Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Jan 31, 2019 12:42 am
he problem is that you are closed to the objective complimentary differences between men and women. Like other feminists you demand an imagined equality with no conception of the value of differences.
Yes, Greta's problem is that she is what the Americans call a "liberal". In the US, the term "liberal" typically means "social liberal" or "liberal - progressive." Donald Trump refers to all Democratic party politicians and their supporters in disparaging terms as "liberals", and warns the public that "liberals" in the US are intent on destroying the traditional values that made America the great nation it once was.
Because the terms "liberal" and "liberalism" have been defined in so many different ways and have come to mean so many different things, I thought I would begin saying what I want to say by setting down a list of the core principles of
social liberalism as identified by John Gray, an authoritative, mainstream political philosopher, who has studied liberalism extensively and discovered there are four common strands which can be found in all of the different formations of the doctrine. A "liberal", says Gray, is a person who in essence:
(1) Affirms the
ETHICAL primacy of the
INDIVIDUAL human being against the pressures of collectivism ( ingroup hegemony, ethnic/racial tribalism, etc).
(2) Is a
MORAL EGALITARIAN who believes that
ALL (i.e. each and every individual) human beings possess precisely
THE SAME (i.e. IDENTICAL, EQUAL) MORAL WORTH ( "dignity"). (The liberal presumption of the assumption of absolute, universal, moral egalitarianism is the bedrock upon which social, cultural and political egalitarianism are, in turn, based). Liberalism's obsession with egalitarianism in the idea of the individual's absolute, non-fungible, inalienable, universal entitlement to: equal rights, freedoms, equal status before the law, equal consideration in respect of comparable interests and so on can be traced back to the 17th century in the work of Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes (1651) and John Locke (1690) and then, in the 18th century, Rousseau (1755/1762), Helvetius (1758) and the greatest of all the Enlightenment philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1785).
(3) Is a MELIORIST who believes that successive generations can achieve PROGRESS; i.e; improve their sociopolitical arrangements over time. Or, to put it in other words, that human beings can, through their own efforts, make the world a better (and better) place. (Meliorism, i.e; a faith in man's ability to achieve - through his own unaided endeavour - progress, in these sense of making his world a better place , is essentially a metaphysical concept).
(4) Is a
UNIVERSALIST who affirms the MORAL UNITY of ALL human beings (i.e; the whole of the species,
homo sapiens) and therefore MARGINALISES LOCAL, CULTURAL DIFFERENCES.
Liberalism is a uniquely and distinctively Western political/philosophical doctrine. Although Western liberalism is said to have its theoretical foundations in the work of thinkers like John Locke, the 17th century English philosopher and, his fellow Enlightenment theorist Montesquieu, I think the first emergence of Liberalism as a political movement can be traced back to medieval England. I am referring specifically to the famous
Magna Carta (Great Charter (of rights) that was ratified by King John of England in 1215.
What is so special about the
Magna Carta it that codified the revolutionary and uniquely Western concept of "the rule of law". With the
Magna Carta authority is abstracted away from ingroups (like local family groups) or tribal groups, and the rule of law now takes precedence over, - and applies to -, all groups in society, even (in theory) the ruling class. For the first time, no one is above the law. (This, BTW, had never happened before in any society that existed at any point in the previous 6000 years) Thus, in time, the law eventually becomes secular, and secular law leads to individual rights. As liberalism evolved representative government more often than not became the standard, and in time as we have seen in the West, that government became progressive.
The point I would like to make in this post is that the West's long experiment with political liberalism is now bringing some very unexpected and dysfunctional consequences to bear in its own societies. The reason is that political liberalism is a constantly evolving/growing movement, and it is an innate characteristic of the nature of Liberalism as a philosophical/political doctrine that
WHEN IT REACHES ITS APEX, IT THEN BEGINS TO DECONSTRUCT ITS OWN TRADITIONS AND SOCIETY BY AUTOMATICALLY GENERATING NEW NORMS AND STANDARDS. This, I believe, is what we are witnessing right now, namely the process of political liberalism beginning to destroy Western civilization through its creation ever more maladaptive new social/moral standards and norms. Here is a brief account of some milestones in the progression of liberalism in the West ( I will mostly use the US to illustrate) to help demonstrate my point...
THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
The West abolished slavery in its colonies, but it also forced the rest of the world to outlaw the practice. Britain was the first Western nation to ban the British slave trade, passing the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807; a year later, in 1808, the United States followed suite and also passed legislation banning the slave trade. After Britain and America abolished slavery, other countries involved in the slave trade including Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Sweden, Denmark Brazil and Cuba also outlawed slavery relatively rapidly. While slavery still exists, of course, in many parts of the world to this day (mostly in the Middle East and Africa),
it was the West and only the West that came to see the inherent inhumanity of chattel slavery as it embraced in the Enlightenment notion of the equal dignity (moral worth) of all men, Kant's moral philosophy was particularly influential in promoting the notion of moral egalitarianism throughout Europe in the 18th century. This fundamental liberal thesis of moral egalitarianism was, as I will demonstrate, destined to have a profound influence on the nature Western civilization in the twentieth century.
THE 19th AMENDMENT
After liberalism destroyed slavery, its next target in the progressive era was women's rights, which led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, not so coincidentally, however, once women were enfranchised the concept of the Welfare State was born. The Welfare State, in short, represents the culmination of marrying individualism with egalitarianism, and this is a profoundly secular and anti - ingroup idea that is , again, uniquely Western. Universal man-made salvation, the expansion of the franchise relates to this idea as does the extension of Western democracy as the ultimate political ideal.
THE IMMIGRANT
Liberalism in the West also led to a very important, and in the majority of cases alien concept, namely, "the immigrant". An immigrant is distinct from a foreigner. A foreigner goes to another country and lives there as an outsider. An immigrant, on the other hand, is on arrival in his new country immediately seen as having equal standing with the natives, even though having no ties, history, and at times very different cultural/moral values and world-views than the dominant ingroup. Most societies throughout the world today still cling to the concept of the foreigner and have retained their ethnic/racial tribalism. Whether it is in Japan, China, Cambodia, any of the Muslim-majority states, the sacred lands of the different aboriginal tribes of Australia, Papua New Guinea, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Turkey, etc the concept of ingroup and outgroup continues to operate in society. Throughout the West the suppression of ingroup preference in accordance with the principles of liberalism (moral egalitarianism, universalism, anti-collectivism, anti-tribalism, etc) has logically led to the mass, uncontrolled immigration of people from completely incompatible cultures, most of whom are not even able to look after themselves. In 2015, for example, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel blithely opened her country's borders to 1,000,000 Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi Muslim immigrants; today, 99% of these million immigrants are still unemployed. Or consider Sweden. Here, over recent years, a leftist Swedish administration (which upon being elected to power trumpeted itself as "the world's first feminist government" !) have adopted a very liberal stance on immigration, the result has been that Sweden today has the second highest Muslim population rate in Europe. and not just this but also Europe's second highest rate of sexual assault and rape. Although the Swedish government denies that there is a serious problem with the rape of Swedish women by young men who are Muslim immigrants, the fact of the matter is that there is indeed a serious problem with Islamic immigrants raping and sexually abusing Swedish women and ongoing tactic of the government - which is to put it head in the sand and avoid openly addressing the reality of the crisis - is an open scandal.
FALL-OUT FROM THE FIRST AND SECOND WORLD WARS
The next phase in the evolution of liberalism came after the horrors of the First and Second World Wars, which resulted, in turn, resulted in civilizational exhaustion and civilizational self-doubt in the West.What had formerly been the established thinking with regard to the notion of Empire was now completely upended and this allowed the process of decolonisation to go relatively peacefully after the end of WW2. No longer was it Europe's duty and burden to civilize the world; the new paradigm was one of rigid egalitarianism for all.
This egalitarianism was officially "enshrined" in the 1948 United Nation's Declaration of Human Rights which proclaimed that...
"
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity (moral worth/value) and rights."
...and...
"
(Thus) all men (and women) are equally, individually, entitled to the rights and freedoms set out in this Declaration."
