by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2024
(Jan. 1, 2024) — A follow-up to my latest Newsmax column, ‘The Right to Burn Books.’
“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
Robert Frost
At birth, they measure us, weigh us, and draw our first blood. We’re recorded in the bureaucracy’s ledger before our mother’s first embrace. Conscripts for the modern liberal state’s reserve army.
To Glaswegian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the modern liberal state cannot inspire the type of loyalty that drives citizens to make sacrifices for the polity. He compares it to “dying for the telephone company.”
I agree, but with a caveat: it’s not just that the modern liberal state cannot drum up loyalty; it should not. Yet, increasingly, it does.
In his critique of liberalism, MacIntyre argues that, up until the Renaissance, ethics were teleological — assuming life had a purpose beyond being a chain of causes and effects. With Aristotle relegated to the sidelines, ethics was left as, essentially, a list of vocabulary with few definitions and no context. Enlightenment philosophers, then, were empowered to start with a clean slate.
MacIntyre cites the Hawaiian islanders as an example. Their taboos, once full of meaning, lost their didactic purpose over time, becoming an arbitrary set of prohibitions. When King Kamehameha II abolished them seemingly overnight, there was no resistance. MacIntyre sees this as a mirror to post-Enlightenment moral confusion.
This confusion took us from utopia to ultracrepidarianism, driving the rise of totalitarian belief systems around the world. From Mussolini making the trains run on time, to Kim Jong Il making the sun rise in the East, to the West’s manic drive for diversity and equity. The Enlightenment lit up every candle in Nuremberg’s Cathedral of Light, a beacon for totalitarianism that shines into every facet of life today: from schools, to universities, the government, arts, and the corporate world.
Over time, such an assault on reason became entrenched as the concept of liberal citizenship. Once the shared values underpinning civic republican life faded away, what remained was a Faustian bargain: either we all enrich ourselves under the auspices of the telephone company, or morality shall be restored. Tertium non datur. Until the rise of the Third Way, or social democracy’s halfway house.
Underpinning this combination of neoliberal economics and passé socialist policies is a synthesis of Cultural Marxism and brooding Randian thinking: the belief that the individual, as the ultimate minority, is always oppressed by the collective. It appears the solution was to dismantle every sub-collective division in society, in favour of creating a monolith of the rainbow, a wall composed of atomised individuals.
Modern Janissaries
“What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Since the end of the Cold War, society has been running endlessly on a hedonistic hamster wheel, trapped in the perpetual Groundhog Day after the End of History. Loyal only to the next dollar.
Dying for bureaucrats and corporations is harder to sell than dying for king and country. It doesn’t get the blood pumping. Yet, there’s the third way. In the 14th century, Sultan Murad I, the third ruler of the Ottoman Empire, faced a similar dilemma in then recently conquered lands in the Balkans.
His solution was as brutal as it was effective, a plan almost straight out of the mind of modern educators: he took the children of his Christian subjects to indoctrinate them into loyal soldiers and bureaucrats.
These children, separated from their families at a young age, circumcised, and converted to Islam, became fiercely loyal to the Sultan. This system birthed the Janissaries, one of the most formidable military forces in history. Over time, the Janissaries rose to the top of Ottoman society.
Modern Janissaries are similarly conscripted from families, indoctrinated from youth, and climb society’s ranks as they go. And now, with China and Russia looming, they are prime candidates for enlistment by foreign powers. TikTokers and neocons alike, defying social democracy’s earlier predictions, are increasingly ready to die for the telephone company.
Read the rest here.