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#Post#: 23194--------------------------------------------------
Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
By: antihellenistic Date: October 29, 2023, 1:32 am
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Origin of Eugenics
[quote]Early Eugenics
Man is instinctively eugenic: the most capable men have sought
and been encouraged to mate with the healthiest women. Legal
prohibitions against inbreeding, due evidently to an
understanding of the increased chance of unhealthy offspring,
are found as far back as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 B.C.)
and in the Old Testament. Plato and Aristotle advocated eugenic
measures in the interests of society.
...
The birthplace of eugenics, properly understood, was
19th-century England, where Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had
supplied strong evidence of man’s descent from other life forms.
One consequence of this was quickly grasped by another Victorian
Englishman, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822-1911). In
Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton argued that intellectual
abilities, no less than physical characteristics, are
hereditary. From this insight, it was a short step to the
realization that measures to foster the transmission of
desirable traits could lead to enduring improvement of the race.
...
From the beginning, eugenics caught the imagination of ordinary
Americans. Its relation to family genealogy and its connection
with the principles of plant and animal breeding aroused
enthusiasm, particularly in farming communities, and eugenics
exhibitions and contests became common at county fairs.
As in England, leading churchmen endorsed eugenics — as did many
Jews, who arguably owed their hereditary capabilities to a
eugenic mating system adopted during their centuries of
segregation in exile. In a Mother’s Day sermon at a temple in
Kansas City in 1926, Rabbi Harry Mayer declared, “May we do
nothing to permit our blood to be adulterated by the infusion of
blood of a lower grade.” Jews were well represented in eugenics
societies, and in eugenics research as well.
...
It was America’s reform-minded Progressives — not right-wing
conservatives or Southern segregationists — who took the lead in
advocating and enacting eugenics legislation in America’s
eugenic heyday. As historian Mark Haller writes, “Eugenics in
its early years exerted a broad influence upon American thought
as a sort of scientific reform among the many other reforms of
the Progressive Era.”
In his later life, perhaps the most eminent Progressive,
Theodore Roosevelt, promoted the cause of improving the race
through better breeding with his customary vigor. Echoing
Professor McDougall, the Rough Rider wrote: “The great problem
of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable
as compared with less valuable or noxious elements in the
population. This problem cannot be met unless we give full
consideration to the immense influence of heredity.”
The Progressives were instrumental in passing laws providing for
sterilization (often involuntary) of the insane or feebleminded.
Indiana’s (1907) was the first; Governor Woodrow Wilson signed
New Jersey’s sterilization law in 1911; Hiram Johnson signed
California’s two years later. Significantly, sixteen American
states passed legislation for sterilization before a single such
law was passed in the South. By the 1930s, some thirty states
had passed eugenics laws, primarily in reform-minded
legislatures. It was in the most “conservative” states, where
religion and tradition were most strongly opposed to reform,
that eugenics made the least progress. From 1907 to the 1960s,
some 60,000 sterilizations were performed in the United States,
with California well in the lead with 20,000; below the
Mason-Dixon line, North Carolina eventually carried out the most
sterilizations.
...
Following the American lead, other governments adopted eugenics
measures. In Switzerland the canton of Vaud passed a
sterilization law in 1928; in the next year Denmark was the
first European nation to enact such a law, followed by the rest
of Scandinavia shortly thereafter.
