A key element of the the ideology of the new populist far right (Trumpian, Faragist, Zemmourian etc) is some version of the “great replacement” theory, the idea that Western civ is under threat from migrants, Muslims, black people, brown people, yellow people and the rest. In some version or another, it actually goes back a long way, and was the main driver of things like the White Australia policy and similar paranoias elsewhere about white settlers being overwhelmed by coolie labour. I happen to think the fears are overblown and that the good stuff in Western civ – Bach, Shakespeare, Gothic architecture, science, ymmv – is going to survive any amount of demographic change. But the question I’d like to pose here is, how bad would it be, morally speaking?
The current “liberal” guardians of Western civ are perfectly happy to have large numbers of their fellow human beings drown, freeze, starve, or be tortured in Libyan holding pens rather than allowing them to be physically present in the heartlands. Many of the people who have drowned, frozen etc have done so because military interventions by the guardians of Western civ, as well as the wars on terror and drugs have made staying in situ frankly intolerable. Some of the movements of people (and plenty more to come) have been because of the growing impacts of climate change, including flooding and desertification, but far from co-operating to tackle those problems, the guardians have been dragged only as far as making minimal concessions which are unlikely to slow the catastrophe by much. And the populations the guardians guard are, let us not forget, the principal historical beneficiaries of industrialization and related greenhouse gas emissions. Now, faced with a worldwide pandemic where the imperative is to get everyone in the world immunized, the guardians have hoarded the vaccines at the expense of the global poor and are now punishing poorer countries such as South Africa by cutting them off when they suffer the predicted consequences. In all this, the guardians have the willing support of most of their electorates, such that no politician can hope to succeed by doing more or better.
Obviously I could go on, and back through some of the history. But it seems unnecessary to do so. The more liberal of the guardians, in Washington, Brussels, Canberra and the like will presumably remind us that “at least we’re not the Nazis” and also that actually, they are holding the line against the locally Nazi-like and provide excellent welfare and human rights for citizens inside the fence and those few denizens who managed to get over or under it. When we could pretend to ourselves that it was only a matter of time and that the “backward” would eventually catch up and have similar goodies for themselves, there was something understandable about this stance. But now they mustn’t get much richer there, for fear of making the planet even hotter, and they mustn’t come here. “We” are no longer, to paraphrase the Soviet posters, “the shining future of all mankind”. So where does that leave our claim not to be replaced?
{ 39 comments }
James McAnespy 11.30.21 at 2:24 pm
The problem is and for centuries has been Western imperialism – and the accompanying mindset that defines people by the birth and property holdings. For the denizens of these enriched landmasses, the people who were born outside of the white angle saxon protestant monoculture (which is treated as the supreme race in the UK) are not worthy of enjoying the full possibilities of life and therefore news of them perishing in a cold, shit-strewn crossing of the English can be casually brushed aside as being the proper order of things.
This is the element that needs to be eliminated – but it would take at least a generation of education to do so, and a cultural upheaval throughout each of the imperialist powers.
MPAVictoria 11.30.21 at 2:49 pm
Replaced with what? Chinese style capitalist authoritarianism? Some sort of Islamic Theocracy? I try and keep the hope alive that some sort of democratic socialist system will arise to tackle the incredible challenges we are facing but this seems less likely by the day…
Dwight L. Cramer 11.30.21 at 4:51 pm
I thought perhaps you were going somewhere else–in the direction, perhaps, of what’s worth keeping. But, bluntly, Western moral angst has been ongoing throughout the great Imperial Adventure (and perhaps even part of the fun?). It’s been transmuted with the replacement of de jure empire with soft hegemony, but the game goes on. Of course the West is cruel and selfish and blind to its cruel selfishness–has been all my life. Anybody for protesting the Death Penalty from under the security of the Nuclear Umbrella in a MAD world?
Remember that? We are no different from anybody else. But, that’s okay.
Sorry. I’m being pragmatic, not taking a position based in moral philosophy or any sort of theological argument when I assert it. Being a bit veterinary with respect to the human mammal, as a matter of fact.