And that this is the case regardless of:
*Race
*Ethnicity
*Colour
*Culture
*Sex/Gender
*Language
*Religion
*Political or other opinion
*National or social origin
*Property, birth or other status
It is still, for instance, the currently held belief in Western societies that that all cultures are valid and all cultures are equal despite observable differences in outcome, prosperity and human dignity. All discourse in the West regarding the equality of cultures was elevated to a
sacrosanct fact that only a perceived idiot, or, an evil psychopath could dispute. And again, this is another completely anti - ingroup preference that is uniquely Western.
THE CIVIL LIBERTIES MOVEMENT AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
AS Liberalism continued to evolve in the West,in America, the American Civil Liberties movement came to prominence in the 1960's; it sought to convince the US that there were absolutely no differences between the human races. Also in the 1960's, a women's rights movement began to gather momentum, it sought nothing less than a sexual revolution and tried to convince mainstream society that there were absolutely no differences between the genders (i.e; men and women).
(1)
RACE
The idea that there are no distinctive human races on Earth, and that if I select 10 Japanese adults at random from an inner city district of Tokyo, 10 adults from a traditional village in Denmark and 10 native Pygmies from the African Congo, place these three groups of ten in a "iine-up" and study them carefully, I will not observe any biological differences IS ABSURD.
Despite this, there is a longstanding orthodoxy in the West among mainstream social scientists which holds (to this day!) that !) human races are an entirely social construct which has no basis in biological fact.. A related assumption is that (2) human evolution stopped at some point in the distant past; so long ago , in fact, that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.
THESE TWO CLAIMS ARE LIESI say "lies" because those who perpetrate them in the Western academy today are FULLY AWARE that in the decade since the decoding of the genome, hard empirical evidence now exists to confirm for a scientific fact that there is indeed a biological ( biogenetic) basis to race AND that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously over the past 30,000 years to date.
The reason that academic in the social sciences continue to lie about the biological basis of race is that if they tell the truth, they will be classified by the mainstream Liberal academy as "scientific racists" ( i.e. evil, crazy fascists/Nazis) ostracised by their colleagues and in all likelihood unemployed.
In short, there are not just plainly observable physical differences between races ( like skin colour and other conspicuous types of variation in gross anatomy) but also important genetic differences among the main racial groups ( i.e; Asian, Western
Europid Caucasian, sub-Saharan African Nego, Papua - New Guinean/ Australian Aboriginal, Latino/Hispanic, etc.) result in psychological variations such as cognitive ability (g-factor, average IQ) as well as the nature of social instincts which , in turn, produce variations in social behaviour, (for example, traits like : degree of interpersonal violence; literacy; impulsivity; the capacity to defer gratification and the propensity for work, etc. ) and ultimately in culture (the intellectual/rational and moral achievements) of different racial groupings.
Finally human beings are inherently sociable. From our earliest years we want to belong to a group (the ingroup), conform with its cultural and moral values, with its social manners and mores and to punish those who violate them. In time our social instincts prompt us to make moral judgements and to defend our group (the ingroup) even at the sacrifice of our own lives.
What happens when you force large numbers of individuals from different racial groups to live together in the one territory is that there will be constant tension and conflict between them. The different races will not assimilate because they naturally prefer to interact only with their racial ingroup; moreover, each racial ingroup will have different genetically-based social instincts and behaviours, that are expressed in different cultural values/practices and different racial personality traits. When, as in the United States since the mid-1960's, there has been an ongoing policy of allowing large numbers of foreigners from non-White European nations to enter the country as immigrants, the result is predictable. Now matter hard successive governments over the past 50 or so years have tried to make non-White European racial groups assimilate harmoniously with the native population of White European Americans, they stubbornly refuse. Not only do they not integrate, but due to their different (genetically-based) instincts, values and behaviours they INEVITABLY CLASH and erode social cohesion/solidarity/trust and so on.
FEMINISM AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
While any child can tell you that there are a number of very distinctive and conspicuous anatomical, physiological and psychological differences between men and women, Feminist intellectuals argue that this is not the case. Since the late 1960's, the feminist movement in the US has pursued the goal of establishing gender equality -(and not just equality of opportunity, but equality of OUTCOME) - between the sexes. Because, there are, of course, many innate and substantial biological and psychological differences between males and females, the entire feminist/gender equity project was patently absurd to begin with, and therefore destined to fail (which it largely has). Not only was it unnatural, but it was also profoundly inhuman, anti-social and immoral, and it continues to inflict tremendous damage on the basic fabric of Western society today. Consider the following...