Canada, too, had its eugenics movement, in which women played a
leading role. While the influence of the Catholic Church
prevented eugenics legislation in Canada’s most populous
provinces, sterilization laws were enacted in Alberta and
British Columbia in 1933. Fatefully for the eugenics movement,
in that same year Germany adopted a law for eugenic
sterilization.[/quote]
Important information about the history of eugenics
[quote]Nazism
Nothing has blackened the reputation of eugenics so much as its
link to the Hitler regime. In the estimation of Paul Popenoe,
one of the leading figures in the American eugenics movement,
“The major factor in the decline of eugenics was undoubtedly
Hitlerism.” But in fact, as the American geneticist and
anthropologist Stephen Saetz has demonstrated in a
well-researched study of eugenics in the Third Reich, German
eugenic practice was not radically different from its American
counterpart, and many policies afterwards blamed on eugenics,
above all the measures against the Jews, had nothing to do with
eugenics. The “euthanasia” program, in which as many as 80,000
of the severely retarded and incurably insane were killed, was
motivated by a desire to free medical facilities and personnel
at the outset of the war, and was not a eugenics program. In the
view of historian Sheila Faith Weiss: “German eugenicists . . .
have at most only indirect responsibility for the “euthanasia’
program.”
Still, the association of eugenics with Adolf Hitler and Nazism
helped turn what was already a strong opposition to eugenics —
stretching from the Catholic Church on one end, to the
anti-hereditarian left (from the American academy to the
Kremlin) on the other — to an ironclad orthodoxy. Most Jews, at
first affronted by tangential connections between the eugenics
movement and U.S. immigration reforms of the 1920s, and then
repelled by Hitlerism, passed solidly over into the
anti-eugenics camp.[/quote]
Source :
Ending a Historical Taboo. Posted on March 12, 2010.
HTML https://www.amren.com/news/2010/03/ending_a_histor_1/
#Post#: 23200--------------------------------------------------
Re: Exposing people with the Western Darwinian Worldview
By: Aryanization Date: October 29, 2023, 3:56 am
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[quote]“The major factor in the decline of eugenics was
undoubtedly Hitlerism.” But in fact, as the American geneticist
and anthropologist Stephen Saetz has demonstrated in a
well-researched study of eugenics in the Third Reich, German
eugenic practice was not radically different from its American
counterpart, and many policies afterwards blamed on eugenics,
above all the measures against the Jews, had nothing to do with
eugenics.[/quote]
The Aryanization process is radically different from western
eugenics because Aryanization selects for traits that natural
selection tried to erase, the noble traits of the Aryan, founder
of civilization. Therefore, the Aryanization process has nothing
to do with scientific racism either.
[quote]“If one wished to describe the history of the Aryans, he
would have to admit that today the Aryan has vanished except for
a few very small traces.” – Alfred Rosenberg[/quote]
This is because the Aryan was a mistake by natural selection...
#Post#: 23201--------------------------------------------------
Re: Exposing people with the Western Darwinian Worldview
By: Aryanization Date: October 29, 2023, 4:05 am
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From the main site:
[quote]At the heart of the Aryanist worldview is the axiom that
all the gene pools not only in the present day but indeed
throughout recorded history are heavily degraded, and that it is
the natural tendency for such degradation to further increase
over time, due to natural selection consistently eliminating the
noble in favour of the ignoble. It follows that, tracing
backwards in time, the noble traits that historically have
appeared only rarely in individual cases might well have been
the norm of at least one prehistoric root race, which we call
the Aryan race. Biologically, the arising of such a race could
be accounted to an accident of genetic mutations occurring in a
window of favourable environmental conditions which did not last
(but which authentic National Socialism aims to re-create).
Teleologically, what other purpose could there be for a race
whose nobility leads them to have no attachment to the material
world in which they have arisen, if not to help the rest of
living creation transcend it also? In Hitler’s words: “There
have been human beings, in the baboon category, for at least
three hundred thousand years. There is less distance between the
man-ape and the ordinary modern man than there is between the
ordinary modern man and a man like Schopenhauer.”[/quote]
#Post#: 23490--------------------------------------------------
Re: Exposing people with the Western Darwinian Worldview
By: mind Date: November 7, 2023, 8:38 pm
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[quote]
If we admit that radical Islam and war traumas are additional
problems, performance will probably be somewhat lower than
African Americans.
[/quote]
This information tells me that the mind of the martyr and the
mind of IQ are on opposing poles of the spectrum.
