Pascal Bruckner is considered one of the eminent philosophers in France today.
The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism by Pascal Bruckner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Pascal Bruckner clearly and successfully articulates my own thoughts and feelings concerning the West's heavy love affair with flagellating itself.
He makes so many good points and I certainly won't attempt to list them all, but here are a few:
Once upon a time the West had good reason to feel guilty of slavery, racism, genocide, fascism, communism, imperialism etc... but those days are gone. We are still apologizing for events that have happened hundreds of years ago. The most recent events, like segregation and racial discrimination hearken back to the years before affirmative action which was the 1950s. Notice how all the popular movies about racism in the U.S. take place in the fifties or earlier? But according to our culture of Western guilt nothing has changed.
Yes, we have poverty and too many minorities and immigrants living in ghettos, but are the reasons still due to racism and discrimination?
Bruckner gives a resounding "No!" He then elucidates on what actually does hold minorities and immigrants back. It is the tyranny of Western Guilt. Because when the great white west tells African and Middle Eastern immigrants and also racial minorities in the U.S. that "It is all due to the evil white empire that you are degraded." What are you saying? You are calling these people degraded.
What can be more degrading than to make a career of victimhood?
The terrorist threats? The West's fault! Poverty among immigrants? West's fault.
Bruckner's book goes further into citing specific historical sources and also political leaders that have profited by perpetuating this myth and the people that follow along because it makes them feel virtuous while they continue to live in upper scale, segregated neighborhoods, putting their children in private schools while denying minorities who are too poor to pay for these schools the same choice and have to put their children in dangerous, failing public schools and continue to live in gang-ridden neighborhoods.
Bruckner makes an interesting observation about the recent turn against Jewish people, especially in Europe. They were acceptable as victims of the holocaust, and living in ghettos, but once they rose to equal status to the rest of Europe and America and built their own nation, they are the "new fascists" and the Arab nations are Israel's victims.
He points out how Europe enables anti-nationalism because we are not supposed to identify with a particular country anymore but see ourselves as part of a global community. So people gleefully boo during the French national anthem during soccer matches. Algerian immigrants who were born and raised in France wave Algerian flags while never ever intending to step foot in Algeria.
The career of Victim-hood demands that we see ourselves as the tyrannical oppressors of Middle Eastern countries while never contemplating why these same people are desperately trying to get out of their own countries and come to Europe, America and Canada.
He brilliantly points out a fact that the self-flagellates are blind to: that to view yourself as an oppressor or tyrant is to hold yourself as guess what? Superior! And guess what it also does? Holds your "victims" as Inferior.
The results of this Western Guilt is to preserve racial division and create an even greater hostile environment between the different groups than when there was actual discrimination.
An excellent quote from the book:
"It is a mistake to believe that making schoolchildren feel guilty in accord with the principle 'your ancestors enslaved mine' will make them like the idea of human diversity any better or will seem to them anything more than a theatrical artifice.
Just imagine little blond, brunette or curly headed kids coming up to each other on the playground and introducing themselves as descendants of slaves, of colonized peoples, of slave traders, of bandits, of peasants, of beggars...
...Why ask boys and girls to make themselves the contemporaries of crimes that may have been committed three centuries ago...we are supposed constantly to inject rage and anger into them. "
He goes on to say that perhaps we should simply abolish any kind of statutes of limitations on crimes, give all of us a portfolio at birth of grievances to exploit. That we can go back as "far as the Middle Ages" to "demand justice."
Our present system of white guilt has produced "chronic malcontents" where no one can ever get on with their life and enjoy it. We must either view ourselves as oppressed and be miserable or as oppressors and be consumed with guilt (another form of misery).
Somebody finally put in print what I have been thinking for ever so long.
The book says far more with many historical recitations and I don't agree with everything he says, especially concerning Christianity, which he considers the originator of guilt, at least the Medieval Catholic church, which is an oversimplification and it ignores the gods of pagan countries who had to be constantly appeased in order to avoid destruction.
He says that the Enlightenment threw off religion but retained the mantle of guilt. This is his theory of origins but he can't really substantiate it.
However, his observations of the here and now are compelling and one of the most perspicacious studies on the subject.
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I am on a French Impressionist track these days. Currently I am listening to Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, Second movement.
A couple of days ago I ran into a woman who worked in the office of the school where I taught for several years. She reminded me why I don't subscribe to the local paper: I'm tired of seeing former students photos there.
Not for earning awards or any graduating from college. But because they are dead or in jail.