(1) The dramatic undermining of the Christian institution of patriarchal marriage, claimed by feminists to be a tyrannical practice which has traditionally enabled men to oppress and denigrate women for their own selfish ends. For fewer White American women are now choosing to marry.
(2) With the sharp decline in marriage rates, the number of traditional patriarchal nuclear families in the US is also rapidly declining. No good can come of this for the simple reason that this nuclear family unit has always been the foundation of every successful human civilization that ever there was over the past 6000 years of human history. WE know that societies where the patriarchal nuclear family was subverted by by feminism quickly collapsed. Ancient Rome is good example. 2000 years ago, in 1-2 AD, the patriarchal family unit was destroyed in Rome. Men refused to marry and the government tied to revive the institution with a "bachelor tax." Children grew up without fathers. Women showed little interest in raising their own children and frequently used nannies. Men became increasingly demotivated and began to engage in prostitution and vice. Prostitution and homosexuality became widespread. Before too long, a demographic and moral collapse takes place. The Roman population declines to below-replacement birth-rate. There is extreme political and military instability (25 Emperors come and go in a space of 50 years !) the Empire become ungovernable and teeters on the brink of civil war. Fatally weakened, Rome is ultimately conquered and destroyed by the Germanic (barbarian) tribes of Europe between 400-500 AD.
(3) In 1973, the "Roe vs Wade" legal case in the the U.S. Supreme Court gave women the legal right to choose to have an abortion. This allowed the establishment of a legalised and subsidised industrial-scale, abortion industry in America. One of the great strengths of traditional Western culture was that it was a robustly LIFE-AFFIRMING culture; morally speaking this principle ( of the affirmation of life) was an implicitly "good" and "right." To actively campaign - as modern feminists do - for easier and more widespread, subsidised legal access to abortion is, in principle, to promote a culture of death. Personally, I find this to be innately, morally wrong. I do understand there are exceptional circumstances wherein it is possible to justify abortion, what I object to is the way feminists are mass-marketing abortion as a technical medical procedure that is bereft of any spiritual or moral dimension; they have a wholly cavalier and irreverent attitude to the issue of abortion, and are effectively teaching women that to have a surgical abortion is no different than to have mole or a wart surgically removed or, say, a wisdom tooth extracted by a dentist. Moreover, feminists repeatedly announce to women that it is their absolute, inalienable, legal right to choose whether or not they have an abortion; no consideration is ever given to the fact that other persons (like the father of the unborn child) may be profoundly effected in the decision.
(4) Between 1950 - 1996 the annual divorce rate in the US increased by 89%, while the annual marriage rate of girls 15 or over decreased by 45%
.
(5) Today, over 80% of child poverty in the US is within divorced or single-mother families. Women who give birth and raise children outside of a stable marriage are 7x more likely to live in poverty.
(6) In America, states with a lower percentage of single-parent families have lower rates of juvenile crime. A state - by - state analysis shows that, in general, a 10% increase in the number of children living in single-parent homes (including divorces) accompanies a 17% increase in juvenile crime.
(7) Children and youth from broken homes have a substantially higher risk for : delinquency; problems with chronic substance abuse, teen pregnancy, psychiatric conditions like: major depression, panic disorder, a personality disorder, Conduct Disorder etc., educational failure, suicide, future unemployment.
And the list of damage wrought by gender feminism in the West goes on and on and on.
THE WEST TODAY: "ANTIFA"; BUG-CHASERS and GIFTERS; BESTIALITY; CHILDREN ON HORMONE BLOCKERS; DOGS HAVING SEX REASSIGNMENT SURGERY; NON-BINARY GENDER FLUID
As the West has become more secular, "enriched" with vibrant diversity and increasingly less cohesive, stands of personal behaviour and even personal appearance have ebbed ever lower. If you search the term "People of Walmart", what you see will shock you, but it gives a very good visual example of where Western society (in this case, the US) is at this point in time.
