There is No Western Civilization

Ngarjuna

Botheration. The students at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies have proposed that “the majority of philosophers on our courses” should be from Africa and Asia. This has caused a backlash in the press.

Powerline comments

“This is so pathetically stupid that it doesn’t really deserve a response. I take it that these people claim to be studying philosophy, right? So that means they need to study philosophers. What we call philosophy is a Western invention. I remember when Paul and I were taking a Greek philosophy class from Professor Duggan at Dartmouth. At one point in a lecture, he referred to ‘Western philosophy,’ then paused and said: ‘as if there were any other kind.’”

Bodhidharma

Here is an interesting case where I think both sides are wrong. It is an old problem, one that I have cared deeply about since undergrad days, and it seems we are never going to resolve it. The truth seems to have no voice. I majored in Comparative Religions, and went on to do grad work in the field, very largely because it was the only place in the academy where one might study the vast domain of non-European thought. Perhaps two thirds of the world’s knowledge, and all untouched elsewhere.

In principle, it seems to me that the students are absolutely right. What was the name of the school again? If you study philosophy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, you have every reason to expect that the philosophers you study will be primarily Oriental and African. Otherwise, your degree is a fraud.

As to the claim that the only philosophy worth studying is Western philosophy, that is simply extreme chauvinism. It is pig ignorant. I tell you with some conviction, anyone who has not studied Buddhist philosophy, Ngarjuna, Hui Neng, the Tao Te-Ching, Confucius, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, Shankara, Ramakrishna, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Arabi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, has missed important parts of the human argument and experience. He or she is only half-educated.

And they are understudied. If you are not going to find them in the School of Oriental and African Studies, then where?

Ibn Sina

One can argue, technically, that philosophy is a purely Western invention. But only technically. In the sense that the word is Greek. Yes, Eastern thinkers often dwell on different issues than the classic ones that have preoccupied the West. But that only reveals an artificial limitation on our viewpoint—a good reason in itself to study Eastern philosophy. One could similarly argue, and I have heard it argued, that comedy and tragedy are a Western invention, and there is no comedy outside Europe. This is true in the same sense: our definitions of the two genres come from Aristotle and the Greek ritual tradition. Nevertheless, it is absurd to suggest that we cannot find funny plays or sad plays in other cultures, and more absurd to suggest that non-Western drama is not worth studying because it does not fit into our categories. What in the end, is wrong with learning something? Why would we want to exclude it from a university?

This sort of chauvinism implies cultural relativism. Truth does not have a skin colour or an ethnicity. There is no “Western civilization.” There is only civilization. It is the human duty to seek truth and to seek the best. Wherever we find it, regardless of the “culture” that spawned it. Is something that is true in Toronto not true in Mumbai?

Shankara

That is, incipiently, what American culture and English-speaking culture is: taking the best wherever we find it. That is its genius. And, moreover, that is what Christian culture is. Might I point out that Jesus was Asian? St. Augustine, though, was African. We are building the world culture, those of us who are with the program. Take the best music, whether from Ireland or Africa; the best food, whether from Italy or China; and so forth. That is our project.

Unfortunately, while those who object to the student union proposal seem hopelessly misguided on this, this is in fact not what the students want either.

Here is the relevant portion of their “Educational Priorities”:

Decolonising SOAS: Confronting the White Institution: 

Decolonising SOAS is a campaign that aims to address the structural and epistemological legacy of colonialism within our university. We believe that SOAS should take a lead on such questions given its unique history within British colonialism. In light of the centenary and SOAS’ aims of curating a vision for itself for the next 100 years, this conversation is pivotal for its future direction.
Our aims are a continuation of the campaign last year:

To hold events that will engage in a wider discussion about expressions of racial and economic inequality at the university, focussing on SOAS.

To address histories of erasure prevalent in the curriculum with a particular focus on SOAS’ colonial origins and present alternative ways of knowing.

To interrogate SOAS’ self-image as progressive and diverse.

To use the centenary year as a point of intervention to discuss how the university must move forward and demand that we, as students of colour, are involved in the curriculum review process.

To review 10 first year courses, working with academics to discuss points of revamp, reform and in some cases overhaul.

To make sure that the majority of the philosophers on our courses are from the Global South or it’s diaspora. SOAS’s focus is on Asia and Africa and therefore the foundations of its theories should be presented by Asian or African philosophers (or the diaspora).

If white philosophers are required, then to teach their work from a critical standpoint. For example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so called “Enlightenment” philosophers wrote within.

