Now, to anyone who has ever read any of my posts (—or who has ever even heard of Nietzsche—), it should be obvious what I meant by this:
Although I have some deep philosophical disagreements with Solzhenitsyn, I have no doubt that he felt in his bones a deep revulsion for the sickness of the West.
My worldview is fundamentally irreconcilable with what I would characterize as, at its roots,
Tolstoi’s Christian worldview. —Surely, alas, Solzhenitsyn would object to this: I argue that from first principles, it is Tolstoi’s Christian worldview that provides a fertile soil for Communism. However, nonetheless, anyone who is not blind, deaf, and congenitally imbecilic is aware of this empirical reality:
A fact that cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West, while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.
In the crudest terms:
Hard times make hard men—comfort corrupts.The error of the Soviet Communist system, which the American Communist system corrected, was that the Soviets strengthened the defiant willpower of their own victims. The Americans seduce, lull,—
enthrall, in both the figuratively derived sense of the word, and its literal, original sense.
(Check a fucking dictionary, ignoramuses.)Having so said, let us look
a bit all the way farther to the East. All the way to China...
—Oh, don’t worry, marcus: This is really about the West. ;-)
Oh, dear. That
☭ All-American Communist™ openly advocates that heirs should devalue their
living ancestors.
Never mind the ones who are not
yet dead...
PSA: Do you want heirs? Start at the opposite end of the same problem—
* nullius says to read a book!—
whoops.Too bad.Everyone being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.
—
ahem. I’ll just wait right here, whilst the unmitigated savages
add me to their ignore lists. For they
should not be allowed to read what I am about to write.
THIS SPACE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT NULL.
Ah, that’s better! Now that everyone is gone, I can get to my point.
Devaluation of the elderly is symptomatic of the sickness of a culture that values neither
heirs nor
ancestors: Two sides of the same coin.
That
“READ A BOOK” link was to William S. Haas,
The Destiny of the Mind: East and West (MacMillan, New York, 1956). This is scholarship, not some pomo rationalization of multicultural dogma (though I should warn that books published from about the 1930s–70s are a grab bag in that regard, as the Communists fully took over and the last vestigial generation of scholars retired or died off). The comparison of similarities across cultures can be as important to understanding the differences between them as
vice versa; and the main thesis presented by this book is, per its title, that of a fundamental difference of minds.
Amidst the details, let us see what Professor Haas has to say about
ancestor worship: It is not only a Chinese thing!Still more revealing with regard to the spirit of the Roman family are its religious and political aspects. The Romans too worshipped ancestral spirits—the lares. In conjunction with the penates—the spirits of the household—the lares protected the life and continuity of the family, thus holding a place dear to the Roman heart. These spirits, however, were never given ascendancy over the deities of the national cult. The Roman family never had nor claimed the kind of omnipotence which fell to the Chinese family. In sharp contrast to the latter, the Roman family, from its first appearance in history, aimed at something more general and greater than itself, something whose superiority it never questioned. Hence it was that the virtues cultivated within the Roman family were easily transformed into civic and political virtues, while those of the Chinese family remained distinctly social.
[...]
Wherever it appears, the patriarchal family is a natural phenomenon. [...]
Neither the Chinese nor the Roman state grew out of the patriarchal family. The Chinese state was a phenomenon in its own right with its own implementation. A psychological and ideological rivalry resulted between it and the family. It is perfectly compatible with these conditions that the state in China should have been regarded as a kind of national family, a view which did not contribute to the state’s strength. On the other hand, the Roman family went a long way toward meeting the prerequisites of the state. The rising state had only to take and shape what was offered it by the family to strengthen its own political virtues. This of course did not make the Roman family a state, any more than the reverse conditions made of the Chinese state a family. Yet the fundamental difference remains that the Roman family was oriented to something beyond itself of a higher order.
Hence we arrive at this seemingly paradoxical fact. The Roman state attained the power of its inner organization and outward force because of its deep psychological relation with the family. This relation, however, in no way obliterated the boundary line between the two institutions. In China, the state and the family faced each other as strangers. But this separation, far from shaping the idea of state in the Chinese mind and strengthening its factual position, tended to make it difficult for the state to assert its full authority. In Rome, despite the difference between family and state, a certain organic link between the two was achieved. These two widely different relations between state and family apply not only to China and Rome, but with few exceptions and in varying degrees to the East and to the West in general.
Once upon a time, the West
had a real culture.
It was best before Christianity. With all due respect to Solzhenitsyn, whose courage commands admiration, his powerful and oftentimes profound intellect mistook the nature of the Renaissance, and also that of prior and of subsequent events.
In the foregoing context:
Make household gods of your ancestors. Treat your old folks right. The rest will follow for your posterity. —The principle seems so obvious that I will omit the five thousand word essay.
And overall, the West should return to the roots of the Occident:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ...
‘Wrath, o goddess sing...’ —
In the beginning of Western literature: Homer. —Do I look wrathful to you? —Be I thus accursed? —Be it so, I will reign in Hell...
Poll