The fear of replacement is, I think, a bit more visceral. American neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanting ‘we will not be replaced’ is a comfortable, easy to confront face of it. More interesting, artificial intelligence researchers focused on artificial general intelligence (not tool AI), seem genuinely spooked that their own work could lead to their own redundancy. There’s something humorous about that, more so than with the neo-Nazis crowd. But I’m drifting into the sci-fi lane, and out of moral philosophy, and I know this website has a whole bunch of sci-fi fans, and I don’t want to stray onto their turf.
nastywoman 11.30.21 at 5:06 pm
‘But the question I’d like to pose here is, how bad would it be, morally speaking’?
No it isn’t bad at all –
Especially ‘morally speaking’ – as we (all migrants, not only Muslims and black people, brown people, yellow people and even mixed whites) talked about it just on thanksgiving.
Or in other words:
We are very busy in order to replace all these ‘old purity guardians’ and that leaves some peoples claims not to be replaced in the preverbal dustbin of histery –
(and I always loved this itiom)
AND just never forget that a lot of ‘migrants, Muslims, black people, brown people and yellow people might be ‘Liberals’ too –
(but NOT ‘guardians’) –
and that the main guardians of white supremacy – and fans of the “great replacement†theory are always the Right Wing Nationalistic Racists – who never deserved the label ‘populists’ while being ‘trump’ –
(the worlds new word for: Utmost Stupid)
nastywoman 11.30.21 at 5:19 pm
‘Replaced with what? Chinese style capitalist authoritarianism? Some sort of Islamic Theocracy?’
I highly recommend the type of ‘direct democracy of Switzerland’ – as IT might have it’s drawbacks too – but all in all ‘fureigners account for 25.1% of the population’ and if a country – any country finally has over 25 % of the population in ‘foreigners’ it becomes as open-minded and beautiful diverse as London used to be.
Jim Harrison 11.30.21 at 7:06 pm
The great rival of Europe and America is a China, a nation that traces its ideology to a couple of Germans and plays chess by European rather than Chinese rules. The various fundamentalism around the globe channel a host of ideas borrowed from existentialism and philosophical idealism. What looks like the replacement of Western Civ from an American cultural conservative perspective looks very much like the replacement of non-western Civ from a world perspective. One irony of the situation is that what the loudest and most paranoid of the right in America are afraid of aren’t Muslim or Confucian or Ashanti notions, but science, political liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, i.e. Enlightenment values and institutions that are parts of the Western tradition if anything is. In this conjuncture, the Trump supporters are the ones acting like the stereotypical natives right down to promoting what amounts to 21st Century versions of the ghost dance religion.
You can only make sense of the great replacement theme racially because considered in any other key, what’s happening is the triumph of the West.
J, not that one 11.30.21 at 9:15 pm
The “populist†far right you refer to in your first sentence are largely committed to embracing the most caricatured version of the idea that by virtue of having white skin and speaking English they automatically share equally in the highest heights of “Western Civilization.â€
Toward the end of your post you suggest that “liberals†are wrong to “protect us†from those self-identified “populists,†identifying “liberals†with the overvaluing of Western Civ instead of those populists. This inference seems to me unclear.
For myself, I think it’s interesting to consider the process by which a rightwing libertarian who knows little of the humanities and science becomes convinced that he must defend “civilization†sight unseen, lest he be insufficiently conservative.
Tm 11.30.21 at 11:22 pm
I think I understand the intention of the OP and I mostly agree with it but I doubt the framing makes much sense. And I think it is never a good idea to engage with right wing talking points.
PatinIowa 12.01.21 at 12:04 am
Alas, it’s apocryphal. Still.
Journalist: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
Chetan Murthy 12.01.21 at 3:01 am
Chris, I think you give the mouth-breathers too much credit, by taking their words at face value. It’s bafflegab, man. They don’t mean Western Civ: they mean Western skin, and that’s all they have ever meant.
I’m a child of the Western Enlightenment: I believe in science, evolution, the equality of all humans, the Rights of Man, and I could go on and on. I’m a Kantian, fer crissake. [hell, I can’t even curse without invoking Western Civ!] But I’m pretty damn brown, and I’m sure Renaud Camus would say I’m a member of the invading hordes, come to replace the people of the West.