#Post#: 23935--------------------------------------------------
Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
By: antihellenistic Date: November 21, 2023, 7:57 am
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Lee Kuan Yew, the Eurocentrist Chinese
[quote]Lee did not reject all the Western practices inherited
from the British. He was impressed by the capacity of Western
capitalism to stimulate economic growth. With a sharply rising
population, Communist agitation among the unemployed, and the
end of Singapore’s previous role as a trade hub for the British
Empire, the island needed a new model. Lee tried to enrich
Singapore through world trade and investment.
...
Lee was well aware of the weaknesses of any multi-racial society
and he tried to limit the dangers. In a conflict with
Singapore’s neighbors, many Malay Muslim citizens might feel
more solidarity with enemies rather than with Singapore. Malays
were therefore exempted from conscription and police work,
although this policy was later relaxed.
Lee understood racial differences. Observers had long noticed
that Malays were easy-living and “lethargic,” while Chinese were
driven and entrepreneurial. Lee Kuan Yew and a Malaysian
nationalist prime minister Mahathir Mohamad had similar views:
the Chinese had been selected by a culture of study and hard
work, as well as by cold winters in China; tropical Malays had
not. On trips to Europe, Lee remarked on the differences between
efficient Germans and easy-going Italians. He was also aware of
differences in performance and social outcomes in the United
States. He said in a 1982:
Let us not deceive ourselves: our talent profile is nowhere near
that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The
exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no
accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage,
sometimes 50 percent, of faculty members in the top American
universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the
number of high-caliber Japanese academics, professionals, and
business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage
of Japanese in the total American population.
Lee was also impressed by Richard Herrnstein and Charles
Murray’s The Bell Curve. He told his authorized biographers:
The bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85
percent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture.
The whites score on average 100. Asians score more . . . . The
Bell Curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are
realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration
because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the
results cannot follow.
In a 1993 article written for The Economist, Lee predicted that
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, coastal China, and Singapore
would become very prosperous in the next century, while the rest
of Asia would not. National differences were due to “a people’s
culture, heredity, and organizational strengths.” Lee was right.
...
Singapore’s successes reflect the country’s ability to keep
economic elements of the British colonial inheritance along with
Asian traditions and habits. Success came from Anglo
institutions and Sinic virtue. Lee Kuan Yew almost seems like an
Asian archeofuturist. Low fertility is a failure, but just such
a hypermodern society may be the one that finds solutions to
dysgenic trends.[/quote]
Source :
Lee Kuan Yew: Building and Keeping a Nation Posted on December
24, 2021
HTML https://www.amren.com/features/2021/12/lee-kuan-yew-building-and-keeping-a-nation/
#Post#: 24031--------------------------------------------------
Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
By: antihellenistic Date: November 24, 2023, 2:42 am
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Critics to the western capitalist morality
[quote]Referring to Lenin’s theory of imperialism, the Brazilian
sociologist, F. H. Cardoso (1972), argues that inequality
‘‘among nations and economies resulted from imperialism’s
development to the extent that import of raw materials and
export of manufactured goods were the bases of the
imperialist-colonial relationship” (p. 171). Thus, the
inequality between advanced economies and dependent economies
was a by-product of the process of capitalist growth.
Imperialist profit was based on unequal trade and financial
exploitation. Similarly, the Egyptian economist S. Amin (1996)
has argued that Europe was responsible for the underdevelopment
of large parts of Africa during the colonial era. Europe
produced peripheral economies that were heavily dependent on the
world market. Their dependence is a result of the dominance of
the center countries, which have prevented the establishment of
nation-wide capital goods industries and the manufacturing of
goods for mass consumption. Amin suggests that the less
developed countries should break their asymmetrical relationship
with the center countries and pursue a socialist development
strategy. He blames not only global imperialism, but also the
African ruling classes for their failure to further
industrialization. He writes, “The collusion between the African
ruling classes and the strategies of global imperialism is,
therefore, the ultimate cause of the impasse” (Amin, 1996, p.
