You may have to parse through a substantial amount of cerebral gymnastics here. What better way to HAVE to admit we’re right than to obfuscate the truth with redundancy and word porn? Nevertheless, the ‘aggressive moralism’ narrative of the open border psychopaths is finally tilting toward the abyss. Let’s just hope (and work harder) that its not to late.
Wanting to Preserve Your Way of Life Does Not Make You Racist or Fascist
I have been trying to find the language to express my discomfort with the presumption that anyone who does not welcome very large numbers of refugees into Europe with widely opened arms is somehow resurrecting the ghost of Hitler. Or the right language to express the proscribed thought that those in Eastern Europe who want to settle only Christian refugees might have appropriate reservations about the very real difficulties of integrating very different cultural and religious practices into their distinct way of life.
According to the OECD, Europe is expected to receive up to 1 million asylum applications this year. The European Union’s 500 million-strong population can surely absorb such numbers that may be small in the overall frame. But many communities are impacted in a concentrated way. By most accounts, today’s refugees from the savagely war-torn Middle East or Africa are looking for a permanent place, preferably in Germany — which expects 800,000 applicants this year — or Sweden, to plant their future.
I have found that language not on my own tongue, but through the words of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, famous for his provocative stance that we should engage in “obscene solidarity” instead of patronizing “political correctness” that tip toes around hard realities by using “pretty language.”
But before I get to Žižek, let me take a detour that lays the ground of what we mean — or at least what we have meant historically — by cultural pluralism.
Some years ago I published a conversation with the great pluralist thinker Isaiah Berlin in the New York Review of Books entitled “Two Concepts of Nationalism.” In that discussion we addressed the attachment to one’s way of life as the very stuff of cultural pluralism that liberal civilization is meant to protect.
After examining aggressive nationalism of the kind we associate with Nazism that results from the wounds of humiliation — “like a bent twig, forced down so severely that when released, it lashes back with fury” in Berlin’s phrase — we spoke about “non-aggressive nationalism.” Here is what Berlin said:
Nonaggressive nationalism is another story entirely. I trace the beginning of that idea to the highly influential 18th-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder virtually invented the idea of belonging. He believed that just as people need to eat and drink, to have security and freedom of movement, so too they need to belong to a group.
Deprived of this, they feel cut off, lonely, diminished, unhappy. Nostalgia, Herder said, is the noblest of all pains. To be human means to be able to feel at home somewhere, with your own kind. Each group, according to Herder, has its own Volksgeist — a set of customs and a lifestyle, a way of perceiving and behaving that is of value solely because it is their own. The whole of cultural life is shaped from within the particular stream of tradition that comes from collective historical experience shared only by members of the group.
Thus one could not, for example, fully understand the great Scandinavian sagas unless one had oneself experienced (as he did on his voyage to England) a great tempest in the North Sea. Herder’s idea of nation was deeply nonaggressive. All he wanted was cultural self-determination. He denied the superiority of one people over another. Anyone who proclaimed it was saying something false. Herder believed in a variety of national cultures, all of which could, in his view, peacefully coexist. Each culture was equal in value and deserved its place in the sun. The villains of history for Herder were the great conquerors, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, or Charlemagne, because they stamped out native cultures.
Only what was unique had true value. This was why Herder also opposed the French universalists of the Enlightenment. For him there were few timeless truths: time and place and social life — what came to be called civil society — were everything. . . . In Herder, there is nothing about race and nothing about blood. He only spoke about soil, language, common memories, and customs.
Continue….