CHERISHING WESTERN CIVILIZATION: preserving our dignity & nobility. (24 JULY 2016)

I’ve listened to people gloat over other people’s suffering, for instance 2 radio announcers split up a couple’s marriage on air and laugh at it. We are in a nihilistic period of self-degradation of individuals & institutions; where it is PC to teach to the lowest common denominator and to vilify our culture & civilization. “Mother” has become several cuss words, in English & Spanish both. You can organize for any kind of pride but white pride. You can read any trash, but don’t be seen with the Word of God. Globalists mock those who love their own nation & its traditions of liberty. So what can be saved of our great Western civilization & culture? Our culture is a mocking poor shadow of what it used to be, and who cares, or even remembers what it was?? (Now a word of warning, I make a lot of comparisons w/ our modern culture & what life was like when I was Amish—I don’t do this to promote a religion, but I think they represent what our Christian heritage was more like in the distant past. They provide a benchmark for what we have lost in our post-Christian culture.) I believe part of the PC hatred of our cultural heritage is that Western civilization was in many ways an outgrowth of Christianity & its value system. To see something positive in it, would be to admit that Christian values can help the culture of a society.

DETACHMENT. The individualism of today is different from the individualism of the past. People are detached from reality & living in fantasies…detached from their heritage, their traditions, their moral values…just detached in general. I reflected the other day how someone had committed suicide by gun across the street from me when I lived in the city. The drama happened at night, and unless a policeman had come to my door a month later, & unless I had been a writer/researcher who stayed at home to open the door to the cop and learn about the suicide, the sound of that gun would have simply been one more sound of the city to me. Our lives are fragmented from the people around us, as if invisible walls existed, as if those across from us were in another dimension. People pass by someone getting mugged as if their own life and the drama a few feet away are not connected.

So people are detached spectators. They don’t want commitment. Detach yourself from family life. With such an attitude, they question what are children for? The prevalent view is kids will simply get in the way of the modern hedonistic self-centered lifestyle that people want. Along this line, if you want to quit being a man & be a woman, be your fantasy. When I was Amish, marriage and children are assumed to be part of life. No one is detached. Men were men, & women women. I would have known firsthand about my neighbor’s mental struggles and would have been there to provide solace. My neighbor would not have died alone in misery.

Institutional living teaches detachment…it is someone else’s responsibility to clean up my mess, …someone else’s responsibility to feed me…etc. We have become a culture of infants playing imaginary games and never growing up to be responsible. Actors were once on the margin of society, now those who help us fantasize are society’s heroes. Dependencies rather than responsibility. And dependencies are equated with independence. In place of individual responsibility to moral values, we have public policies of being PC. “Culture” & “cultivate” have a similar etymology. Indeed we need to cultivate culture, it doesn’t just happen. We can’t continue to teach to the lowest common denominator.

THE ABANDONMENT OF OLD-SCHOOL MANNERS. Past traditions are viewed as old-fashioned & burdensome traditions. Propriety & proper manners, the refinement that civilization created, are being tossed aside for animalistic “freedom”. It is pleasing to see someone enjoy experiencing the lost manners of old, when they delightfully experience them for the first time. In Huxley’s Brave New World, Savage asks why something is prohibited. The Controller says, “Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here.” “Even when they’re beautiful?” “Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.” Boy, if that doesn’t describe our society, and the consumerism’s planned obsolescence. When I was Amish, they valued the old. They would tell me the great giants of faith back in old times may never be outdone and had special importance for today. They referred to their faith as “Old order”. They valued the elderly as a source of wisdom.

GREAT MEANS OF COMMUNICATION, DOES NOT MEAN GREAT COMMUNICATION. “Garbage in, garbage out” when it comes to instant computerized global communication. In college, (in general) they have quit using text books & switched to ebooks. I note that few if any of my fellow students read the ebook textbooks. They are much harder to read and use than real textbooks. It feels like part of the dumbing down process to quit using books. Books & computers can complement each other, & I have no problem with a symbiotic use of the two to enhance the other. But one should not exclude the other. I witness entire areas of study becoming lost as those, who determine what is computerized, censor the real old world out, and remake the past into their own vision of it.

In public libraries, rare research tomes are discarded to make space for magical fictional fluff. Libraries are having their budgets shrunk, and new administrators think books are outdated & headed for extinction. Digitize it all & get rid of paper. As a researcher, the physical card catalog presented me with some advantages that the computer catalog doesn’t (& vice-versa). There are distinct advantages to having a book in your hand over access to the e-book version via the computer. It is hard to explain to someone who has not learned how to use books. The Dewey decimal system taught the brain how to view knowledge as organized and put into classifications. Keyword searches never teach this. Book classification systems v. keywords is the difference between organization & randomness. One surfs the Internet, rather than studies a subject. Fast is not the same as good quality. Libraries now buy new books from approved lists, which may explain in part why my books are extremely rare in any library. Libraries are one of the containers of our cultural heritage. They safeguard our past records. So there needs to be a balance between preserving the old, while adding the new.

ANCIENT WISDOM. Our self-reliant ancestors learned the healing properties of the plants in their lands. This is one type of knowledge that the pharma corporations would like us to forget. Fortunately, people are resisting the dependency that the World’s system is trying to force us into, and they are preserving some knowledge of the ancients’ wisdom & arts. There have been back to nature movements around the world. The problem is, we don’t know what we don’t know…what we have lost, may be permanently lost. When I was Amish, an intelligent Amishman was telling me some of the arts of farming have been lost. But healing is more than medicine, it is caring attitudes. The Amish incorporate the elderly as part of the extended family, in our culture they are institutionalized. Doctors don’t work for themselves, and are structured into a money-making system, with insuring corporations dictating to doctors what is allowed to be done. The doctor-patient relationship now has the cold-blooded insurance company as a third party to the relationship. In the calculus of money-making, which citizens are worth preserving? Moderns ask what are the cost benefits of keeping the elderly alive?

RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. It is not P.C. to admit that Islam does not respect human rights as our nation has understood rights, but that is the hard reality of it…a harsh reality that Europe is presently dealing with. But the people like Obama & Hillary have no true appreciation for the liberties that were enshrined in our Decl. of Independence & Constitution. One must (to remain PC) not mention the culture of Europe or the values enshrined in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights. We must enshrine multi-culturalism, diversity, and feel some sort of guilt for the past. Europe is seen as simply a greedy imperialistic abomination. I found it interesting that Obama’s brother in Kenya said that Kenya was better off under British imperialism & that he rejects his brother’s communistic worldview. So now we must swallow a highly selective view of the past, where the bringers of western civilization are the bad guys, and everyone else is automatically noble. They forget the Arabs wanted European intervention to free them from the enslavement of the Turks under the Ottoman Empire. They forget who built the oil fields and made the oil have value. They forget that the Europeans took steps to free the bondage that women were trapped in within these Islamic nations. We must forget the real history that has many noble deeds, and are to remember a rewritten history which sees nothing of value in our heritage. The middle ages, which saw lots of innovation, scientific advancement and progress under the Church, are now called the dark ages. I am not saying negative things did not happen, I am saying that the positives are now deleted from the approved version of history, so that a balanced view has been lost. North Korea choose communism; South Korea adopted Western values & methods. Make an honest comparison of the welfare of their people…and then quite blaming all the world’s ills on Western Civilization.

FINAL THOUGHTS. “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue & if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.” This is what I would like to see preserved!