This may seem like regression, but it is still in line with the same Liberal ideal. In the West, immigration, as I have mentioned above, was ramped up in the 1960's, while simultaneously the concept of assimilation was destroyed. After that came gay rights which took less than a generation to go from the "Defence of Marriage Act" to full legalisation in virtually every Western nation. Norms are all but gone now, and in most cases they are to be socially ridiculed: kids don't need a mum and dad; heterosexuality is just one option among many; sexual relations with animals are a legitimate choice (according to a recent ruling in the Canadian Supreme Court !). The current normalisation of transgender is almost complete and thus there will need to be new frontiers in the long march of Liberalism, and on and on it will proceed.
At the moment, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) which has arrived, incidently, in the West with the flow of culturally incompatible immigration is something we see in the news these days. We are told by the mindless CNN talking heads that WE ( whatever that means ?) in the WEst universally revile it as it is fundamentally against our values. Wait a decade, and the demographic changes that this decade will bring and see where that argument ends up. In several years the same talking heads will be calling anyone who disagrees with FGM a bigot or a "FGM - phobe." Think that the normalisation of paedophilia is unthinkable ? Two words: Aisha and Islamophobe. Normalising ANYTHING at this point is a possibility.
None of this is to say that people don't deserve to have rights, but the fact is that some rights have, in part, always been surrendered for the good of the community to keep it cohesive and civilized. The problem in Western society today is that there is no collective community any more, only atomized groups that mutually revile each other while having to physically exist in the same place. Having no standards, no agreed up norms or collective values makes any society so unfortunate as to be placed in such a situation basically maladaptive, and this does not bode well for the future at all.
This is all part of the same intellectual progression that has played out in the West for centuries. And it is essential to understand that Liberalism is not simply some Jewish conspiracy that began in the West when cultural Marxists like Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and other Frankfurt School communists arrived in the US after fleeing Nazi Germany and began to develop and then promulgate their critical theory. Liberalism is, in fact, much older and has been metastasising for hundreds of years. While it is true that the rot has accelerated thanks to the influence of entities the Frankfurt School as well as a media and academia that is disproportionately Jewish, it is a short-cut to thinking to merely throw up your hands and shout: "The Zionists did this !" In order to truly understand the current situation the West finds itself in we need to take a wider look at history and the bitter pill for many will be that it is:
* Loathsome cretins like "Antifa"
* The degenerate "bug chasers" and "gift givers" (NB: "bug chasers" are male homosexuals who intentionally engage in unprotected anal sex with male homosexuals who have HIV/AIDS ("Gift Givers) in order to infect themselves with the HIV virus)
* Parents paying for their children ( and pet dogs !) to have hormone blocking therapy or sexual reassignment surgery
* Those participating in the annual celebration of sexual perversion this is the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco
*The non-binary gender fluid
*Young women dressed like prostitutes marching in "Slut Walks"
who are indeed the true intellectual heirs of Western civilization's experiment with Liberalism that goes all the way back to the European Enlightenment.
Briefly, to conclude, I think that there are two fundamental reasons that Liberalism was destined to become maladaptive, dysfunctional and self - destructive. The first is that it is grounded on a thesis of moral egalitarianism. This is the PRESUMPTION of the ASSUMPTION that all human beings are born equal (i.e. IDENTICAL, THE SAME) in terms of their innate dignity or moral worth; that each and every individual human being on the planet literally possesses an identical modicum of inherent moral worth (value) simply on account of the fact that they are members of the species
Homo sapiens The Libertarian premise that ALL individual human beings are endowed at birth with equal, basic moral worth (dignity) which commands respect, calls out for justification , or at least elucidation
TO DATE, HOWEVER< THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SUCCESSFUL THEORETICAL JUSTIFICATION OF THIS CLAIM PROVIDED BY ANY PHILOSOPHER So, if you think that moral egalitarianism is counter-intuitive and clearly at odds with your own experience of living in a human society, then I would say you are dead right. It is obvious, I would argue that all human beings differ in the degree to which they are morally worthy. The second premise of Liberalism I find particularly nonsensical is its conceptualisation of society as an atomistic collection of insular independent, separate, individual human units. The truth is quite the opposite, human being are innately social and cannot successfully exist outside of their own ingroup.
Regards
Dachshund