Lao Tzu heading west 

In other words, their problem is that SOAS is not racist enough.

“ a wider discussion about expressions of racial and economic inequality”? It is hard to shoehorn either European or Asian philosophers into a discussion of economics or race. Not an issue most of them have been interested in. It is a good excuse to avoid having to deal with any of them. And not even really about politics, either. It is an excuse for saying “you owe me a degree without working for it.” Because oppression.

“present alternative ways of knowing.” Thank you, Carlos Castenada. As any proper philosopher, East or West, North or South, could inform them, there are no “alternative ways of knowing.” Epistemology 101. By definition—or it is not knowledge. If such cultural relativism is true, we are indeed wasting our time studying Oriental or African thought. This is just a way to reject any criticism of your own thinking. “It’s just my way of knowing.” How dare you mark me! Oppression!

“ we, as students of colour” This is presented by the Student’s Union. Are all students at SOAS really “students of colour”? If so, the school should be defunded. It is just an academic ghetto. Or is it that only students of colour are worth mentioning? Then we have extreme discrimination against whites. Either way, it further assumes that Oriental and African thought is of interest only to students of Oriental and African background. If so, again, studying it is a waste of time. And why should any Europeans be asked to fund it?

“SOAS’s focus is on Asia and Africa and therefore the foundations of its theories should be presented by Asian or African philosophers (or the diaspora).” I almost bought it, it almost was true, until that first parenthesis. “Or the diaspora”? That is, people of African or Asian ancestry living in Europe or North America? Outside of African Americans, there would be few of those more than a couple of generations back; among Africans in the US, only a few centuries. A small pool in which to find some of the world’s greatest thinkers. No; this is a fairly obvious claim by the “students of colour” that they themselves are, due to their ancestry, already authorities on Oriental and African thought. It I impertinent of their professors to suppose they know better. So stop annoying them with questions and give them their degrees. Racists.

Averroes

“ acknowledging the colonial context in which so called ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers wrote within.” Pardon the bad grammar; its probably correct in African or Oriental Diaspora thought. Again, there is a point here. The Age of Discovery was deeply influential in European thought. You could do a lot with that premise. But has it been generally unacknowledged? If so, congratulations! You just found a thesis topic!

One gets the feeling the authors never thought of that. That in itself is a chilling reflection on the state of the academic project. This is something the professors are supposed to do for them?

“Culture studies,” which is something we vitally need, has been co-opted everywhere. Instead of studying culture, they simply award unearned degrees on grounds of race or sex or sexual orientation.

I propose a rule: harsh, but perhaps necessary. If you are going to have a department of “women’s studies,” only men should be permitted to enroll. If you have a department of “queer studies,” only straight people should be allowed to enroll. If you have a department of African or Oriental Studies, they can accept nobody of African or Oriental parentage.

If such studies are of any value, they must be of value to those who are not themselves from the culture. On the other hand, follow the implied logic of the SOAS proposal. Students of the African or Asian Diaspora already know all this stuff. They are wasting their time pretending to study it.

The End is Near

The tunnel at the end of the light.

I have a leftish friend, a distinguished editor and journalist, who, in retirement, still writes a regular column. It is a window on what the left is thinking, at least in Canada.

His latest column clarifies something. It is titled, “DENYING THE EPIDEMIC OF DEMENTIA.”

That is the main premise: that there is a current epidemic, dementia, and we are foolishly doing nothing about it.

“It’s hard to call dementia an epidemic. Epidemics typically involve infectious diseases. But when one in every 11 Canadians over the age of 65 has some form of dementia, some 700,000 Canadians, it’s hard to call dementia anything but an epidemic. Every year, about 25,000 new cases are diagnosed.

Apply those figures to any other illness -- measles, cancer, AIDS -- and you’d have not just an epidemic, but panic.”

In pointing out our folly, he lists other matters about which we seem to be willfully blind:

“ So we deny climate change. Even though the figures are clear. Global temperatures are rising. So are sea levels. Polar ice is melting. Storms, floods, and fires escalate in violence. But we’d rather debate it than fight it.”

“ We deny the massive extinction of species. As with climate change, we’d rather argue about possible causes than acknowledge the problem.”

“ We haven’t even begun to consider the effects of living in a bath of wireless transmissions, relying on safety standards drafted before cell phones and Bluetooth even existed.”

“ And the topic of over-population is utterly taboo. We humans are already the most invasive species on earth. No other species has had such a devastating effect on other species, or on the environment. But we can’t talk about it, because we consider all solutions unthinkable.”

