The Bookworm Beat 8-31-17 — the different cultures edition

The Left says all cultures are equal, except for ours, which is worse. The Left then takes active steps to turn this falsehood into the truth.

Different culturesWhen I was looking for the common denominator tying together the various posts I found interesting, the binding word was cultures. Both inside America and outside, in the larger world, we are seeing that the internet not only connect us, but it brought together, cheek to jowl, successful cultures and failed ones. Each of the links examines cultures and their differences.

What makes successful cultures? I actually found boring the fact that a bunch of dead-end Marxist law professors got their knickers in a twist when a couple of other law professors pointed out, quite accurately, that in the modern world, it’s the Protestant model (or, one could say, the traditional Jewish model or the traditional Catholic model) that brings success: learn, work, marry, have children, in that order.

By now it’s a dreary “dog bites man” story about the way in which the cultural Marxists among us are desperate to destroy this tried-and-true recipe for material success and, instead, seek desperately to force on America behaviors that lead to criminality, promiscuity, and poverty. As part of this pattern, anyone successful who dares to preach what he or she practices is doomed to be pilloried and destroyed.

I did find interesting, however, David Goldman’s rumination on what constitutes a successful culture. After all, if we’re going to be proud cultural relativists (and I am), we’d better have a sense of what we consider “successful.” Goldman points out that most cultures die and, moreover, die without a trace. The ones that thrive are the ones that can latch onto and incorporate the best of other cultures, while retaining the virtues of their own.

What makes unsuccessful cultures? Sadly, Islam makes for an unsuccessful culture. Another thing that makes for an unsuccessful culture is that moment in a nation’s history when the power brokers refuse to identify the forces seeking its destruction. Such is the case in Europe and America, where every Allahu Akbar attack is denominated an insane act, unrelated to any specific cultural influence. Daniel Greenfield turns a gimlet eye on Islam’s cultural propensity for murderous violence and the West’s corollary  suicidal propensity for denial.

The one thing Greenfield concedes (in a different post, because he is a very prolific thinker and writer) is that Americans are still a great people. (As someone else said, I think it was Richard Fernandez or maybe David Goldman, America has an extraordinary wealth of human capital.) Our problem, though, is that we are losing the institutions that develop, identify, and propagate American greatness.

Indeed, as Ann Coulter describes with her usual verve, our media is desperate to deny that Americans are a great people. The media celebrates everything but American greatness. And on the rare occasions when it can, it tries to induce mass hysteria about rare “right-wing” deviations from that melange of American regional cultures that are united by core decency. This is how you kill cultures.

It’s almost as if they wanted it to happen. When you think about America being a great country, part of its greatness is the rule of law. Another part of its traditional greatness has been reverence for free speech. When both of those exemplary national traits vanish in a maelstrom of criminality and violence, Americans start questioning who and what they are.

With that in mind, you have to ask yourself what the Democrat governor of Virginia (Terry McAuliffe) and the Democrat mayor of Charlottesville (Mike Signer) ignored the DHS’s warning that it would be dangerous to let Antifa thugs and White Supremacists thugs get too close to each other.

It’s almost as if these Democrat party operatives wanted the violence to happen. And why would that be? Well, it’s all about the cultural narrative:

The media has a consistent culture: It lies. And then it lies some more. And when it’s done lying, it digs in deep and lies even more. So don’t worry that General Mattis is refusing to execute President Trump’s order revoking transgender service in the American military. That’s a lie too.

And finally, the Clash’s Rock the Casbah, from a time when pop culture was transgressive, not regressive, and you could rock about clashing cultures:

(For those who find both lyrics and video muddy, here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

The song gives a fabulist account of a ban on Western rock music by an Arab king. The lyrics describe the King’s efforts to stop his population from listening to this music, such as ordering his military’s jet fighters to bomb any people in violation of the ban. The pilots ignore the orders, and instead play rock music on their cockpit radios. The population then proceed to “rock the casbah” by dancing to the music. This scenario was inspired by the ban on Western music in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The song’s lyrics feature various Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Sanskrit loan-words, such as sharif, bedouin, sheikh, kosher, rāga, muezzin, minaret, and casbah.

Photo credit: Three Hijabs, by Eric Parker. Creative commons license; some rights reserved.