In no reasonable sense am I a threat to Western Civilization: I was raised in it, and have imbibed it wholesale. I am more “western” than the Hari Krishna kids who used to try to push their literature at me in airports back in the 80s, FFS.
It is always and only about race and skin. Always has been, always will be.
greg 12.01.21 at 5:50 am
“Western civ” is being ass-holes about the COVID vaccines. There’s no way any corporation spent more than a billion dollars researching the vaccine, so if their various governments bought rights and recipies from the different drug companies for say a few tens of billions of dollars, (Financial peanuts, these days,) and gave the rights away to the world, no one could say the pharm companies had been cheated. And if the various pharm companies refused, may they be cursed by god forever. The owners, that is, may their profits be maximized.
Really, this whole scene is so anti-Christian, the point being the hypocrisy involved. American Evangelicals think they are all saved? After this Fuck Up!
MFB 12.01.21 at 7:58 am
Well, Houllebecq toyed with the idea of France becoming an Islamic Republic in Soumission, and seems to have concluded that it wouldn’t make that much difference.
I suppose the big issue is that if Western civilisation were replaced with some other kind of civilisation, the people currently looting the planet in the name of Western civilisation might be replaced by other people. Whether the looting would stop is less likely, but the fear of being replaced is surely what drives the right-wing propaganda the post talks about.
Meanwhile, the liberal looters are mostly fairly convinced of their own irreplaceability and the absolute perfection of their ideas, therefore do not have any fears on that score. Not a much more attractive perspective, really, although they sound less manically racist than the right-wing does.
nastywoman 12.01.21 at 11:01 am
@12
‘Meanwhile, the liberal looters are mostly fairly convinced of their own irreplaceability and the absolute perfection of their ideas, therefore do not have any fears on that score’.
and do you guys really have to give ‘liberals’ such a bad name? –
As didn’t I already mention that it is the Right-Wing Racist Science and Climate Change Deniers who actually REALLY hate ANY ‘fureign culture and black brown or Muslim people’
AND NOT the average ‘liberal’ –
(if you guys really intent to talk ‘politics’ and not ‘race’ as for example my brother Chetan already has suggested)
Right?!
Fake Dave 12.01.21 at 11:16 am
There’s no such thing as “Western Civilization.” It simply doesn’t exist outside the realm of stereotypes and false dichotomies. It’s real the same way the priest and rabbi who walked into a bar or the man from Poughkeepsie are real. At best, it’s a convenient way to flatter author and (intended) audience by making them heirs to all the best people of human history. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for arguments drawing up the battle lines in preparation for the next genocidal Clash of Civilizations.
I don’t think the alleged utility of upholding some undefinable “Western Canon” could ever justify the ignorance and chauvinism it enables and even its most ardent gatekeepers can’t help but shift goalposts and retreat from motte to bailey in the face of various pointed questions. Are the Abrahamic religions Western or Eastern or somehow both? Where, precisely, on a map from Delhi to the Danube does “The West” even begin? Was the USSR “Western?” Was Byzantium? Al-Andalus? What wing of the the museum should we put the Greco-Buddhist statuary in? You’d think people who’ve dedicated their lives to defending something would at least be able to define it, but they won’t. Maybe they can’t. Frankly, I think it’s more about defending a certain kind of elite intellectual identity than civilization in general — vanity disguised as principle. Civilization marches on with or without these people, but they’ll happily take credit for it after the fact.
steven t johnson 12.01.21 at 12:50 pm
#10 and #14 should try substituting the unfashionable term “Christendom” for “Western civilization.”
dilbert dogbert 12.01.21 at 3:04 pm
MMMM???
These are the folks who have been historically replaced:
Muslims, black people, brown people, yellow people and the rest.
Ebenezer Scrooge 12.01.21 at 3:28 pm
I like what Chetan #10 said: “They don’t mean Western Civ: they mean Western skin, and that’s all they have ever meant.” However, I think he made a typo, which I can correct.