In a superficially unrelated remark, a reader responds to the immediate past column with the comment:

“Look into the future, . What do you see for us? The Tyee, which is a decidedly left wing newspaper, took a poll of its readers regarding their prognosis for the coming year. Over 80% said they view the future as hopeless.”

And that, it seems to me, is an apt summary of the movement that currently calls itself “progressive.” far from believing in the possibility of progress in any sense, it seems convinced that the sky is falling. One way or another, these are the last days. The world is about to end.

This view is not realistic. Start with dementia. A smaller proportion of people than ever before, at every age group, are getting dementia. That is not characteristic of an epidemic. What is also happening, of course, is that with the improvement in life expectancy, more people than before are living long enough to risk dementia.

But this then seems an effort to put the most depressing spin possible on good news. It is as though either the left wants to believe the world is going to Hell in a handcart, or they are somehow traumatized and cannot get past negative thoughts.

Quickly, on the pressing danger of climate change: to avoid being called a “climate change denier,” it is not enough to believe just that the earth is getting steadily and significantly warmer. Although there is already room enough to doubt that. You must also believe that man is the principal cause, that this will be a bad thing, that it is realistically possible to stop it by government action, that the actions proposed will cost less than the eventual damage from climate change, and that there are no more pressing problems on which the money might be better spent. 

Bertrand Russell, public atheist, leads "ban the bomb" march, 1961.

Buying all that takes quite a leap of faith. It is a complicated dogma, and improbable on its face. Most improbable is the idea that climate change, if real, means impending universal doom. At its core seems a conviction that man is evil, and must somehow repent, to avoid the imminent wrath of an angry God.

So too with the idea of an impending imminent mass extinction. There is no hard evidence of it, only predictions based on computer models. Again, a leap of faith that violates the scientific sine qua non of skepticism and demanding evidence rather than relying on authority. It does not come from science; from whence does this conviction come?

The ultimate concern mentioned, revealingly, is overpopulation. That perhaps gets to the nub. The problem is too many people; with the self-contradictory assumption that too many people by their existence will kill all people. In other words, the problem is with the sinful nature of people. People are bad per se; people are evil in their essence.

Far from ignoring or refusing to discuss the problem, it has been done to death. When I was in high school, back in 1970, our biology teacher required us all to buy and read The Population Bomb. This nagging negative thought has been pervasive ever since, for at least 50 years now. It is, granted, at last apparently fading. Because all the predictions of “overpopulation” turned out not to be true. Scientific evidence did not support the theory. Instead of running out of water, food, and everything else, poverty has declined worldwide. Famines have become much more rare. And the world population is, on present trends, soon to level off on its own.

As men are evil, anything made by man is also evil. That is, civilization is bad. Hence the concern with “pollution.” And new inventions like cell phones or Bluetooth must necessarily be somehow poisonous. The idea that they might be has in fact been studied again and again; and no significant harmful effects have yet been found. The concern seems based on irrational fear, not science.

To be fair, a lot of the present pessimism on the left is connected with the fact that their girl lost the recent US election. Still, they do seem generally to be taking an apocalyptic view of that too. It’s Hitler? Trump is going to send them all to concentration camps! And that has been their attitude for fifty or sixty years, hasn’t it? Since the “ban the bomb” movement in the fifties. The world will end soon from global cooling, or global warming, or overpopulation, or peak oil, or nuclear holocaust, or pollution, or if not that, surely something. There is always a nagging sense of threatening epidemic.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse: overpopulation, dementia, global warming, and Donald Trump

Granted, the right can be apocalyptic too, on a smaller scale. They worry about the decline and fall of civilization, or at least “Western” civilization. But in this is an original optimism and hope In progress: that civilization is worthwhile and that mankind has indeed built something over the years.

What we seem to see on the left is an obvious pervasive sense of free-floating guilt. The human conscience is acting up, and disturbing our sleep.

What happened? What is driving the left, literally, crazy?

This comes from turning away from God.

The Razor's Edge

Women's razor

Under public pressure, Tesco in the UK has just reduced the price of its women’s twin-blade razors to match those of their men’s two-blade razors. The previous “discriminatory pricing” was supposedly a form of prejudice against women.

I don’t get that logic.

If an essentially identical product is sold at two prices, why is it you are obliged to buy one instead of the other simply because you are a woman? Why not buy the “men’s” razors? Would that be so hard? Is that really too difficult a mental challenge for the average woman to handle?

If, of course, women did that, the market for women’s razors would evaporate. Or the price would come down. Obviously, if they are selling for that price, women are buying them.

