Theses of this book
The “accelerating anti-cultural vortex” we are witnessing all around us is a surge of effort to enforce cultural change, to help the counter-culture flourish by suppressing traditional social norms that obstruct this.
This is the culmination of liberalism, which redefined modern society as a mass of freely choosing individuals not an identifiable people directed by its own tradition. Liberalism denied that societies are cultures, that we must live under cultural authorities.
But the claim of liberalism was false: all people are under an obligation to their conception of the Order; all people have absolutes and belong to their cultures, their god, which are their authorities.
In line with human nature, the ‘free individuals’ turned out to be an established culture with power.
And the new cultural authority is now asserting its dominance, by forcibly transforming all of culture into the new way of life.
Traditional culture is slated for erasure, by ‘exposing’ traditional thinking as backward and anti-human, warranting its legal suppression. Cultural institutions (schools, courts, professions, media, etc.) are increasingly dedicated to condemning, restricting, re-educating, and thereby neutralizing the citizens who belong to the ‘problem’ culture.
The justification for that suppression relies on an Enlightenment misconception about justiceexposed by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
Justice is partly cultural. Just as it makes no sense to charge an ancient Athenian with violating in his own culture a taboo of the Persian way of life, it makes no sense to charge traditional culture with violations that are intelligible only on the premises of progressive culture. The shift from one culture to another is not progress; it is defection and realignment, the development of another paradigm.
It is not justified to to suppress what is not injustice. It is not injustice to live and to run things (a school, a state) with, say, a belief in heteronormativity (there are two sexes only, and they cannot be changed), just as no injustice attached to living as a Persian.
Cultural suppression also relies on a misconception about legitimacy.
It is evidently not possible to prove to every citizen that, for instance, heteronormativity is ‘the truth’ – or the design of nature, the dignity of the unborn, the moral law is ‘the truth’ – but the failure to prove these points to a people who reject their foundations is no form of defect.
Human cultures have never had to argue their legitimacy before people with an fundamentally different outlook.
The traditional Western outlook is the justifiable outlook of a people. – As, by the same token, is the outlook and way of life that is the rejection of the traditional Western outlook, formed over the centuries (via Rousseau, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Dewey, Foucault, et al.).
Our problem is not our differences but the refusal to acknowledge that difference is part of the plan.
It is part of our Western tradition to recognize fundamental difference and not suppress cultures. It is ancient wisdom to treat worshippers of different gods as people with their own place; ‘unbelievers’ are not enemies to be forcibly converted into us.
(So the reactive talk of a ‘Christian nation’ and a ‘conservative country’ just flirts with the ugliness of cultural suppression instead of correcting it.)
This disordered slip into forcible cultural assimilation has come about because of a quirk in Western history: the traditional culture in Western countries itself gave rise to a counter-culture. Single countries became home to two cultures with opposed values, norms, and modes of thinking – diametrically opposed, because the one culture was drawn out of the other by way of rejection.
This has created a problem of rivalry for control of social institutions, which – contra liberalism – exist to help each ‘people’ live its own way of life (a school board, a college of physicians, the media, the courts).
Why should this be when we are federations and federations are formed of different peoples.
What is additionally disturbing is our political amnesia. Both Canada and the United States began to exist by recognizing that no ‘fabric of Canada’, for instance, is torn apart by the existence of peoples with contrary beliefs. The fabric is torn by working to force one people into the culture of another.
It is the genius of a political system honouring liberty (a system that does not mean liberalism) that it unites its separate parts on the proviso that one kind of people (like the ‘nationality’ of Quebec) would not be pressured to act like a different people (diverting one man’s energy into the flourishing of another man’s way of life). Traditionally minded Canadians and Americans simply cannot have a new master called The Culture.
The way out of the problem of rivalry is simply the practical problem of finding a way to restore the homelands that cultural division accidentally broke up, where one kind of people could have and shall have again the institutions that are theirs, serving their ends, their absolute.