210). Thus, the central thesis of dependency theorists is that
the “underdevelopment in the periphery is the direct result of
development in the center, and vice versa” (Roberts and Hite,
2000, p. 12; see also Chilcote, 1984).[/quote]
Continuing
[quote]Hitherto we have surveyed a variety of evidence showing
that intelligence is positively related to earnings. The major
reason for this association lies in the operation of the law of
supply and demand. This fundamental law of economics states that
the price of goods and services is determined by the balance of
supply and demand. If the supply is abundant relative to demand,
the price of goods and services will be low. Such is the case
with unskilled work in the contemporary world, for which a pool
of unemployed is always available providing an excess of supply
over demand. Conversely, if the supply is limited relative to
demand, the price of goods and services will be high. People
with high IQs can acquire complex skills that cannot be acquired
by those with low IQs. As a result, people with high IQs are in
short supply relative to the demand for the goods and services
they can produce. They are therefore able to command high
earnings.
...
The explanation for the relationship between low intelligence
and crime proposed by Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) is that those
with low IQs have a greater need for immediate gratification,
weaker impulse control, a poorer understanding of the
consequences of punishment, and a more poorly developed moral
sense. In addition, adolescents with low IQs tend to do poorly
at school and fail to obtain vocational skills, As a result,
they are only able to get badly paid jobs, or they find it
impossible to obtain any kind of employment. This makes them
disaffected; they become alienated from society; and as a
result, many of them turn to crime.[/quote]
Source :
IQ and the Wealth of Nations -- Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen --
Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence, 2002 page 11, 34,
46
Therefore, a society that results in facilities and products
that require high intelligence to operate, and the resulting gap
between the people who are able to achieve it and people who
can't, is inferior. Because it does not solve the problem for
people with difficulties and "low intelligence". It can cause
social disaffection for the people who fail in an attempt to
achieve resulting in an unnecessary crime, that only happens in
a society with facilities and products that require high
intelligence to operate. Western Civilization is the source to
blame. Because most complex facilites and products require "high
intelligence" to operate mostly came from it. Western mindset of
Industrialism, Progressivism, and Machinism are the problem
#Post#: 24319--------------------------------------------------
Re: Exposing people with the Western Darwinian Worldview
By: 90sRetroFan Date: December 5, 2023, 4:31 pm
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HTML https://www.amren.com/features/2023/12/how-to-have-more-and-better-children/
The most important line:
[quote]the war with the anti-natalists is a war against an enemy
that shoots its own soldiers: Fear of climate change will keep
liberal birthrates low. “[Pro-natalists] have seized the means
of reproduction.”[/quote]
This is the hard truth. The only way we can win is if we are
shooting more pro-natalist soldiers than anti-natalist soldiers.
If we are not doing this, we are asking to lose.
Miscellaneous disgust fuel:
[quote]Life is beautiful, he concluded, and we must make sure it
continues.
...
Malcom and Simone Collins are a husband-and-wife team who stood
at the mic together and alternated speaking.
...
A heathy society creates networks that encourage dating,
marriage, and childbearing. It used to be possible to insulate a
pro-natalist group from America — the Amish, Traditional
Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Mormons — but the internet makes that
much harder. However, being surrounded by and resisting what the
Collinses calls “the monoculture” can sharpen your own culture
and make it more resilient. You should also pay attention to
other successful groups and copy what works.
...
Michael Anton started with the basic problem: How does boy get
girl? His talk was about the lessons a pickup artist might learn
from Socrates’ only surviving dialogue with a woman. The lady
was Theodote, a beautiful, high-class courtesan of the kind
known as a hetaira. Every Athenian man was at her feet, but by
the end of the dialogue, she is begging Socrates — the fat,
ugly, penniless Socrates — to let her come see him.