No; the real significance of the former different prices is this: men are more price-sensitive than women. A woman feels it is worth it to pay one third more simply to get a colour she prefers—pink, for example.

Supply and demand.

What this reveals, in turn, is that women generally have significantly more money to spend than men do. Women have money for such luxuries; men do not.

Forget all the propaganda you have been fed about men making more than women. They do not. But men need to make life choices based on how much money the job brings in, while women, being intrinsically wealthier, have the luxury to seek out jobs that are fun.

The truth is, regardless of who in a family makes the money, it is the woman who spends it. Eighty percent of all purchasing decisions are made by women. This is true regardless of whether one partner works, or both. Women have eighty percent of the folding money.

There is a reason why there are so many women’s magazines, so fat with ads. Men’s mags are only there to cater to single men, who still have some disposable income.

But apparently it is not enough. What’s the point of having social privilege if you do not use it relentlessly to push for more?

Exile

If we should live long enough,
we all end our lives as exiles
Somebody changes everything as we sleep,
and we awake one morning in a foreign land.

-- Stephen K. Roney

Wishes for the New Year

Since I seem to be so bad at predicting things, let me instead concentrate on things I would most fondly wish to happen. Take it as a prayer; and perhaps it will be heard.

First and foremost, the critical issue of this era is abortion. May we see the start of laws against it, in Canada, the US, and elsewhere.

Second, an end to Quebec’s discriminatory language laws, so that Montreal can regain its rightful place as Canada’s metropolis. Now is the moment, with Ontario’s government making life impossible for business in old rival Toronto.

I would like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK to seize the moment and have a new customs union deal ready to go the day after Brexit becomes official. For Canada, good insurance in case Trump wants to weaken NAFTA.

I want a union of the Catholic with the Orthodox churches. There is no reason but prejudice for the split to endure. There are no substaantian theological differences. And all such conflicts within the Christian church are cause for scandal.

I want an end to no-fault divorce. Nothing is more harmful than the weakening of the family. I want legal penalties for adultery. Without them, marriage is an unenforceable contract. I support gay marriage—it discourages promiscuity, after all—but on the same basis. And I want it clearly spelled out that homosexual sex is not a human right. Pretending it is one is destructive to real human rights like freedom of conscience.

Other ideas to strengthen marriage: an absolute cap on the amount a non-earning party could take out of the marriage. Being married to c doctor is not, in principle, harder or more valuable work than being married to a steelworker. End predatory divorces! Similarly: the person paying child support should also, automatically, have legal custody. He or she may, of course, choose to allow the other party to raise the children, But he who pays the piper ought to be able to call the tune; otherwise, you have a decent functional definition of slavery.

I want a prohibition on affirmative action of all sorts, on grounds of human rights. Not just an end to the legal requirement, but make all hiring on the basis of race or sex illegal, as it should be.

I want an end to all “hate laws” and speech codes, on the same grounds. Prosecute the deed, not the motive. It is impossible to prevent “hate laws” from being used to discriminate—against any currently unpopular group. They violate equality before the law.

I want—here I am libertarian—an end to all legal penalties for possession of drugs of any sort. Again, this seems to me an obvious case of human rights. We have a right to do as we want to our own bodies. Pursuit of happiness and all that. Besides, as a practical matter, prohibition only feeds crime and lawlessness.

Speaking of libertarians, I want Maxime Bernier for the conservative leadership. Not Kevin O’Leary, not Kellie Leitch: both are disqualified as a practical matter by not speaking any French. Both are embarrassing “me too’s” for Donald Trump. We ought to be grown up enough not to ape older brother. Both would be divisive within the party. Nor do we want a Red Tory; that too would alienate a large part of the party. It would be electoral death in this era of populist insurgency. Bernier’s libertarianism seems a platform everyone could rally around.

I want unrestricted immigration for Christians and Yazidis from the Middle East. We are watching a genocide unfold, and doing nothing. After abortion, this seems to me the greatest scandal of our time. And no nonsense about having to let in Middle Eastern Muslims in proportionate numbers. No; we did not need to let in Aryan Germans or Austrians during the Nazi era to justify letting in Jews. Could we tell the difference? Of course we could, at least for Christians. There are baptismal records.

For some of the same reasons, I’d like an unrestricted “right of return” to Canada for Jews. Why not? It is pure self-interest to want to attract as many Jews as we can. They always produce a disproportionate benefit to the economy and culture wherever they go: they are a leaven to the nations. Where, for example, would Canadian culture be without Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, Wayne and Schuster, or Ed and David Mirvish? Let alone the Canadian economy, or Canadian academics. Not a lot of street gang action in Jewish nighbourhoods, either. Second, it seems to me it would be a safety valve for the continuing troubles in the Middle East. It gives Jews a ready second option in case things go South there. The Arabs too, would probably thank us.

