Hostility of Western Elites To Western Civilization
The institutions and traditions of Western civilization are almost entirely the products of the Age of Enlightenment (AKA the Enlightenment, the Modern Age, or the Age of Reason). For the purposes of this essay, Western civilization includes the countries of Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The Age of Enlightenment was a philosophical and scientific revolution that developed in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. The civilization growing from the Enlightenment evolved over a very long time and was accepted by most Western peoples. Yet, despite this fact, a substantial majority of present-day Western elites are at war with Western civilization. How can this be?
The bedrock of Western civilization we have inherited from the Enlightenment has been constitutional republican government. The powers of government have been circumscribed to ensure the freedom and well-being of citizens. More often than not, the powers of government have been separated into coequal legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Each is independent of the others in their operation. Each checks the other branches if they stray toward tyranny. How can Western elites quarrel with this?
The Motivations of Modern Western Elites
How do we know Western elites are at war with their own countries’ traditions and institutions? And who are they? An elite is defined as a group or class of people having the greatest power and influence over a part or whole of society. Such elites include academic, political, media, cultural, and economic elites. The elites eating away at the foundations of Western civilization are mostly called progressive or dirigiste.
Sometimes their influence is attributable to the elite’s beneficial contributions to society and is justified. Sometimes their influence is gained because of their wealth and privilege. In this latter case, an elite can be hostile toward existing institutions and traditions.
What can cause an elite to war on modern civilization? Social groupings, from national governments to smaller voluntary associations such as companies and charitable groups, are fundamentally chaotic systems. This primary fact is especially true for any country’s economy, but the reasons for an economy’s chaos are also true for other social systems. Every chaotic system consists of a large number of components. In Earth’s chaotic atmosphere, these components are molecules in the air. In social systems, the components are individual human beings and groups of human beings. Each component has a number of attributes that can change when that component interacts with others. Examples of such attributes for an atmospheric molecule are the molecule’s three components of position, three components of momentum, and internal energy states. For human beings, examples include an individual ‘s knowledge, desires, abilities, and purposes.
Because interactions between components of a social system are chaotic, it is often impossible to predict the interactions’ results. Such unpredictability makes the attainment of elites’ purposes extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible. As an example, consider the inflation caused by the Biden administrations war on economic abundance and its massive spending.
Over the years, progressive Democrats have reacted to this difficulty with attempts to constrain ill-behaved, chaotic social systems through government control. Members of a privileged caste usually believe strongly in their own capabilities. If an elite cannot solve or ameliorate a social problem under its purview, then perhaps democratic society has not given it enough power to attack the problem. Yet, any additional power given an elite to direct events necessarily takes that power away from private citizens, companies, and other democratic institutions. When that happens, society becomes more autocratic. Constraining social systems has been seriously attempted ever since the Woodrow Wilson administration approximately a century ago.
President Wilson, a one-time professor of political science at Princeton, believed the average American citizen lacked the knowledge and temperament to govern himself, much less to govern the country. Instead, he believed the country should be governed by knowledgeable technocrats. Ever since then, progressives have been taking power and freedoms away from the people and giving them to the technocratic administrative state, aka the regulatory state.
These dirigiste beliefs about the intellectual limitations of average citizens and their inability to change find an echo in dirigistes’ devotion to critical theory and critical race theory. Most people, according to American progressives, are sheep whose notions are dictated by powerful elites. Progressive Democrats want to ensure those elites are progressive. Those members of the public who do not agree with them deserve to become neo-feudal serfs.
The two most potent motivations driving global elites in their war on Western civilization are (1) the extreme difficulty of bending social reality to their will, and (2) the contempt they hold for most people’s abilities and motives.
Western Elites’ Denigration of Western Peoples
One purpose of our elites has been pointed out by Douglas Murray in his book The War on the West. In any Western country, the sovereign is the people themselves. They are the ones who determine the nature of the country. If, then, you are hostile to the social arrangements and institutions of the country, you must condemn the people themselves in a way that explains the social shortcomings.
It is also true that the majority of people in the West can be described as “white.” A racist explanation for social wrongs immediately suggests itself. This is not the only reason progressives believe white racism is systemic (critical race theory is another), but it substantially reinforces other explanations. Douglas Murray writes in his first chapter in The War on the West. the following:
There is an obvious, observable truth about people in the West. Historically the citizens of Europe and their offspring societies in the Americas and Australasia have been white. Not absolutely everybody has been. But the majority have. The definition is tautological — white means mostly having ancestors from Europe. Just as the majority of people in Africa have been black and the majority of people in the Indian subcontinent have been brown. If for some reason you wished to level an assault on everything to do with Africa, you might well at some point decide to target people for being black. If you wanted to delegitimize everything about Indians, you might at some stage decide to attack its people for the color of their skin. Both would be inhumane and would today be easily identified as such. But in the war on the West, white people are one of the first subjects of attack. A fact that has been steadily normalized and made into the only acceptable form of racism in the societies in which it happens.