According to Mr. Anton, Socrates had the spirit of the
successful lady-killer, an “abundance mentality,” the assurance
that there are so many women out there that any individual
turndown doesn’t even count as a failure. Socrates genuinely
didn’t care if she said “no.”
Socrates also befuddled her with his quick mind, setting logical
traps for her. He also put her through what the pickup artist
calls “compliance tests,” or making her follow his rules. The
successful bar crawler doesn’t buy a woman a drink; he tells her
to buy him one. Socrates led Theodote through the conversation
in the same dominating way. He also used the “push/pull”
technique of alternating between seeming interest and
indifference. Running hot then cold only increases her interest
in him. The fly so much becomes the spider that by the end of
the dialogue, Socrates warns the desperate Theodote that she may
come try to seem him, but he won’t talk to her if he is with
people he finds more interesting.
...
We are inherently a religious species, and religion is
pro-natal, even if it requires believing implausible things.
...
Is there a substitute or proxy for religion that stimulates
child-bearing? Some of the ancients believed that loyalty to the
group was enough to encourage large families.
...
The children-are-fragile meme warns that a single misfortune or
mistake by parents could wreck a child. In fact, children are
resilient, and can come through many bad experiences without
permanent scars.
...
Lefties are more worried about protecting their children from
life, while “trad” parents believe in hard knocks, so long as
they don’t open arteries.
...
Miss Keenan is happy to see “trad” families having large
families, but says they can’t do it alone. We need smart,
tech-types who also want big families.
...
Miss Keenan noted that the city of Austin is full of
nice-looking women of marriageable age: “We need to push them
off their ebikes into minivans full of toddlers.” She looks
forward to a time when “maternity maxing will become a
full-blown trend, not a luxury lifestyle.”
...
Charles Haywood talked about the need for “men-only spaces.”
Masculinity is in a crisis; there are too many feminized men.
You don’t get children unless men behave like men, and no matter
how they are educated, women love masculine men.
...
Competition is central to masculinity: “When a man walks up to a
group of men, at least part of his brain is asking, ‘Can I kick
these guys’ asses?’ ” All these aspects of masculinity go into
making babies.
...
Men need places that are for men only, and women should stay
out. Even low-testosterone groups, such as bowling leagues and
model-railroad clubs, used to be all male and should stay that
way. But the best groups for building men are based on masculine
pursuits: hunting trips, gun clubs, canoe expeditions, jiujitsu
and boxing clubs.
There may be some hope for old-line male organizations such as
the Moose, Elks, Rotary, Lions, and Masons, but most are dying.
Men’s groups at churches are usually worthless. They invariably
try to “elevate” women, are consensus-driven, and apologize for
existing.
Workplaces used to be functionally segregated by sex; we should
go back to that. On the job, men should be able to favor each
other for promotion, especially men with families.
Unfortunately, that’s against the law; all anti-discrimination
laws should be abolished.
...
Israel has managed to keep its birthrates above replacement; the
orthodox have big families and even secular Jews have 2.3
children per woman. Cultural competition can spur childrearing;
Israelis know that Israel cannot survive without Jews.[/quote]
It's not as if our enemies do not deserve to be shot.
Photo of the conference:
HTML https://www.amren.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/ConferenceView.jpg
A mass shooting here would have improved the world in a day more
than most pacifists can improve the world in their lifetimes.