That would probably be enough immigration. If not, might I put in a word for the desirability of Filipino immigrants? Christian, generally fluent in English, utterly non-racist as a culture, familiar with Anglo legal principles, and generally admiring of the culture. You do not find Filipino ghettos anywhere. They integrate within two generations.

Predictions

Past experience has shown me that I have a truly appalling record at making predictions for the upcoming year. Fortunately, last year, I was too ill to make any. Because they would have been wrong.

A lot of people have very bad premonitions for the coming year. A lot of people have high hopes. I think odds are that there will continue, as last year, to be many surprises. This is happening because of technology. The world is changing. We are at a moment at least as important as the invention of printing. More probably, as the invention of writing. It is bound and sure to have wide-ranging political, social, cultural, and economic ramifications, and we have only begun to see them.

Self-driving cars are almost here. Farewell to much of the expense and difficulty of travelling. Farewell to most of the human toll of traffic accidents. Farewell to the need for any form of government public transit. Farewell for the need for parking space. And farewell to the single most common job in North America.

I come from the future. Or rather, the past of the future. Or the future of the past. In any case, I am a present, right?

The rest of the working class will be hit as hard. Robotics will kill most manual jobs. Checkout cashiers are already no longer needed. Drones can already replace deliverymen. As robots become cheaper than even Chinese workers, manufacturing may begin to re-relocate.

Nor are only working class jobs in danger. The Trump revolution was a part of a general revolution against the professional “elite.” This was the biggest part of the printing revolution, and it is bound to be much bigger now. Doctors are actually now obsolete; they hang on because of their social power, but it will not last. Lawyers are obsolete. Teachers are obsolete. Journalists are obsolete. Accountants are obsolete. No doubt engineers are obsolete. Why are the rest of us going to keep giving them money and power when they serve no useful function?

This I can foresee. But how much of it is going to happen in the next year? That I cannot foresee.

Part of Trump’s victory was a revolt against political correctness. I think political correctness, feminism, and the LGBT lobby are truly dead now. From now on, they will be a laughing stock, and it will not take long before everyone will be embarrassed to identify with them. This is the sort of thing that dies fast.

Part of Trump’s victory also was a revolt against free trade. I have always believed in free trade. I still do; I think that it will continue, that Trump is just bargaining for a better deal. If not, I expect economic trouble worldwide. Even if free trade hurts some producers, it helps others; and it helps all consumers. Not everyone is a producer; everyone is a consumer. This is before we even begin to look at the issue of comparative advantage. Or the obvious moral point that all men are brothers, and there is a basic immorality in taking jobs away from the relatively poor in Indonesia to give them to the relatively rich in Michigan.

As for immigration, I have in the past been generally in favour—on the grounds that if we do not bring the workers to Canada, the jobs will just go to cheap labour elsewhere. That may no longer hold, with the growing capabilities of robotics. Robots in Canada may soon be cheaper than people in China. The need to keep our population of active workers growing may also soon no longer apply. What happens if improvements in life expectancy, entirely probable with the unlocking of the human genome, begin to kick in? Labour may become irrelevant, and only capital matter. Good joke on Marx.

One thing catches my eye this January. Trump has tweeted “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won't happen!”

Is he serious? How is he going to prevent it?

Commentators I have seen all say this will require tougher sanctions, or sitting down at the table with Kim Jong Un, or maybe infecting them with some computer virus. A preemptive strike, of course, is out of the question.

But is it?

Surely the US, if it has the will and is prepared to accept the possible repercussions, has the capability to take out whatever North Korea has in a preemptive strike. The land area of North Korea is much less than that of, say, Iran, and every inch of it has been under close US surveillance since 1950. The Americans have bases just across the border. What Israel could do in Iraq, surely the US can do in North Korea.

Yes, this could mean war. Yes, North Korea has artillery that could hit Seoul.

On the other hand, it seems certain that, in any all-out war, the North would lose--so long as they still do not have nuclear weapons. Their only hope would be blitzkrieg, as they tried in the Korean War. It almost worked then because the South had no air power and no anti-tank weaponry. That is not going to be repeated. And the reason they had no anti-tank weaponry then still holds—the Korean Peninsula is lousy blitzkrieg terrain. Think Switzerland.