“They don’t mean Western Civ: they mean Western foreskin, and that’s all they have ever meant.” Masculinism is even more integral to that tribe than racism.
Alex SL 12.01.21 at 8:16 pm
I am sure that something like Western Civilisation can be circumscribed if given a meaningful definition, but what is even the definition in this context?
Democracy and civil liberties? No reason to assume that some electoral system or set of laws is somehow unique to The West, and conversely, there have been plenty of totalitarian dictatorships and absolutist monarchies that were clearly part of Western Civilisation. To advance this definition one would need ludicrous amounts of No True Scotsmanning and/or ignorance of history.
Language, clothing, food preferences, means of production, and views on gender roles? That is what I usually see as culture, but obviously those change rapidly from century to century anyway, so that e.g. German culture of the 19th century has been completely eradicated and replaced with German culture of today. And in the broader view, what has mostly changed on this front is most of the world becoming westernised, and a bit of food diversity and anime flowing the other direction.
Reading Shakespeare, Dante, or Goethe in school? As already implied by the three selected authors, this canon differs greatly even from Western country to Western country. And while I know that there is a certain set of right wing intellectuals who seriously believes that it is the end of Western civilisation if people don’t read their personally preferred core set of authors anymore, this definition of civilisation just makes me giggle.
Skin colour? I think that is what these people are really talking about, and the only reason the word “civilisation” even enters the discussion is for the racism to be somewhat deniable.
Fake Dave 12.02.21 at 12:54 am
Sometimes Christianity is treated as the quintessential Western religion, but other writers (such as Gibbon) insist that it was a decadent/effeminate Eastern import that corrupted Greco-Roman virtues. Arguments about Judaism and Islam are similarly bizarre. All three religions clearly emerge from the same Hellenistic millieu and were constantly in contact with one another, but numerous contemporary authors like Niall Ferguson insist on dividing them even though Plato and Josephus were at least as well known in Baghdad as in Rome.
Trevor 12.02.21 at 1:36 am
Victoria is right in #2
For all our manifold faults and hypocrisies, the Value Above Replacement Civilization seems … really high? All the critiques of current arrangements that carry any moral weight are coming from within the Western tradition. Challenges from outside the framework of individual rights (fundamentalist Islam, Maoism, Fascism maybe?) come from societies that look much much worse for human flourishing along virtually any axis.
I think a better approach is to push harder on universalization. These ideas arose in “Western” societies historically for contingent reasons, but they’re good ideas that don’t belong to us exclusively, and more than gunpowder and paper belong exclusively to China or decimal integers and algebra belong to the Islamic world.
Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/tolstoy-is-the-tolstoy-of-the-zulus/278789/
John Quiggin 12.02.21 at 2:33 am
Trevor @20 All of the challenges you mention have their sources within Western civ. That’s obvious for fascism, and Mao’s version of Stalinism, and as others have observed, the idea of Islam as non-Western makes no historical sense if you view Christianity as central. Depending on viewpoint, Islam is either the final revelation of the Judeao-Christian tradition or a Christian heresy (the view of people like Belloc).
John Quiggin 12.02.21 at 2:40 am
Relating Islam to the OP, I recall reading that the Crusades were viewed by those they attacked (Muslims and Byzantines) as the last of the barbarian invasions.
Going a bit further on the alternate history track, and accepting the traditional view of the Battle of Tours as deciding the fate of Christian Europe, it looks like a defeat for the more advanced civilisation. Had Islam prevailed there, the Renaissance might have come sooner. In that case, we would be talking (in Arabic, I guess) about Mediterranean rather than Western civilisation.
J-D 12.02.21 at 4:29 am
I am reminded of something I wrote in a comment here a few years ago:
both sides do it 12.02.21 at 5:30 am
Jacob Bacharach has a running gag on his twitter feed that encapsulates a few comments here
“None of the defenders of Western Civilization has ever encountered it”
Chetan Murthy 12.02.21 at 5:40 am
A number of comments mention “Western Civ as a stand-in for Christendom”. So we can run with that, too. I’m an atheist, but all my religious referents are from Christianity and Judaism. All of them. B/c yanno, I was raised in a Christian society, even if my parents were about the most non-practicing Hindus you could imagine (which I’m certainly not complaining about grin — it’s what allowed me to believe in science first before any other faith system). And then we come to the entirety of Central and South America, which is …. Christian! And much of Africa! I mean, Evangelicalism is spreading like wildfire in all those places!
