Biased BBC contributor Alan suggests that we commence with a consideration the Pope’s words for Easter….
‘The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil.’ ‘The darkness enshrouding God and obscuring values is the real threat to our existence and to the world in general.’ ‘Today we can illuminate our cities so brightly that the stars in the sky are no longer visible,’ he said. ‘Is this not an image of the problems caused by our version of enlightenment?’ ‘With regard to material things, our knowledge and our technical accomplishments are legion, but what reaches beyond, the things of God and the question of good, we can no longer identify,’ Benedict added, saying that faith was the ‘true enlightenment.’
Timely and relevant words that neatly illustrate what two books reviewed in the Sunday Times expound.
You may or may not agree with religion or Faith and whatever that may entail but whether you take an entirely secular view of the world, or one viewed through the filter of a religious scripture or are hedging your bets and offer up a quiet prayer to God like the atheist in a foxhole you may well have come to the conclusion that society has possibly lost its way. It still rumbles on in a recognisable form but is somehow indecipherably changing for the worse.
Kipling’s ‘God’s of the Copybook Headings’ prophetically (or not …perhaps society was really always thus?) describes a society in free fall as it ignores the lessons of the past and denounces the attacks on authority, deference and the virtues that once held a Nation and culture together.
F. Scott Fitzgerald sums it up even more succinctly….
‘My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.’
Now however we have two books that have been published and delve into this arena dragging out into the light things many on the Left, and BBC in particular, wouldn’t want on show.
The BBC are famously Leftie, no question, the senior staff were 60’s radicals, Marxists and Trots wanting to overthrow everything. Even Joan Bakewell , the thinking man’s crumpet, admits she was suspected of wanting to overthrow the government.
Their inheritance lives on and who can deny that attempts are being made to discredit the Cameron government right now.
But what other influences did such people and their avant garde attitudes have?…on society, on culture, on the very fabric of society?
Biologist E.O. Wilson has brought out a book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in which he reminds us that everybody belongs, and needs to belong, to a ‘tribe’…the need to form groups and to defend those groups not just physically but for their values and culture is innate and instinctive and is an important part of what makes us human.
This book illustrates the fallacy of multi-culturalism. It can never work. You can suppress conflict but eventually it will always break out. ‘Them and Us’ is Nature and natural. We’re all in effect ‘racist’….or ‘tribalist’ to be polite.
What it tells us is that the only way for a multi-cultural society to rub along is to have a great deal of suppression that could verge on oppression.
No? Well try wearing a crucifix to work these days. A small example but very telling. You can’t wear a crucifix in case it ‘offends’ another’s religious sensibilities. In a supposedly modern, enlightened, liberal and predominantly ‘Christian’ society you cannot wear a small crucifix on your person.
The second book is more revealing and devastating for the Left…but illustrates what we already know…Liberal, Left values destroyed the foundations of society and have brought us to the verge of collapse….where the unresolvable tension in our species between selfishness and altruism developed into a vast social experiment by the Liberals who took power and decided selfishness, masquerading as ‘Individualism’, was the road to happiness and self fulfilment only now to be dashed against the rocks of reality and inner city rioting, arson and looting for ‘bling’ trainers.
This book, The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, by Jonathan Haidt (a liberal himself), is an indictment of Liberal thinking…although in their defence he claims they can’t help themselves it’s hardwired into their brains…..the Left cannot understand why ‘others’, Rednecks, Neocons or those in 4x4s, just can’t see what is good for themselves…how could they be so dumb as to not see the benefits of immigration, the iniquities of religion or the blessed freedom for women of abortion on demand.
Haidt says it is Liberals not Conservatives who are being blind…deaf to the real concerns of the vast majority of the world’s population. This vast group has the same concerns as the Liberal, defending the vulnerable and preventing suffering, but they weigh that against other issues…the need for authority, loyalty to a group, religion or society….all of which Liberals view as oppressive or irrational obstacles to equality and liberation.
He says it was a terrible mistake for Liberals to casually subvert all the structures that have developed over centuries to give purpose to people’s lives, to restrain their worst excesses and such mistakes risk destroying social order and moral constraints in pursuit of individual liberation….lowering the overall well being of the society and damaging the very victims the Liberals were trying to help.
The constraints are there because in the real world people will often do bad things if given the choice. Co-operation and cohesion depends on trust and knowledge in the others around you.
Liberals need to understand that most people are attracted by ideas of order, group identity and a desire to belong to something bigger than just themselves alone and until that happens they will continue to be baffled as to why most people do not agree with their world view.
It is not just a question of ‘education’ or the lack of. Nor inded are Rightwingers less intelligent.
The BBC needs to understand why people oppose mass immigration, even new immigrants see it is wrong, why dismembering a unified Britain and subsuming the remains into a manufactured, anonymous European identity is abhorrent, why allowing an alien religion to grow and smother our own culture is an utterly offensive.
The BBC needs to realise their views are the ‘extremist’ ones in reality….because they are held by such a small proportion of the population…as Haidt defines such Liberals, they are ‘WEIRD’…Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic……but out of touch with the ‘common man’.