The Jucheists have been playing the game of provocation just short of war for over sixty years. Because it pays off for them. They shake down for some handout to stop, and then they can repeat the cycle in a few years. Perhaps it would be healthy to call their bluff. Their own actions suggest it is a bluff. Do the leaders in Pyongyang really want to die?

Luckily, Gananoque remains out of range.

Moreover, isn’t it, on balance, more dangerous to do nothing, and allow the DPRK’s hostile and unpredictable government to develop the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on Los Angeles or San Francisco? Then they could really go for the Danegeld.

Would China react? I doubt it. They only engaged last time when the UN forces got close to their own border. China is on the rise; the longer they can postpone any confrontation, the better their chances. So long as their basic interests are not threatened, they are better off keeping the peace and keeping their economy growing. They have distanced themselves enough from the Pyongyang regime that their prestige is not on the line here, if they stay out. A harshly-worded protest is about the most I would expect.

At the same time, such a strike might be a useful shot across the bow to Iran and Russia, who have been acting pushy in the last few years. It would reassure American allies everywhere.

Trump is no doubt setting the table at this point to scare North Korea into pulling back on their nuclear program. And, more importantly, to give China fair warning. But the Kim regime is used to getting away with this stuff, and is entirely capable of miscalculating. If they do not pull back, hitting them hard would be the best way to set the table for the next negotiation with the next adversary.

It’s the art of the deal.

So here’s one prediction: Trump bombs North Korea.

Christmas Music

Trump Has No Sense of Humour?

“Donald Trump never laughs,” Al Franken said. 

This was the senator’s first observation to me on a recent afternoon.

These are the opening lines of a recent NYT piece, an interview with Senator Franken about Donald Trump.

“I don’t know what it is,” Franken continues. Of course he does, and so do I. But this is supposed, surely, to be arch and revealing. It is supposed to suggest a man without humour.

Absolutely no sense of humour.

Soon after I saw this, by chance, I saw a video of Trump laughing.

But leave that aside. Surely anyone can see that one of Trump’s winning traits is his sense of humour.

“Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

Like most good comedians, his style is deadpan.

How often have you seen Buster Keaton laugh? Jack Benny? Groucho Marx? George Burns? Walter Matthau? Bob Newhart?

For the most part, nothing kills a joke more surely than laughing as you tell it.

Franken, as a professional comedian, knows this.

He is being disingenuous. He is being a typical politician.

Are you laughing at me? What's so funny?

Could it also be the left that has no sense of humour? Fraqnken surely sees the joke, but perhaps he can reliably count on his constituency, like the New York Times, not getting it. It fits: they insist always on taking anything that Trump says strictly literally.

"Knock, knock? What do you mean? I don't see any door. You're lying!"

Christmas Music

George Michael in Hell

A bit of anti-Christian propaganda came down the Facebook feed of late. Twice, from two different sources. So I guess it’s getting good distribution.

Maybe there really have been comments somewhere that Michael is damned because he was gay. None are cited. But they certainly would not be in accord with Christian doctrine.

To be fair, I can only speak definitively for Catholicism here. Protestantism, with thousands of denominations, has no clear voice on anything. It is probably possible to find a self-declared “Protestant” who believes almost anything you choose, and accepts no higher authority to gainsay it.

But then, you need to be specific, and not call “Christian” a doctrine most Christians would consider heretical. Otherwise, all possible human views become “Christian.”

First off, for Catholics, nobody is certainly damned. Repentance is always possible. Accordingly, nobody is damned for, at any point, “being gay.” Damnation requires not just sin, but a final and definitive turning away from God. That’s what purgatory is about.

Second, “being gay” is not a sin. Homosexual sex is--as is any sex outside marriage, and any sex not open to having children. This includes extramarital sex, using artificial birth control within marriage, or masturbation. Or, for that matter, coveting your neighbour’s wife. Or looking at a woman with lust in your heart. Homosexuals are not singled out as sinners here. One might just as well say that being heterosexual is a sin.

Which is exactly why everyone feigns to care so much about supposed discrimination against homosexuals here. What it is really all about is heterosexuals wanting free license for lust without feeling guilty about it. If they can convince themselves that the church’s teaching on sex is just prudishness, they can salve their conscience.

You want sin? There is one unforgivable sin. That is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

That is, misrepresenting religion in an attempt to mislead.

New Life Gives Rise to Mercy.

