The “progressive” strategy: Let’s conflate the validity of Ideas and Values with the skin color of those who promote them. Let’s not discuss whether 2+2 actually equals 4, but simply dismiss that proposition as a racial bias.
Hence the title of my aforementioned book, “Mindless by Design,” whose basic premise is that the contemporary myth of Systemic White Racism is really but a pathetic attempt to avoid discussing the relative merits of the cultural articulations of history’s various Civilizations because such a discussion must inevitably reveal that some peoples undeniably produced cultures which were demonstrably superior to others.
It is a sad fact of the poisonous climate produced by the “anti-racist” Left that I must preface my brief discussion with the assertion that acknowledging the intellectual superiority of the Tradition which emerged from Ancient Greece to most every cultural regime which emerged from the continent of Africa, is in no way intended to imply that any individual of either European or African descent is by that very fact superior or inferior to any other. One can acknowledge the irrefutable Facts of History while respecting the Individuality of every person on the planet, if one is a “conservative,” that is.
2500 years ago Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as the Cynics and Stoics engaged in a prolonged and preeminently rational investigation into the Nature and Meaning of Life, seeking to define those Principles and Values most conducive to human fulfillment. Yes, Athens was decidedly patriarchal and Aristotle appears to have been a Male Chauvinist, yet others postulated that Women were as worthy as Men of contributing to the political process while still others endorsed the Democratic principle that all peoples, even the “barbarians” typically reviled by the elites of Greek culture, were entitled to respect as human beings. As a devotee of 20th Century Existentialism, I have always marveled at the similarities between the beliefs of the Ancient Stoics and those of Sartre and Camus. This is not to imply that every idea that emerged from the speculations of Western philosophers and literary artists had merit, but simply that, as the amazing Socrates suggested, it is only through the free give and take of such discourse that the Dialectic of genuine civilized progress can maintain its momentum.
Just as that Dialectic was more or less stifled throughout the Middle [“Dark”] Ages by the imposition of an authoritarian Religious Dogma, so also the behavior of Western Man as he ventured beyond the shores of his known world was hardly perfect. But the contemporary narrative on Colonialism equates the sometimes despicable behavior of the colonialists with the Civilization of which they were a product, demonizing even those Westerners who remained relatively civilized in their dealings with the peoples they encountered simply because they assumed what seemed to them the unequivocal superiority of their culture of origin. As with its Marxist definition of “social justice,” so also in its vision of History, the Left always sees Success as tainted, achievement simplistically vilified as a species of oppression rather than celebrated as a product of Man striving to be the very best he might be. I can’t tell you how many articles I have read declaring the very notion of a Meritocracy to be a Western, Capitalist myth, those who have failed to flourish apparently never being in any way responsible for their failure.
Reality is complex. There are no doubt social injustices in every society though to a decidedly lesser extent in the Democracies of the West. But you’d never know it from the ludicrously biased narrative promoted by our “intellectuals.” While he certainly wasn’t perfect, Columbus is presently being demonized as a genocidal monster because 500 years ago he came to the eminently rational conclusion that the peoples of the New World, seemingly stuck in the Stone Age, would benefit enormously from a Western Education. He is literally being demonized for failing to conform to the dictates of Post-Modern Relativism, the absurd, juvenile, amoral belief that all world-views are equally valid, that an empirical, rational approach to Reality is of no more merit than one rooted in ignorance and superstition.
Mindless acquiescence to such Relativism coupled with a convenient disregard for the facts of History has led the “woke” Left to impugn the reputations of a host of formerly revered Western cultural icons, among them Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln in the States and Sir John A. here in Canada. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the brazen disrespect for the truth typical of the Left’s “social justice warriors” than their recent assault in Toronto on a statue of Egerton Ryerson, a 19th Century educator charged with responsibility for the many atrocities inflicted upon Canada’s Indigenous in the Residential School System ostensibly designed to educate them. Ryerson, research reveals, spoke Ojibwe and was close to the Mississauga community just outside of Toronto. A friend of one Peter Jones, an Ojibwe who converted to become a Methodist minister, Ryerson actually gave the eulogy at his funeral. So progressive was he that he inveighed against the use of corporal punishment in any of Canada’s schools 170 years ago! And by the time the Residential Schools actually began to proliferate in the 1870s, he was an old man who had nothing to do with their jurisdiction. Yet in addition to the recent defacement of his Toronto statue, the various Boards of Education which include schools named in his honor, are all considering eradicating him from the historical record. Truly Absurd!
Fact: While White Westerners are no less prone to evil than any other sector of the species, the Principles which emerged from the European Enlightenment are unequivocally responsible for a level of peace and prosperity relatively unknown to much of the world. To cite but one example, the Rationalists of the 17th and 18th Centuries saw the separation of Church and State as a mandatory prerequisite to maintaining the freedom and well-being of every citizen within any given society. How many Nations today, having failed to adopt this principle, are riddled with concentration camps and death squads for that very reason? How many millions did Mao kill in his so-called Great Leap Forward at the behest of the religious mania known as Communism?
The term “Whiteness” is presently being tossed about with scornful abandon, the implication being that it is a meaningless abstraction created by deluded Caucasians. Obviously anyone who sees himself as superior to another because his skin is White is a racist if not an idiot. But the notion that Whiteness is a term devoid of meaning literally asks us to ignore all of Human History. In a recent T.V. interview, Black American academic Marc Lamont Hill asked Christopher Rufo, a White man who rejects Critical Race Theory, “to name something positive about being White.” His request was of course laden with skepticism. While Rufo was understandably tactful in his response, he would have been perfectly justified in countering with a lengthy catalogue of the benefits available to Hill, whose ancestors may indeed have been slaves, due to the rational, humane, “dialectical” evolution of White Western Civilization. It is no doubt in search of those benefits that refugees from around the world continue to assail the borders of the Nations of Western Europe and North America day after day after day.
The non-racist puts the integrity of Ideas and Values ahead of Ethnic Identity. I am in awe of Black American “conservatives” such as Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens and Larry Elder who see the Principles which made America great not as White Constructs but as indisputably Valid Constructs. “Anti-Racists” on the other hand, those who buy the drivel spewed by Ibram X. Kendi et al, divert attention from any discussion of Substance by making everything about Race. Hence Patrisse Cullors’ stated intention as a founder of B.L.M. to dismantle the Nuclear Family which she dismissed as a White Social Construct, while Black “conservatives” see the dissolution of that institution as the chief reason for the surging pandemic of drug abuse and violent crime within inner city America.
Yes, irony of ironies, the Left denigrates those “White” Principles and Values which might very well lead the poor and “oppressed” to a better future, and then hypocritically blames Systemic White Racism for their failure to achieve that end. And pointing this out evidently makes me a White Supremacist!