My former colleague told me that a student I taught in the fourth and fifth grade was now going to prison for murder.
I remember this boy as being a behavior problem and I did my best by allowing him to come in to my music room and help me set up each morning. Probably he was glad to get out of his homeroom class, but I found if I could develop relationships with my students outside of class, it helped with discipline issues.
A couple of years later when I walked into the Middle School where he was, he saw me and greeted me with a big smile. That surprised me because I had never seen him smile before.
I know there are deeper and more serious reasons why too many children are turning out the way they are but I also saw that the children we taught were getting more and more out of control, not only because of their chaotic home life, but because we as teachers are not allowed to provide any consequences for bad behavior. And, frankly, we teachers spend more time with these children than their parents do.
Why do I mention this? (And sorry if I've depressed my readers, I'm feeling a little depressed myself since I learned about this student.) Because the book I'm reviewing offers some acute observations as to why too many students are falling through the cracks.
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I would give this book ten stars if I could. It should be required reading for anyone with children.
Esolen writes in the form of irony. He tells you all the effective ways that will kill your child's imagination, sense of wonder, creativity, appreciation for nature, a healthy view of love and sex and body image, and sense of the transcendental.
Each chapter breaks down exactly how to accomplish this. Carefully follow his instructions and you too can have a child that will roll along on that assembly line of correct thinking, and conform to ideologies dictated by mass entertainment (he refused to call it pop culture because there's nothing cultural about it) and they will be shoved out at the end into a nihilistic, bleak, adult who can then turn around and start the process over with their own children.
Perhaps needless to say, his narrative is sarcastic, at times bitingly so. Those who don't agree with his stance may not appreciate it.
A few of his admonitions:
1. Don't peddle truth; only shades of grey because all ideas have equal merit.
2. Keep your child indoors as much as possible, preferably in front of a television set so they will be unable to truly socialize with other children, create their own games, songs, chants, or how to resolve conflict for themselves. Keep them forever monitored.
3. Keep them in public school for longer and longer hours and shrink summer vacation because spending eight hours or more a day under florescent lights in a windowless room is healthy. Make sure recess is minimal as well as lunch to prevent any free socialization. This must all be managed by adults- but not their parents; their parents need time to be themselves as they pursue their careers.
4. Games must be formal and structured by adults in the form of sports. This also will prevent actual socialization and cull the imagination.
5. Replace fairy tales with political cliches and fads. Better yet, crush their spirit by making them constantly fearful that the world is about to be destroyed by evil people who are bent on destroying the environment, making animals endangered, and let's not forget "global warming" oh wait... we're calling that "climate change" now...anyway, don't let them read actual books from bygone times. Oh, and don't let them look at great art or listen to great music. Those things irreparably spark the imagination.
6. Ridicule anything that is heroic or patriotic.
7. Reduce all talk of love to narcissism and sex.
8. Level distinctions between man and woman (or spay and geld).
9. Distract children with the shallow and unreal. And surround them with noise. They must never, ever have moments of silence.
and finally:
10. Deny the transcendent or fix above the heads of men the lowest ceiling of all.
I thought the book was refreshingly honest, especially after spending several years as a public school teacher. He knows what he is talking about and expresses his acutely perceptive observations with a shrewd eye for language or as someone who actually spent most of his childhood outside, reading quality books and quietly contemplating the transcendent.
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For those who pray, please pray for this young man. He is the same age as my son. They went to school together. Horrible things happen to people in prison and I just pray for his salvation and protection.
Listening to Public Radio. Liszt's Totentanz, a piano and orchestra theme and variations of the ancient Gregorian chant Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is playing. Here is a link for the interested.
Many people know who the late Christopher Hitchens is, but not many, at least in the U.S., know he had a brother who is also a writer. Peter Hitchens is a writer for The Mail, a British newspaper that can be read online.
He complied a number of his essays, written both for The Mail as well as an American magazine and put them together to comprise a Kindle book called Short Breaks into Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler's Life.
Each essay is about a country he visited over the past ten or so years and the impressions he received there. Most of the countries are under oppressive regimes, such as North Korea, Eastern Europe, different African countries and China. He offers much thought-provoking insight to each country.
Even Japan, which, we don't consider to be repressive, is in its own way. Once a manufacturing powerhouse in the late seventies and eighties, Japan has fallen under anxious times. College students prolong graduation, taking class after class, sometimes doubling the college career life-span due to the lack of jobs in the work place. For every job there are hundreds of new graduates applying.