Pope Francis sent this tweet just before Christmas:

It crystallizes something for me. Not in a happy way. As far as I can tell, it is meaningless. Just a selection of warm fuzzy words: “Happy Happy Joy Joy.” “Mercy,” “Hope,” “Joy,” “New Life.” Why not “joy gives rise to mercy”? Why not “mercy gives rise to peace”? “Peace gives rise to love”? “Love gives rise to new life”?

It smacks to me of words mattering more than their meanings. Just say the right words, and do what you like.

What I love most about Catholicism, stretching back to Pope Paul on abortion, more so with JPII, Benedict, and the new catechism, is the moral clarity. This is what we need. We do not need to feel good about ourselves. We need the truth. Otherwise, the Pharisees were all we ever needed. That disturbing business about the crucifixion is best forgotten. Too upsetting.

I accept that Francis’s emphasis is on the pastoral. Fine. But it must not be at the expense of clarity. His job is guidance. His insistence on “creative ambiguity” in the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia seems of a piece with this. I see no value to anyone in this sort of thing.

If there were, it seems to me that Hallmark Cards have it covered.

Christmas Music

Day nine...

This Is My Memory Too

In fact, I remember lots of Canadians celebrating too. And Americans on the left.

Christmas Music

The World's First Christmas Stamp

... was from Big Pink.

A Mark Steyn Christmas

New Year's Eve Music

Christmas Music

Christmas Music

Day 6:

Putting Those White Males in Their Place

Blake, Africa and America supporting Europe.

Another example of the anti-white racism in our current culture came down the pike the other day: “White authors are still writing racist books because white critics won’t call them out.” I get these regularly on Facebook. I tend to respond here rather than on Facebook, because otherwise I lose my “liberal” friends. It is not easy in academics not to be left-leaning.

Most obviously: it discusses racism in literature as only a problem of white male authors. What could be more racist than such an assertion?

“Racism in literature,” it begins, “manifests itself in myriad ways: characters whose personalities are reduced to their accents, cultural dress or foods;...”

Further on, it says that much of the problem of racism is that books are too often judged solely on literary merit (God forbid), instead of political considerations. But a case of a character who is distinguished only by his accent or dress or food is not racism. It is simply bad writing.

Does the author know what good writing is? Isn’t she supposed here to be an authority on it? She is identified as “an award-winning essayist, journalist, and literary critic” Or have the humanities discarded all such considerations now?

She goes on: her second example of endemic racism is “brown or black characters ‘rescued’ by white saviors...”

No doubt this happens in some stories. It is not easy, offhand, to think of an example. Robinson Crusoe, I suppose, published in 1719. But the complaint drips with irony. Has the author never heard of the literary character called “the magic negro”? It’s been a big deal in literary thinking recently. The common plot device is not to have the black character rescued by a white one, but the white one rescued by a black or brown one. The Green Mile, Gunga Din, Pocahontas, The Last of the Mohicans, the story of the first Thanksgiving, The Shining, Peter Pan, the Krishna cycle, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and so on.

By this logic, these are all racist stories. But with the target being whites.

One wonders if the author has actually done much reading.

Another common example of racism: “... the ‘surprising’ friendship between a white character and a character of color...”

So showing a white character as not being racist is itself—racist.

“or, a white character’s journey to a ‘foreign’ or ‘third world’ country in search of ‘enlightenment.’”

Someone sure likes scare quotes.

Granted, this is a pretty common motif: the pilgrimage. Aside from Chaucer, it is pretty central to the image of Jerusalem in the Bible, or Mecca in the Quran. Or, in Taoism, the mythical islands to the East. Still, one would have thought this implied a positive, not a negative, attitude towards Jerusalem or Mecca, of said foreign country, as, say, possessing the real spiritual truth. It seems that, the instant a white mentions anything or anyone non-white, even with the highest praise, he is racist.

So are non-white authors equally racist if they mention anything white? Wouldn’t their writing in English, in the first place, count as cultural appropriation?

“The western or white gaze is unimaginative, misrepresentative [sic], and often harmful.”

Imagine substituting “the Chinese or Oriental gaze,” “the black or African gaze,” or “the female gaze” there. Sound good?

“As Pooja Makhijani writes in her review of Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend: ‘We Americans erase layers of oppression by foisting our own frameworks, which reflect the specificity of our culture and history, on others.’ ‘The end result,’ says Lee, ‘is the reflexive default to ‘the western gaze.’”

Note the name of that author: Kwan. Our reviewer does not say it, but he is Singaporean Chinese. However, rather than concluding that racism is found in all races, both this article and the review to which it refers bizarrely blame Kwan’s supposed racism on Americans and the British. This is racism in both directions: in scapegoating white Europeans, and in infantilizing Asians. It supposes even a successful non-white author like Kwan is incapable of thinking for himself.

