The following is a brief excerpt from my aforementioned book. For those of you who did not major in English Literature, F.R. Leavis was a staunch defender of the Western Tradition through the early and mid decades of the last Century:
“How horrified would the critics of the Leavis generation be to learn that pride in the Tradition they deemed integral to the enlightenment of the species is now dismissed as a form of racial arrogance! From the philosophical deliberations of the Ancient Greeks, to the simple charm and wisdom of Chaucer, to the genius of Shakespeare, to Donne’s metaphysical speculations, to the rational prescriptions of the Enlightenment philosophers, to the mysticism of the Romantics, to the heroic efforts of those women who defied the conventions of their eras [the Brontes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, etc.], to the social concerns of the Victorian novelists, to the spiritual angst of Tennyson, to the naturalism of Zola, to the aesthetic musings of Joyce, to the reverence for tradition of Eliot, to the Existential prescriptions of Sartre and Camus, such a vital, varied and passionate response to the Human Condition; one whose dialectic yielded social-political institutions demonstrably more rational and indeed more humane than those produced by most of the non-Western world; and one which took for granted up until the recent past that Human Consciousness by definition committed Man to the pursuit of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, the “progressive” ethos representing a crassly arbitrary and pragmatically worthless refusal to honor that commitment.”
Is the cultural tradition cited above in any way superior to the traditions, let us say, of the Indigenous of the Americas? By suggesting that it is, have I just exposed myself as a White Supremacist? Or is the very suggestion utterly idiotic?