So even if we think they mean “Christendom” it doesn’t work.
And haha, Ebenezer, I don’t think it means “white foreskin” either, b/c heh, every Black American has white male progenitors, and yet …… they’re not classified as part of Western Civ either.
JQ is right, that this “Western Civ is so great” is a recent development at best, and I certainly do not mean to argue for it; rather, just to show that it’s pure hypocrisy from top to bottom.
RichardM 12.02.21 at 8:45 am
The kind of scenario right wingers mean when they talk of a great replacement is farmers switching to a different breed of cattle because it is more profitable.
For example, in 1494 Columbus first landed on Jamaica, and in the subsequent decades the Spanish claimed the Island. The inhabitants of the island, the Taino, proved not resistant to Spanish diseases, or the hardships of slavery. So the Spanish gradually replaced them by West Africans. There was massacres, but never any moment when someone said ‘lets kill them all now’. But in modern Jamaican genetic surveys there is barely any trace of descendants of the Taino.
It seems to me that this slow genocide of the Taino was a bad thing. Consequently, to me, any argument that implies the opposite conclusion must be wrong or inapplicable. That genocide being bad doesn’t seem to be contingent on the Taino having some globally unique quality; they made good canoes, but were they unambiguously better than those made by Polynesians? Similarly, whether or not the Taino had a hard boundary between them and other Caribbean groups has no obvious moral relevance.
As I see it, it was bad because over a period of multiple centuries, almost all Tainu had unhappy lives, with many ending early and some violently. And so few having children, and those children having the same issues. On other Caribbean islands, the locals had it somewhat less bad, and so they do have modern descendants making up some proportion of the islands inhabitants. The point is not that having descendants is a good in itself, but that, at a population level, a widespread lack of them is invariably a symptom of some real systematic issue.
All that means that any response to a political theory based on a claim that such a replacement is going to happen should not focus on clever legalistic arguments about how it would not be breaking any moral rules if it did. Instead, seek to demonstrate that it will not. Present plans for action, focusing on ensuring people actually do have better and happier lives. Perhaps ones that are not contingent on their productive value to any farmer
Tm 12.02.21 at 9:57 am
“Plato and Josephus were at least as well known in Baghdad as in Rome.”
And of course, much of Greek philosophy would have been lost to “Western civilization” without the translations and commentaries of Islamic scholars. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle)
The whole “Western civilization” framing should be if not rejected then at least severeley questioned.
George Carty 12.02.21 at 10:31 am
Chetan Murthy @10:
The most logical of the more restrictive definitions of “Western civilization” would be that it would be the territories historically under the sway of the Roman Catholic Church or its Protestant offshoots. The fact that many US-Americans don’t seem to regard Latin Americans as fully Western would suggest that many self-declared partisans of “Western civilization” are indeed (perhaps closeted?) racists.
John Quiggin @21, 22:
Jesus was clearly crucial to the coming of universalism (his grand historical achievement was to turn Yahweh from a tribal Hebrew god to a universal one) and is perhaps explains the aggressive expansionism of Western and Islamic civilizations alike. Those civilizations are both inspired by Jesus’s teachings, as spun by St. Paul and Muhammad respectively, while Judaism was also globalized somewhat (in spite of its rejection of Jesus) by the diaspora experience.
Covid has however made me wonder if universalism is overrated: I even at one point (most likely at my lowest point, about this time last year) started thinking “I guess this is what it must have been like for a devout Muslim to live through the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate”. Finding out that your own beloved civilization is objectively inferior to a hated and feared rival is deeply traumatic to the point that I can empathise a bit more with the insanity of jihadism.