(Under the moniker ‘Liberal’ I also include all levels of Socialists who don’t ‘casually subvert’ society but do so with a grim delight and malice aforethought.)
Outstanding thoughts DV.
Again we come back to a society wherein ALL the population live and abide by the same social rules and understand amorality and the penalties that breach of such rules brings.
A society made of many ethnic strands whose moral codes differ significantly will founder in conflict.
This is an interesting read
“Nations are not Constructed by Islam but Deconstructed”
19:13 | Posted by Cheradenine Zakalwe
Recently I read Adrian Hastings’ book “The Construction of Nationhood – Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism”. In it, the author discusses the historical role of religions in shaping a sense of nationhood. Tracing the history of nation formation in Africa, he points out that Christianity, and in particular the translation of the Bible into one of the local languages, was often a key stimulus to a sense of collective identity that later matured into nationhood. Islam did not have this effect. What he had to say about Islam generally was interesting.
Christianity has of its nature been a shaper of nations, even of nationalisms; Islam has not, being on the contrary quite profoundly anti-national. A great deal of vague discussion about the relationship between religion and nationalism is blighted by the easy assumption that every religion is likely to have the same sort of political effect. It is not so.
…Not only was the explicit model of Islam together with its early history opposed to anything like a multitude of nation-states, unlike Christianity, it was also opposed to linguistic diversity. Its culture was not one of translation but of assimilation.
…The Muslim attitude to the Qur’an made translation almost impossible. For the religion person it has to be read, recited out loud five times a day, or listened to in Arabic. In consequence the whole cultural impact of Islam is necessarily to Arabise, to draw peoples into a single world community of language and government. And this is what it did. Even the language of Egypt disappeared before it, except as a Christian liturgical language. Nations are not constructed by Islam but deconstructed.
http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/nations-are-not-constructed-by-islam.html
“You can’t wear a crucifix in case it ‘offends’ another’s religious sensibilities.”
So true but they use other excuses “we warned her that it was inappropriate attire”…they always set up their own ridiculous and intelligence-insulting excuse before they enforce it.
“He says it was a terrible mistake for Liberals to casually subvert all the structures that have developed over centuries to give purpose to people’s lives, to restrain their worst excesses and such mistakes risk destroying social order and moral constraints in pursuit of individual liberation….lowering the overall well being of the society and damaging the very victims the Liberals were trying to help”
Indeed. So true and a tragedy. Luckily most of us have avoided, so far, the inevitable consequence of enforcing on people of what is right for them as we have seen in the old USSR, Communist China, Nazi Germany etc.
Excellent posts above., in response to a fine piece .
Didn`t know of the Islam/Christian divisions re “nation building”, but it would explain a lot.
Luckily, we`re in a golden age of information-thinkers like these are getting spread worldwide; so if Eurabia does get to pass-we`ve no one to blame but ourselves.
Sharansky, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov. Bonner, Hayek, Burke, Mill…even Hitchens and Phillips, Wilders and Booker…as I say, a golden age!
Can I add Margaret Thatcher to this list?-her collected speeches by Iain Dale) are spookily good and prescient, timeless and as thorough a destruction of socialism as you`ll find….and none of it made the BBCs bulletins at the time either..or else I`d surely not have been the Guardian empty head that I was…would I?
A good post. I will just add that the old working class left had “conservative” values with a small c, and only wanted decent pay and a safety-net welfare state.
Unlike the triumphant middle class left, who are utterly opposed to those values, and who spread the poison of liberalism.
When Glenn Beck used ‘Gods of the Copybook Headings’ in a trailer for his new fiction book, many Liberals came out and said that Beck was the worst poet in the world. Unfortunately they did not realise it was written by Kipling!
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/41736/
‘…came out and said that Beck was the worst poet in the world’
That… is amusing
Default knee-jerk rush to critique based purely on pathological ideological dislike before engaging brain.
Could this obsessive contrarianism without reason possibly happen over here? Surely not?
If so, it would be worse than that, it would be dead… funny.
Yes….as remembered by ‘ex-socialist’ James MacMillan (who manages to find work at the BBC despite his lack of enthusiasm for the new Left)
http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/featured/476936/unthinking-dogmatism.thtml
Unthinking dogmatism
James MacMillan
‘He (his grandfather), and most of the politically active working class in places like Ayrshire throughout the 20th century, were old-style socialists.
After battling against the acolytes of Joe Stalin in the mid-20th century, my grandfather and his friends witnessed a new usurpation of their beloved Labour movement coming from the convulsions of the 1960s. A new generation appeared, whose interest seemed less in economic inequality and more in confronting the traditional values of people like my grandfather.
The cherished values of generations, the foundation of correct, well-ordered structures and relationships were under attack from a formidable foe. The traditional family and education, sexual mores, artistic aspirations, religious belief — all were now seen as coercive strategies of the powerful, designed to enforce conformity and slavish obedience.
[I am] contemptuous of the simplistic banalities of the modern progressive élites. They lack intellectual rigour and ethical integrity, their politics are bland and sentimental, their hatred of Christianity is fundamentalist.’
A pretty powerful denouncement of the ultra-Liberal /new socialist values that have insidiously poisoned what now passes for politics in this country.