February 14, 2005
THE PARTICULAR VS THE UNIVERSAL:
The Dead Peoples Society (Spengler, 2/15/05, Asia Times)
Italy's fertility rate of 1.27% is among the world's lowest, and portends the disappearance of the modern Italian language along with all its dialects, living or dead. As mortality beckons to the Italians, their ghosts have come out from amongst the old stones - the Pentri, Caraceni, Caudini, Hirpini, Frentani, Brutii, Messapii, Umbrians, Sabines, Faliscans. Senescent Italy remembers its remote past better than its recent history. The more keenly Italians feel their mortality, the more prominent becomes the old pagan identity. Italy never was a nation, but rather a fractious collection of tribes held in bondage by Rome. Rome ingested the Italic tribes forcibly; force later made them Christians. Local patron saints, of course, are their old gods.The ghosts of peoples extinct long before Rome haunt the consciousness of Western Europe. The European Union has awarded 25 million euros (more than US$32 million) to assist the 50 or so "minority languages" still spoken in one form or another in the region. There is clownish Breton nationalism, independence movements in Corsica and Galicia, and the bloodthirsty Basque obsession with independence, not to mention the revival of the Welsh and Gaelic languages. Meanwhile the dwindling inhabitants of Italy wax sentimental over the pre-Roman kingdom of the Samnites. What applies to the Roman equivalent of the Home Counties, namely the Italic peoples, applies all the more so to the empire. After thousands of years, after Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, after Napoleon and Hitler, and after the European Union, Europe still languishes in nostalgia for the mud and stink of barbarian tribes long since faded into obscurity.
One cannot assimilate peoples by force. Empire and ideology are poor substitutes for blood and culture. To be remembered, we require not only progeny, but progeny who speak our language. Globalization did not begin with McDonald's, but with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and later with Church and Empire. The nations converted at swordpoint never reconciled themselves to homogeneity of religion and ruler; only the individuals who abandoned their culture and set sail for America are free of the old ghosts. The United States has nothing to do with "Western civilization", that is, the Dead Peoples Society. The founders of the US were radical rejectionists who broke away from Western civilization to found something quite different, a throwback to the Hebraic notion of a Chosen People.
Except that Judeo-Chistianity is obviously a, or the, key component of Western Civilization.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2005 7:01 AM
OJ,
Judeo-Christianity is not a requirement for Americanism. An immigrant from China or India can pick it up without converting. Americanism is the religion of America.
Judeo Christianity is a legacy component of the Dead People Society of Europe. You really have to distinguish between America and Europe nowadays, there is no monolithic Western Civilization anymore.
My great-grandparents migrated from Quebec. Quebec is also a Dead People society. French speaking Catholics who began immigrating to the New England area during the post Civil War industrial boom originally were migrants who worked farms in Quebec in season and worked in mills in the off season.
The French Catholic identity was already under strain from the English conquest of New France. The Church in Quebec undertook a program of "survivance", preaching to their flock to preserve the culture by resisting migration to cities, advanced education and economic advancement for most French Quebecois. Their program was to keep them uneducated via the Church monopolizing public education, encouraging an early exit from school to the farms and workshops, encouraging large families to out-populate the English, and a glorification of the rural, feudal farm roots of the culture. Most of the farm land was still titled to "siegneurs".
The French church set up parishes in the New England towns where the growing population of migrants moved to take jobs in the mills sprouting up along the rivers that powered the machinery. They pushed "survivance" on their flock in New England as well. The parish in RI actively fought a state law passed in the 1920s setting a minimal standard for school attendance through the 8th grade. It was common before then for French families to put their children to work in the mills at very early ages.
Although the Quebecois threw off the dominance of the Church in the 1960s "Quiet Revolution", they are still a "Dead People" society through their language laws and desire to secede from Canada.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 17, 2005 3:52 AMAmericanismn is Judeo-Christianity. Chinese and Indians come here and accept the religious creed, whether they accept the religions in toto or not.
Europe is post-Christian, which is why it's dying.
Posted by: oj at February 17, 2005 7:03 AMSo a Chinese Buddhist or an Indian Hindu is a Judeo-Christian by virtue of moving here and becoming American?
Is there any construct in your philosophical system that can't be stretched to mean just about anything?
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 17, 2005 4:37 PMRobert;
When you swear allegiance to a nation that is founded on the following premises:
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
and
" We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
You have indeed adopted a Judeo-Christian viewpoint, at least politically, one that is uniquely religious and unique to those faiths.