Some liberals say that, in order to defend the West, we must defend “western values”, by which they mean “liberal values”, by which I understand those newly-invented values which have done more than any other to dissolve the West. It is like taking health-tips from disease-germs.
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Well yes, but it's not so neat.
The left splits between those who believe in universal values and in the need to defend them, versus those who believe that all values are relative and that to "defend" western values is to assert that those values must take priviledge over others. Thus defending values amounts to a kind of western imperialism. This obviously stems from post modernism.
It's not clear that the "newly-invented values" belong to the first group. In fact it seems that modern destructive values originate from the post modernist view. As Steven Hicks says all cultures are equal except that western culture is uniquely evil.
The former group are typified by say Harry's Place and Norman Geras. I think this group recognises the problems with multi-culturalism (to pick one of the modern values). It's not apparent whether this group are the remnants of a defeated rationalist left or represent a viable alternative. I'm inclined to think the former.
TDK,
Nor is it so recent. The newly-invented values to which I refer are new in relation to that which they are falsely promoted to be an essential part, namely, “the West”, i.e., that European endowment, the ancient cultural and genetic heritage of which ought not to be conceptually reduced to, nor obliterated by, these political ideas which have a visible trace stretching back only a few centuries and a dominance rising only in the last century or so. It is not just very recent inanities like multiculturalism that I have in mind; I include all the other decadences and mental debilitations of modernism. It should be noted that so-called postmodernism is not actually after modernism; it is modernism at a more advanced stage of working itself out to its absurd conclusion.
You may say that there are only a few oddballs and nutters who uphold anything other than the so-called values (i.e., words in favour of liberated appetites along with short-term economic and managerial utilities) promoted by our demotic ideologies, and that, in identifying “western values” with “liberal values”, we are speaking of something approaching a fait accompli. You may be right, but you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I cannot be roused into a defence of hell.
I wasn't arguing that only a "few oddballs and nutters" support these ideas. Few people would even understand that these are the roots for the ideas that they take for granted. The ideas are now received wisdom for most on the left and even for a fair number (notionally) on the right.
I thought my pessimistic final lines made this clear. My fault.
TDK,
I beg your pardon. That was my colouring of your view. Anyway, I agree that there are very few who do not accept at least the explicitly left-wing views of yesteryear. The so-called right-wing nowadays is mostly just nominally such by any historical standard.
This attitude is obvious in the various aggrieved neo-Jacobin articles expressing their disappointment with the "War on Terror".
They are apparently surprised when majority Muslim countries adopt some form of Sharia law after Western invasion. Don't these backwards savages know that the "War on Terror" was meant to make the world safe for Sodomy and Feminism?
"Don't these backwards savages know that the "War on Terror" was meant to make the world safe for Sodomy and Feminism?"
Bingo.
Constructs are suppressing, not destroying those ideas to which you refer. After sufficient successive generations, they destroy those ideas of heritage.
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