#Post#: 25467--------------------------------------------------
Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
By: antihellenistic Date: March 15, 2024, 9:44 pm
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The Western Logic which resulting Concept of Rights and
Liberalism
[quote]The Master-Slave Dialectic and its Historical Reference
This brings me to the second context in which Hegel uses the
word “desire”: in Section B, “Self-Consciousness” of the
Phenomenology (1977), Chapter 4 entitled “The Truth of
Self-Certainty,” which contains the famous account of “Lordship
and Bondage”. Today, the most common interpretation of the
lordship and bondage section (or the master-slave struggle) is
that it is a parable about the nature of “selfhood” in which
Hegel sets out to demonstrate that self-consciousness becomes
determinate only though communication with another self
consciousness. This section is thus seen as the point in Hegel’s
text where the “social” dimension of human experience makes its
appearance. Hegel sets out to show that the self who claims to
be certain of his sensory experiences (including the Cartesian
self who says “I think, therefore I am”, or the Kantian ego who
speaks of the “possibility of the ‘I think’ accompanying all of
my representation”) is impossible unless one also recognizes the
existence of other selves. It is believed that Hegel uses the
parable of the master’s rule over the slave to show that the
self-sufficiency of the master is an illusion since the master
cannot obtain true recognition from a slave lacking independent
judgments (Solomon: 425–31). True recognition depends on a
relation of mutual equality in which there are neither masters
nor slaves (Rockmore 1997: 64–72). Thus, the isolated self (I=I)
cannot claim to have knowledge of something unless this self
acknowledges the existence of another self as an autonomous
subject, “as something that has an independent existence of its
own, which, therefore, it cannot utilize for its own purposes”
(Hegel as cited in Stern: 74). Knowledge presupposes “two selves
mutually recognizing each other as independent” and
“collectively coming to take certain types of claims as counting
for them as authoritative” (Pinkard 1996: 53–55).
The master-slave dialectic, it is true, is intended to
illustrate that one “cannot achieve self certainty except as a
member of a community of free persons who mutually recognize one
another’s rights” (Wood 1990: 93). This dialectic ends with the
image of a master who cannot get satisfaction from the
recognition he gets from his servant. But this relates to the
eventual outcome. We should not underestimate the dynamic which
precedes the creation of master-slave relationship. The opening
paragraphs of Chapter 4, “The Truth of Self-Certainty”, which
include paragraphs 166 to 176, deal with “Desire in general,”
and the dialectic of this desire. The subsequent paragraphs, 177
to 196, deal with the master-slave dialectic, and the first
paragraphs of this dialectic describe two combatants engaging in
a life-and-death struggle for the sake of “pure prestige.” Thus,
in its very origins, before there is any master and slave, we
have a confrontation between two independent individuals, each
of whom is driven to fight the other because each desires to
wrest superior recognition from another self. The desire of the
combatants is not for reciprocal appreciation. The concluding
outcome is a relation of mutual recognition, but in the
beginning we are dealing with two self-assertive individuals for
whom the other is an object that needs to be subordinated.
I would argue, furthermore, that this initial struggle can be
read as Hegel’s version of the “state of nature” parable first
presented by Hobbes and Locke. My reading here is indebted to
Alexandre Kojeve’s much discussed, but not well understood,
lectures on Hegel, which he gave in Paris during the years
1933–1939. I will be using these as they have been assembled by
Raymond Queneau and edited by Allan Bloom under the title:
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit ([1947] 1999). Kojeve does not state
explicitly that this fi ght is a description of the state of
nature, but he does write as if it had an empirical or
anthropological basis in the past before the formation of
states. I will go beyond Kojeve, however, in suggesting that the
life and death struggle that brings about the master-slave
relation should be read as a description of the Western state of
nature.[/quote]
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 318
- 320
#Post#: 25507--------------------------------------------------
Re: Exposing people with the Western Darwinian Worldview
By: 90sRetroFan Date: March 17, 2024, 6:34 pm
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[quote]we have a confrontation between two independent
individuals, each of whom is driven to fight the other because
each desires to wrest superior recognition from another self.
The desire of the combatants is not for reciprocal appreciation.