It is clear that the best-performing countries during the Covid pandemic were those of the Chinese cultural sphere, and I can’t help but wonder if the inherently parochial nature of those societies (by contrast with the universalist aspirations of Abrahamic ones) was the key. It meant that such societies had no qualms about sealing their borders against a biological virus, much as the Tokugawa shoguns sealed Japan’s borders against the memetic contagion of Christianity.
It is notable that the only countries outside that cultural sphere to do comparably well were Australia and New Zealand, where a combination of geographical isolation and a southern-hemisphere location (which meant that they had seasonality on their side during the early weeks of 2020) meant they could get away with waiting until March 2020 to close their borders, while northern hemisphere countries had to have done it in January 2020 (as Taiwan and Vietnam did).
It is also notable that even within East Asia those countries where Abrahamic religions are strong (such as the Philippines with Catholicism, or Indonesia with Islam) did considerably less well Covid-wise than the countries of the Chinese cultural sphere.
Chetan Murthy 12.02.21 at 7:11 pm
J-D: Oh, haha! Yes, the Americans of the 21st century would barely recognize the Americans of the 19th: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/04/deadwoods-historical-accuracy
“DEADWOOD’S HISTORICAL ACCURACY”
Boy howdy, kidnapping and raping little girls found on the street at age 10. Selling children into prostitution. The courts upholding all that. Western Civilization.
Alex SL 12.02.21 at 8:08 pm
Jesus was clearly crucial to the coming of universalism (his grand historical achievement was to turn Yahweh from a tribal Hebrew god to a universal one) and is perhaps explains the aggressive expansionism of Western and Islamic civilizations alike.
Jesus wasn’t universalist at all, and European, Indian, and Chinese thinkers have had universalist ideas before and after Paul.
What is really more plausible as a model of history?
A Great Thinker has an idea that nobody else among millions of humans has ever expressed, and it is so amazing that entire societies change what they do after hearing about it.
or
Thousands of philosophers, prophets, and other thinkers express a great diversity of ideas, and generally more or less the same fundamental ones each era, because we are all humans, and some insights come easily to many of us. Mainstream interests and preferences changes due to economic developments, better or worse education access, more or less wealth, greater or more restricted trade and travel, and then people pick one of those thinkers (and cherry-pick from their statements only those parts they like) to justify what they wanted to do anyway, while all those other thinkers sink into obscurity.
Tm 12.02.21 at 11:02 pm
RichardM?
Who around here argued for the moral permissibility of slavery and genocide? Nobody did. What’s the point then? Gaslighting. The whole modern right wing discourse is pure gaslighting.
Always keep that in mind!
Chetan Murthy 12.03.21 at 1:56 am
George Carty: “It is clear that the best-performing countries during the Covid pandemic were those of the Chinese cultural sphere”
Funny thing. For one of those dusky-hued ones, I’m pretty committed to our “Western culture”, and I find this analysis ….. troubling. Not that I think you’re wrong, but rather, that I think you might be right. It’s really distressing, b/c to me, the idea of “civic duty” was something I thought we inherited from Christianity (OK, OK, don’t go citing all the other sources, I’m an atheist after all, so not like I studied the Bible, ehhhhh?) and it’s been a matter of great distress to me that so many ostensible Christians seem to have forgotten The Golden Rule.
As a columnist over at The Guardian remarked ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/30/anti-mask-blitz-war-public-good ), “Let’s not pretend the anti-mask babies would have lasted a minute in the blitz”.
J-D 12.03.21 at 6:08 am
No, that’s not what they mean. What they mean is ‘Lots of people who look and sound unfamiliar in my neighbourhood where I see and hear them’.
RichardM 12.03.21 at 10:10 am
For example, the obvious impossibility of drawing a firm and agreed boundary between what is and isn’t ‘Western Civilization’ is not a thing that implies moral consequences. So any discussion of it in the context of ‘should this happen?’ is just a bad argument.
Someone could perhaps vaguely make the historical argument that ‘science’ is a meaningful thing that is distinctive to some term analogous to ‘Western Civilization’. If they successfully did, why would that be supposed to matter?
