Time was, I thought I was a pretty smart guy. I believed that I saw things clearly and reasoned accurately. Lately, I’ve become unsure.
The human mind seeks categories. It looks for ways to classify people, things, and events into discrete boxes that partition experience into neat clusters with hard edges. That’s not a bad thing, in most cases. But it can run away from you, especially if you forget:
- That we all reason from premises;
- That the source of our premises ought to be questioned.
We don’t acquire our premises by a logical process. A lot of us get them from indoctrination. Some of us are bludgeoned mercilessly for many years, until finally we conclude that the only way to stop the pain is to accept what we’re being told.
When the pain stops and we’re free to think again, we must be ready to revisit those doctrines and deal with them as rational men.
The above is very abstract: as abstract as I could make it. That’s so that it will be maximally useful to any Gentle Reader who thinks he understands it. Among our premises are some that have signs hung about them that scream “DANGER: Do Not Inspect Too Closely” in large block letters. If you recoil from addressing any of your premises, it’s likely that the memory of pain is what repels you. Indoctrination is intended to have that result.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote a huge novel in which he used a “man from Mars” as his vehicle for examining certain common premises. It’s his most popular, most widely read book, in part because it seems to grant the reader permission to violate certain norms that are near-universal to the First World. Yet anyone who looks closely at the author’s life is struck by how far from the seeming exhortations of Stranger in a Strange Land Heinlein’s own conduct lay.
Heinlein’s novel has value in that it questions premises and implies that the reader should do likewise. That is not the same as refuting them by an impeccably logical process. Moreover, to the extent that we of the late 20th Century set those premises aside, we only reaffirmed their importance. The consequences have all but shattered our societies. They have spoken in a voice of thunder.
I could go on about this. On occasions I’ve done so. But I’ve lost the strength for it. More, I don’t think it’s necessary any longer.
By now you’re probably wondering about what gave rise to this. As it’s an ugly subject, I’ll try to be brief.
Tom Kratman, whom I esteem highly, has posted a set of assessments and predictions for the future of the West. His observations, premises, and expectations are much like mine, at least when I’ve had enough wine to be candid within myself. A brief, thematic taste:
I think, in the first place, that those future saviors have probably added a capital crime, Civilizational Treason, to the books, that looks a lot like our definition of treason, but with an expansive view of "making war upon" and "giving aid and comfort."
The implications of a crime of “civilizational treason” are endless. The core of the concept of treason is opposition to that to which one’s loyalty was premised. But Tom’s term requires that we ask what it means to be loyal to a civilization… and that compels us to ask what sort of foundation lies beneath the civilizations of the West.
That’s a study to which men have given whole careers. It cannot be fruitfully approached entirely in the abstract. It requires a great deal of knowledge about the history of Western Civilization. It also requires the courage to be honest about the currents that threaten to sweep them away.
The threats to any civilization are those ideas that cross-cut its premises, no matter how those premises were arrived at. But ideas don’t hang in the void, Victor Hugo’s notions notwithstanding. They require carriers dedicated to them and willing to invest their lives in propagating them.
If our civilization is founded on certain premises, it behooves those of us who value it to know what those premises are, and to be prepared to defend them with our lives if necessary. The shortfall of persons who meet those criteria is why the enemies of Western Civilization are currently in the ascendant. Worse, a great many young Americans and Europeans have been trained like circus animals to deride those premises. That puts them in league with our enemies.
As Thomas Sowell has said, the barbarians are inside the gates. As Marcus Tullius Cicero has told us, there is no greater danger to what we hold dear than the traitor.
The key to victory in any conflict is knowledge. Sun Tzu said it first:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
But knowledge doesn’t hang disembodied in the void, either. It requires acceptance: your acceptance. If you reject the knowledge required to win, you’ll lose. Apologies for being so blunt about it.
The critical knowledge comes from plain answers to these questions:
- Who is my enemy?
- What makes him my enemy?
Those are precisely the questions we of the West have been most forcibly discouraged from asking.
It is common among Americans generally that we are reluctant to name our enemies and to take up arms against them. Not our overt military enemies; we’re usually pretty good at identifying those. The enemies of Western Civilization: they who are actively working to smash the pillars of the Western temple. But to identify our enemies demands that we identify the pillars themselves. We’ve been irrationally reluctant to name and defend those.
The above requires that we re-examine certain doctrines that have been beaten into us for many decades. Foremost among them is this one: that the greatest of all crimes is making others uncomfortable. To cleave to that commandment, we have restrained ourselves from defending the fundamental canons of the West, even as the Civilizational Traitors now among us have chipped away at them.
If the West is to survive, we must overcome that doctrine. We must perform an othering. We must say, in a great and terrible voice:
“You are the enemies of individual rights and responsibilities, of human freedom, and of the imperishable teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ. On these things our civilization is founded. Therefore you are our enemies. Therefore we will remove you, by whatever means may prove effective. No quarter will be given.”
I submit that it’s time.
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