages.

     There’s a lot that needs explaining here...and part of the explanation must derive from race, ethnicity, and identity as those things bear upon resistance to cultural assimilation.

     I maintain that you cannot function as an American – i.e., as a self-supporting member of American society, free to navigate through it at will, whose fear of the law cuts off roughly at the traffic and zoning ordinances – unless you adopt – assimilate to – the American culture. Yet we allow designated minorities to flout their active rejection of the laws and customs of that culture. We admit thousands of persons each month who neither understand the American culture, nor want to become a part of it, nor respect it enough even to pay lip service to its norms. And we passively tolerate their construction of exclaves in which an American, as implicitly defined here, would be unwelcome at best.

     Thoughts?

6 comments:

Bruce said...

Sounds about right to me.

DrFoo said...

"We" meaning our elite imbeciles? I vote and I pay taxes, yet I have no voice. I've been replaced by a better (non) citizen. The new immigrants aren't encumbered by old fashioned ideals such as duty, honor, country. Neither are our millenials, who have been taught to hold these things in contempt. In Lexington they are proposing confiscation. The America I grew up in is gone. There is a storm coming. Keep the faith.

Anonymous said...

A great article and thank you for posting it. I have a few thoughts. The next generation of children here must be taught the letters of the Founding Fathers at home. In them, they reveal their personal thoughts on such subjects as citizenship and culture. These men were learned, many of them had travelled extensively and had contact with many other cultures and they all knew the following: The only way the country they founded was going to last was if the demographic of the country remained overwhelmingly western European. They knew this full well when they wrote, "We leave this to our posterity." Posterity was another term used to describe their descendants, their kinfolk. They knew from their own experience that western civilization would only be kept alive by a people who shared common bloodlines, ethnicity, language and heritage, not the cesspool we have now.
We could fix a large number of our problems if people of European descent stood together and said, "Enough." Our biggest problem though is the fact that far too many of our own people side with the "others" because it's hip, or cool or that they've been taught it since they've been old enough to understand. Remove them from the equation and work can then proceed on correcting the other problems.
My own personal opinion is that it's too late for what I mentioned above, instead we should be taking careful note of the mistakes that have been made, begin preparing corrections when the time is right and begin making preparations for the country we want AFTER the current house of cards collapses.

Joseph said...

Judging by their support for Sanders, the schools are turning the young into leftists whether or not their families have been here for centuries.

Reg T said...

"The only way the country they founded was going to last was if the demographic of the country remained overwhelmingly western European."

They were more explicit than that: they openly stated that the form of government they created would only work for a moral, Christian (Judeo-Christian moral code), citizenry.

The Left has done - and is still doing - everything in its power to debase that morality, that moral code. Not simply because they are debased themselves, and embrace a relativistic code of "ethics" and behavior wherein "if it feels good, do it", but because it is necessary to destroy our American culture if they are going to force us into a global society and government.

I have a sneaking suspicion that is why they are so accepting of islam and muslim immigrants - their behavior actually mirrors what the Left would prefer to see, in place of a Judeo-Christian moral code, including pedophilia, child rape ("It wasn't 'rape'-rape", said Whoopi Goldberg of Roman Polanski's rape of a child he drugged), and other obscenities.

[And before you talk about how islam kills homosexuals, ask yourself about how open the muslims (especially Pakis) were about muslim soldiers having anal sex with each other on American fire bases (where the officers were _ordered _ to "look the other way") in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Casual male homosexuality has always been a part of Arab - and muslim - culture, especially the use of young boys (bacha bereesh) for sex.]

lineman said...

And that is just one of the reasons for the need to be banding together and forming like minded Liberty enclaves for our very survival... Preferably in places that are self sufficient, secure, and survivability...