To delegitimize the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonize the people who still make up the racial majority in the West. It is necessary to demonize white people.
Douglas Murray, The War on the West, Chapter 1, Race
Racism and its exploitation in slavery has existed for millennia in every continent and every culture on Earth. Yet somehow only the West is repeatedly identified as guilty of these sins by the Leftist elites. Again quoting Douglas Murray, we are told,
Only the Western countries, spread across three continents, were told constantly that in order to have any legitimacy at all—to be even considered decent—they should swiftly and fundamentally alter their demographic makeup. The vision of the twenty-first century appeared to be that China would be allowed to remain China, the various countries of the Far and Middle East and Africa should be allowed—indeed expected—to remain as they were, or even return to something they may have once been. But the countries identifiable as the countries of “The West” were expected to become something else or lose all legitimacy.
Douglas Murray, The War on the West, Introduction
No one can deny that American racism has been a social stain for much of our past. This has been recognized by a growing fraction of the population from the very beginning of the republic. Slavery based on racism was abolished only after a devastating Civil War in the 1860s. The Jim Crow laws surviving the Civil War were not substantially dismantled until the civil rights laws of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968, and the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified in 1964. These legal changes together with overwhelming social disapproval for racism have produced substantial statistical evidence that racism is declining as a social force.
What was written above concerns racism and its use by elites in the United States. However, much of it could be repeated for Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (See here, and here, and here, and here, and here.)
Western Elites’ Use of Multiculturalism
Another effort to delegitimize the West very similar to elites’ use of racism is multiculturalism. The basic tenet of multiculturalism is that the values of all cultures are of equal validity within the milieu of their own societies. However, since Western elites strongly want to delegitimize Western civilization, some cultures are more equal than others for them. Since the elites desire to increase their control over society and the economy, socialist cultures are of particular value.
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, something very new arose in the American Left, partially generated by the rise of the New Left in reaction to the Vietnam War and to the Civil Rights political struggles. Primarily a protest movement, the New Left had no unified political theory or orientation, although they were greatly influenced by Karl Marx’s ideas of individuals’ alienation from society. Prepared to believe the worst of their own country, the minds of New Leftists were fertile ground, seeded with the French import of poststructuralism, which in the United States became postmodernism.
The modern society to which the postmodern Left is “post” is the rational society of the Enlightenment . The postmodern philosopher (or other academic or politician) is extremely suspicious of any of the products of reason and denies the validity of the general philosophical viewpoints of the 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment. Among their disagreements with the enlightenment are these:
- Postmodernists do not agree that there is an objective reality that has existence and properties independent of any human observer. They believe this view to be a kind of naive realism. According to them, whatever reality exists is a construct of the mind, an artifact of scientific methods of observation and the language used to describe what is experienced.
- Following the rejection of objective natural reality, the postmodernists deny that statements from scientists and historians can be objectively true or false. Postmodernists sometimes say there is no such thing as Truth.
- Postmodernists believe that science and technology do not necessarily cause human progress. Some hold the misguided use of advances in science and technology lead to applications for killing on a massive scale, and are inherently destructive and oppressive.
- Postmodernists claim that reason and logic are not universally valid. Instead they believe reason and logic are themselves conceptual constructs. Specific applications of reason and logic are valid only within the established intellectual narratives in which they are used.
- There is no such thing as an inbuilt human nature. All human behaviors are instilled by social forces, with all aspects of human psychology being socially determined.
- Language cannot refer to or represent a reality outside of itself. Words acquire meaning only through contrasts and differences of meaning with other words.
- According to postmodernists, it is impossible to find a foundation of certainty upon which knowledge can build a picture of reality empirically.
- Postmodernists believe it is in principle impossible to construct general theories to explain anything in the natural world or the social world of humans.
Strictly speaking, these beliefs are attributable primarily to academic elites. However, from them they leaked to media, political, cultural, and economic elites. Because of the usefulness of postmodernism’s relativism, political elites on the Left have been particularly susceptible to it.
If one accepts the relativistic nature of “truth,” the claim that the values of all cultures have equal validity follows immediately. One question of great current importance forces itself on us: If other cultures have equal validity, how obligated are we to allow non-assimilation, or even immigration of illegal immigrants? This is, after all, our country, and we have a right as a people to defend our people and our way of life. As President Donald Trump affirmed and as Democrats have vigorously, emotionally and with great vitriol disputed, our country’s government has the right to determine who may or may not enter. Leftist elites, of course, would deny this. They think Western civilization should be thoroughly demolished to make way for a more just society.
The importance of all of the above should be obvious. If you desire to live in a society, where the rights and freedoms of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution are revered and protected, most of the elites we currently have over us must be thrown out and replaced. We had a chance to go a long way toward doing that in the midterm elections of 2022, and we blew it. Let’s hope we do better in 2024.
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