Only a balanced and comprehensive view can save the West from the many threats it faces

The below comment by me appeared in the January 2008 entry, “Can the Darwinian racialists defend the West?”

Traditionalism means an appreciation for what makes us what we are, all the dimensions of what we are, what our civilization is. A view that reduces us and our civilization to race, or that makes race the primary factor, is woefully incomplete and distorted. Race is a part of the structure of reality that makes us what we are, and liberalism denies that. But God and transcendent truth are also part of the structure of reality that makes us what we are, and the Darwinian racialists deny that….

Most Christians today are anti-racialists, a view incompatible with the survival of the West. Most racialists are non-Christians and reductive materialists, a view incompatible with the survival of the West. The key insight is that Western man and Western civilization are multi-layered. A view that takes just one part of the whole and treats it as the whole is no good. The West cannot survive unless it goes beyond these reductive, partial views and starts to see things whole. The true thinkers of Western civilization, the authors of the Hebrew Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the founders of Christianity, Augustine, were never reductionists, they saw the multileveled nature of reality, and man as its epitome. Modern Western man has lost that. Western survival depends on regaining it.

- end of initial entry -

Gintas writes:

It’s not even that people are just leaving out important dimensions because they’re ignorant of them, but they are often actively hostile to them. The Darwinian racialists are often hostile to traditional Christianity, blaming it for the problems of the West. Christians are often actively hostile to the biological dimension. Therefore, attempts to introduce these dimensions into discussion with these people isn’t just a matter of educating them, it’s a matter of fighting your way through hostile opposition, like hacking your way through thick jungle.

Karl J. writes:

This is what I’ve been saying for years. We’re part of the free, white, Christian West. Western civilization includes, but is not reducible to, a regime, race, or religion; and the advocates of each are bound to act at cross-purposes to one another. Of course, our nihilist enemies have no such difficulty: they hate the whole West, in every aspect and everything it represents.

LA replies:

That’s a great point. Conservatives are divided every which way as to which aspect of America they believe in and defend, with each faction totally rejecting the others; while the Left uniformly hates every aspect of America: its religion, its traditional morality, its race, its culture, its traditional political system and liberties, its economy.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 15, 2011 09:30 AM | Send