One of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books has a footnote about a philosopher who proved black was equal to white and then proceeded to get run over on a zebra crossing. That is funny because normally, getting clever about manipulating labels doesn’t change how the real world actually works.
Settings aside such stupid forms of cleverness, the things that, in reality, would cause the replacement of western civilization would, in reality, actually be wars, disasters or genocides. That (and not having a few diverse neighbors) is what is necessary to destroy a civilization.
Arguing for a consequence without arguing for any of the causes that could lead to that consequence is a rather fine line. And one that can only be maintained by a reluctance to think things through.
Tm 12.03.21 at 3:06 pm
I take it that RichardM concedes that nobody here has argued for the moral permissibility of slavery and genocide. The rest is trolling and gaslighting.
Chetan Murthy 12.03.21 at 6:39 pm
RichardM @ 34: Boy howdy, those are words on a page, alright.
“Settings aside such stupid forms of cleverness, the things that, in reality, would cause the replacement of western civilization would, in reality, actually be wars, disasters or genocides.”
But that is NOT what these panties-in-a-knot shriekers are banging on about: they’re outraged about immigration. Oh, and when it comes to wars, disasters, and genocides, it’s The West that’s done most of the perpetrating there. Since 1492, buddy, since 1492.
J, not that one 12.03.21 at 10:51 pm
In the early 20th century racist graduates of English public schools and German Gymnasia claimed Democracy was the especial inheritance of the Teuton tribes. Now racist graduates of North American Accounting programs claim Freedom is the especial inheritance of “Western Civilization†(which properly speaking is the especial inheritance of the Germanic nations plus a few pale-skinned Catholics from Poland). That’s all it is.
Maybe a few rightwing professors believe there’s more to it than that, but I’d they’re real they’re cowering in their library carrels from what I can tell and I see no reason to worry about their possible existence.
Alex SL 12.03.21 at 11:18 pm
normally, getting clever about manipulating labels doesn’t change how the real world actually works.
I really wish more people would grasp that, because that might clear up some rather frustrating perennial discussions about Free Will, consciousness and sentience, souls and other religious concepts, and political ideologies.
George Carty 12.05.21 at 12:44 pm
So I guess that is why attacks on “Muhammad the pedophile” (for his marriage to Aisha) only really got going in the 20th century, because before then the West wasn’t much better in that respect?
I certainly find it distressing too: why do you think I said it made me feel like a devout Muslim living through the fall of the Ottomans?
On masks (while I wouldn’t defy a mask mandate personally) I’m still sceptical of their value as a means of infection control. East Asian countries (where mask-wearing was routine pre-Covid) didn’t then have noticeably lower death rates from flu than Western countries, and mask mandates in Western countries (even the recent one in Germany which required medical-grade masks!) don’t seem to have had much effect.
I suspect a lot of pro-mask people in the West were driven by the fallacious argument “East Asians wear masks, East Asian countries have low Covid rates, therefore masks must be effective” even though what really made the difference in East Asia was not masks, but fast border closures and the use of centralized quarantine (both for residents returning from abroad, and for contacts of those who test positive).
Not sure though how much the difference was down to East Asians being more comfortable with closed borders due to their lack of Abrahamic universalist tradition. Perhaps instead it was simple geography – with most states there being either totalitarian dictatorships or islands/peninsulas which (unlike the UK or Ireland) could easily close themselves off due to not being dependent on truck-borne international trade? Or did East Asia see the rise of a thorough-going “biosecurity state” ideology since 2003, as a result of the experience with SARS: a virus 10 times more lethal than Covid?
Isn’t the specific threat that a lot of these people are afraid of the threat of the Islamization of the West, in the sense of “enough Muslim immigrants come in that they and (thanks to higher birth rates) their descendants become a majority of the population, which then proceeds to vote in a government which imposes Sharia”?
I suppose it would be relevant then that Western and Islamic civilizations are cousins (and perhaps also that Muhammad didn’t compromise Islam’s monotheism as Paul did Christianity’s: which perhaps may be why Islam has more staying power today) rather than being totally alien to one another?
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