The poor dears. In the end, on this assumption, it was a darned good thing for their own sake that the British and Americans were there to take care of them for a few decades.

And they must have done very good job of it, if their influence is still so absolute generations after they left. Why, doesn’t that make a powerful argument for cultural superiority of some kind?

And why isn’t Kwan the guilty party, for “cultural appropriation,” for being so deeply influenced?

“Most book critics are white, and very often white and male,” Khakpour says. “Often those white males are not themselves very well-versed in issues of race, ethnicity, xenophobia, cultural appropriation etc. They are simply trained in reading books by white men, for white men, about white men.” … “Then there’s the reality that it’s much harder to recognize a problem you’ve never experienced. “

Odd, then, that most of the offending authors she cites, along with almost all of the critics, are either not white or not male. How did that happen—in a piece supposedly about white authors and white critics?

But never mind. There is a bigger logical problem here: if it is true that white males cannot have any insight into the lived experience of women or those with darker skins, it must be equally true that women and people of darker skins have no insight into the lived experience of whites or males. Who is the expert here? On what basis? Racial superiority?

Later, the author so much as says that white males “are simply not qualified to comment” on issues of race.

“Poverty enlightenment, a popular theme in narratives about white people traveling to brown or black countries, is similarly problematic when looked at through an anti-colonialist lens. ...”

The unfortunate reality is that, if a book portrays someone going to a “brown” or “black” country, said character is likely to see poverty. Is the author supposed to falsify this, or simply avoid setting any stories in “brown” or “black” countries? How would either of these options be less “racist”?

“Soniah Kamal, in a review of the [sic] Julie Feldon’s Karma Gone Bad (a memoir that proudly evinces its colonialist gaze in the title), notes that the author ‘sees beauty in the world after meeting a slum family, interacting with an orphan girl, and seeing a little barefoot errand boy. Does Feldon experience the same beauty when witnessing poverty in the US?’”

Ironically, the book the reviewer immediately goes on to criticise is a cheerfully comic novel about --- poverty in the US.

Then there’s Nell Zink’s 2015 novel Mislaid. Critics deemed it “infallibly irreverent,” “profoundly irreverent,” “a high comedy of racial identity,” or a “backwards route to examining oppression.”

So is the problem with seeing some kind of blessedness in poverty? If so, our author has just declared Jesus Christ racist. Has she never read the Beatitudes? It’s kind of hard to make much of Western civ as a whole without knowledge of the Bible.

“Mislaid harkens to blackface and slavery, when whites stripped Africans of their identities and forced them to assume their surnames.”

Okay, so maybe she was not a history major. But let’s set the record straight. Blackface might count these days as “cultural appropriation,” but it was obviously a sign of the general popularity of black culture. People would pay more money to watch if the performers pretended they were black. This popularity of black musical culture, after all, continues today. Is it racist to buy Mariah Carey records? The blackface minstrel shows were often banned in the South before the Civil War on the assumption that they were abolitionist.

Nor were Africans ever forced to take “white” surnames. Yes, they were required to take surnames. This was not about racism; it was a practical need in a complex society. Africans did not have surnames. When the slaves were freed, black Americans got to choose whatever surname they wanted. Nobody imposed a name on them: they were simply asked. Most of them chose “white” sounding names. Again, is the assumption that non-whites are incapable of thinking for themselves? And why is this not cultural appropriation?

Granted, Zink’s novel, although the central characters are in fact poor whites, could be interpreted as being really about black poverty in the US. When Zink complained there were no favourable portrayals of “US” poverty, perhaps she meant to exclude blacks as not being American. Nothing racist about that, right? But even so, if she is right, that there are few books or novels these days about poor whites, does that really suggest a preference for white people? Or does it rather suggest that the folks who write, edit, publish or read books don’t give a damn about poor whites? Or cannot see them sympathetically?

It is perhaps to easy to laugh, to see this as ridiculous. Nevertheless, the ugly fact remains that I received this article because I belong to a—more accurately, THE-- worldwide association or professional editors. This was sent out there as recommended.

Note then that, worldwide, nobody gets a book conventionally published without it going through a professional editor. One of these folks.

The same is true of entry to the professions, or to higher study. You don’t get to write books, either, without going through an academy where just this sort of thing is de rigeur.

Not just the overwhelmingly dominant viewpoint—a viewpoint that is largely enforced, and any dissent from which is likely to be punished.

Our system has become both stupid and systemically racist and sexist. Worldwide.