The concluding outcome is a relation of mutual recognition, but
in the beginning we are dealing with two self-assertive
individuals for whom the other is an object that needs to be
subordinated.[/quote]
HTML https://incels.is/threads/britcunts-fighting.586029/#post-13778200<br
/>(video at link)
#Post#: 25631--------------------------------------------------
Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
By: antihellenistic Date: March 24, 2024, 8:44 pm
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Moral Liberalism led into Rightism
[quote]Liberty and the States System
England was the first modern liberal nation but it was not
exceptional. This brings me to one more challenge I would like
to make against the inter-state idea. The original idea, as it
was articulated by Enlightenment thinkers, that Europe’s
difference consisted in the fragmented character of its polity,
included as well the observation that there was a division of
power within the nation-states themselves. This view can be
found in the writings of John Hall (1992), Daniel Chirot (1985,
1986), and Luciano Pellicani (1994). The very same states that
dedicated so much energy to warfare, Hall writes, had “evolved
slowly and doggedly in the midst of a pre-existing civil
society” (1992: 187).
One other uniqueness of the West is the role that Parliaments
played in its history: indeed so unique has this role been that
German historians have considered the Standestaat, the
representation of the three functional estates, Church, Noble
and Burgher, to be a particular stage in world history (187).
The Standestaat was a type of political structure called the
“state of estates”, which amounted to a partition of powers in
which feudal lords, the church, and towns, recognized the
monarch as the legitimate head of the state at the same time
that each retained a specific set of rights and duties (Chirot
1986: 17–19). In China, India, and Islam, in general, there were
no countervailing powers because there was no substantial
distinction between the state and civil society; there was no
aristocracy with special rights, no separation of religious and
secular powers, no independent cities, and no parliaments where
relations between the various estates of society were open for
adjudication. It was in reference to the absence of a civil
society that the category “oriental despotism” was used by
Montesquieu, Marx, Weber, and Karl Wittfogel (Pellicani:
81–107). I shall return to this characteristic in the next
chapter; suffice it to say now that, as centralized
administrations evolved through the modern era, and the old
feudal elites saw their privileges curtailed, consensual-liberal
rights and limits were nevertheless elicited gradually from the
emerging nation-states by aristocrats, town dwellers, lawyers,
and commercial elites, albeit not peacefully but through a
dynamic succession of conflicts that culminated in the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789.36
There is a certain naiveté in the presumption that Europe’s
liberal institutions were not really liberal because they were
associated with the pursuit of global power. It is true that in
some liberal-arts courses, or older survey courses in “Western
Civilization,” the history of the West was occasionally taught
as if it were an intellectual history of “great books” and
“great ideas.” David Gress, in his vigorous book, From Plato to
NATO: the Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998) has dubbed
this idea the “Grand Narrative” (1998). According to him, this
moralistic narrative “established a false dichotomy between some
high principles, which existed outside history, and a flawed
reality, characterized by inequality, prejudice and war”. By
presenting Western history in terms of the realization of the
ideals of liberty and democracy, this narrative “placed a burden
of justification on the West…to explain how the reality differed
from the ideal”. This dichotomy, Gress argues, offered ample
opportunity for cynics to speak of the fraud, hypocrisy, and
inconsistency between Western ideals and Western realities.
Gress thinks that these critical views of the West can be met so
long as we get away from an idealized image of Western
uniqueness. He argues that liberal-democratic ideals were not
new but “old practices.” These practices took hold of society
only when “rulers competing for power” came to realize that the
promotion of autonomous cities, mercantile interests, taxation
with representation “made their societies stronger and more
prosperous [and hence fitter] in the geopolitical conditions” of
early modern Europe.3
I will follow a different line of reasoning in the next
chapters. While liberty did not grow separately from mercantile
interests and state power, the ideals of natural rights,
security, and happiness were actually conceived as limits to the
abuses of power. These ideals, moreover, were not ready-made
human dispositions put into use when they were seen to serve the
interests of warmaking states; they were cultivated and realized
in time. Western freedom and reason can only be comprehended in
time. I will also argue that Europeans were exceptionally
warlike in a deeply-rooted, energizing and libertarian way
rather than unexpectedly under the circumstances of a
competitive interstate system.[/quote]
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 240
- 242
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