Hitchens notes that racism and ethnic purity is a strong motivating force to the Japanese culture and as entrenched as cement. Even Japanese who migrated back from South America (at the encouragement of the Japanese government in an attempt to increase their dwindling population) are treated differently and lead poor, unemployed lives, thus adding to the problem rather than helping it.
I have observed that this has become an unforeseen problem globally in first world countries and some third. Remember all the panic-inducing stories by Paul R. Ehrlich, Kirk Vonnegut and other dystopian writers of the fifties and sixties? Remember Solyent Green? A world overpopulation explosion was going to cause mass starvation and chaos. Now what do we find? Countries with zero population growth, are suffering from an elderly-heavy population that is becoming increasingly hard to sustain by the ever-shrinking youth population.
This leads us to another essay by Hitchens: China. China is suffering not only from an growing elderly population but also an acute female shortage due to their one-child policy and their citizens' propensity to kill baby girl fetuses in order to try again. China now has 130 boys to every 100 girls. This has also led to unexpected consequences.
One of them is kidnapping of young girls and selling them as brides to rich families for their sons. In some villages, according to Hitchens, this has become so dangerous that girls cannot leave the house unaccompanied and, even worse, are kept in bolted cages during the day when both parents have to work.
China, however, is the leading employer of Africa. Do they exploit and pay slave wages? Yes. Are there not reparations for frequent injuries and Africans of all ages, including very young children who work in extremely dangerous mines and other hard labor? No. (Lewis Hine must be rolling in his grave).
Why? Beats starving. I am old enough to remember when Mandela was supposed to change South Africa and allow all races equal opportunity. Mandela is dead, but the government of South Africa, as well as every other African country is run by Tribal Africans, but poverty has not been much alleviated. Where are all the sanctions- rights activists of the eighties and nineties now? Have they lost interest because they no longer perceive the politics in Africa as a Civil Rights issue?
Let's move on to Eastern Europe, Hitchens describes the aftermath of the fallen Soviet Empire as leaving such a moral vacuum that the current corruption in former Soviet governments make the Old regime ever more appealing to its citizens.
And finally, North Korea. Surely the mother of all repressive regimes. Look at a global map made by a satellite at night. South Korea is lit up but North Korea is all darkness. I think that is a fit description of the way of life conducted there.
You can see a photo here.
Peter Hitchens said it was hard to see anything authentic because their visit was so scripted, down to their hotel lights, which went off as soon as they left and came on when they returned. Once he caught a glimpse of a man lying on the ground. Was he drunk? Was he dead? He never got to find out because immediately a group of men and women circled around the prostrate man, cutting him off from view.
On a lighter note, he witnesses a daily ritual between India and Pakistan. A highly elaborate border closing ceremony where soldiers of both sides take down their respective flags, shake hands at a gate that stands between the two countries before slamming said gate shut on each other, before opening it again the next morning. Hitchens wryly compares it to the navies of France and England meeting in the middle of the English channel and mooning each other. You can watch this highly interesting- and not a little amusing- ritual here.
I do not agree one hundred percent with all of Hitchens' views. He is, after all, British and is not necessarily pro-American policies ( he was as adamantly against the Iraqi war as his brother Christopher was in favor of it). But his writing is highly engaging, witty and extremely interesting.
I'm rather jealous of someone who has been afforded the opportunity to travel as he has and get paid for it besides.
There are many other countries. I haven't touched upon South America or North America. I'm not sure which continent Hitchens hasn't visited, perhaps Antarctica. But he has literally seen hundreds of countries and with an adept pen ( or computer) describes them all in vivid terms.
For those of you interested in further information here are a couple of links to Hitchens. One is a debate with his brother and the other is an interview with Eric Metaxas, the author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
Peter Hitchens and Eric Metaxas
Peter Hitchens vs Christopher Hitchens debate
Neil Postman presents an interesting theory as to why the concept of childhood is disappearing. He takes the reader on a historical trip back to the Middle Ages where no culture of childhood existed. Children were treated as small adults. Small, helpless adults that bigger, stronger adults were at liberty to take advantage of. They were expected to work like adults and serve those stronger than themselves. They were not protected from adult themes, such as exposure to sexual situations which they either witnessed or at times were forcibly involved in.
According to Postman, the concept of childhood began with the invention of the printing press. The ability to read created a division between adults and children because adults were now keepers of information that children did not have access to. Not only did the printing press create a class of children, it also created a class of adults, something else that did not exist previously.
As a result, starting with churches, schools were raised to create a literate society. Instead of children being sent straight to work they now were expected to spend their youth learning how to decode symbols and deduce meaning from them. This exercise opened them up to a universe of concepts and ideas that developed their own intellectual capacity. Society began producing abstract thinkers.
It's interesting to note that it was first Protestant churches that began the widespread use of schools before the Catholic church which was very much embedded in the practice of reverencing images. Imagery in the Catholic church was a powerful tool in teaching congregations Biblical history and principles. Icons and other images as paintings, statues etc.. were an integral part of worship.
Nevertheless, Catholics soon got on board and are responsible for schools worldwide and can also be credited for spreading literacy and as a result, childhood.
Literacy produced a culture of children because it produced adults. Adults now possessed abilities and knowledge that children didn't have and children were expected to spend their childhood acquiring these abilities in order to become functioning adults in a society that was now shaped by a largely educated demographic.
That is not to say that literacy was immediate and it took some time to trickle down to the poorest communities. However, church schools weren't respecters of people and both Catholic and Protestant churches planted schools worldwide in every neighborhood poor or rich.
Eventually, this was taken over in Europe and North America by the government.
Now the turning point: After describing the rise of childhood, Postman then writes on its disappearance.
Postman traces the disappearance of childhood to the development of technology, primarily, television and music. Themes and materials that previously were the domain of adults are now a part of a child's world.
First of all there is the diminishing of the intellect. Television requires no decoding, no interpreting, it is a completely passive exercise. No skills are needed to watch TV. There is no such thing as remedial television watching or classes that need to be taken in order to develop the ability to watch it. Instead of reasoning and analyzing, instead our emotions are manipulated by images and music that tell us how to feel about those images.
Most devastating of all, is what children are exposed to through television and popular music. Once upon a time, no one questioned the innocence of childhood or that children should be protected from certain aspects of life. Adulthood was needed in order to carry the load of information required by certain subjects.
The information that children receive about sex and other life themes though media has robbed children of this innocence. Parents buy music for their children that have graphic sexual content. They allow them to watch movies with language and violence that were once considered factors that children needed protecting from. This has all but disappeared from our culture.
And it shows. More and more shows are presenting younger and younger actors engaged in adult themes, including sexual activity.
But it's not only childhood that's fallen by the wayside. It's also adulthood. The average character in popular movies, TV and books is single and has the social skills of an adoloscent. It used to be that thirty was the new fifteen. Now it's forty. It shows in our culture. How many people prefer pursuing their own happiness as defined by "My relationships, my career, what I want to do with my life and it doesn't involve the oppression of being tied down to a marriage partner and even less to children." The rantings of a five year old from the mouths of many adults today.
Postman's book does not hold an optimistic view for our society where he believes technology has deprived the majority of people of basic adult skills for becoming thriving, functional and productive members or our society.
Perhaps a neo middle age serfdom is not so far off with an ever growing poverty class and elitist wealthy class. The inability to reason for oneself certainly will make the masses easier to control.
Resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. (p. 152).
My own view is not so pessimistic as Postman's for the reason that I have faith based on the promises in the book of Revelation.
In the meantime I will be doing my own "rebelling" against the culture by reading good books rather than watching sitcoms, preferring the Wall Street Journal to 24/7 TV news and training young children to think logically.
http://neilpostman.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman
A number of authors around the turn of the last century explored the complications of the race issue in America. The question as to what constitutes race was not easily answered. In Frederick Douglas' Up From Slavery, he talks of a whole new race of people that were growing in number due to slave owners impregnating their slaves. These children, Douglas contended, belonged to neither white nor black communities but were rejected by both. He classified himself in this category because his own father, a slave owner, was white.
Nella Larsson, a prominent writer during the Harlem renaissance creates in her short story, Passing, the tale a black woman who is light enough to be taken as white so decides to pass herself off as such.
Even Mark Twain forced his readers to confront the problem in his novel, The Tragedy of Puddinhead Wilson. In his story a slave girl has to care for both her own baby and that of her owner's because the man's wife died a week after she gave birth to their son. The two baby boys are in fact half brothers, the man of the house having fathered them both. We're given to understand that the slave, Roxana, is only about 1/32nd black herself so her son cannot be told apart from his half brother. Roxana decides to switch the boys to give her son a chance at life and pretends the son born to her mistress is her own, and thus raises him as a slave.
I have always found these kind of stories fascinating and so it is with James Weldon Johnson's book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In Johnson's story, which is a work of fiction in spite of the title, the protagonist, who is never named-nor is anyone else in the book-recalls his upbringing in the north around the turn of the last century, after leaving the south while still a small boy. He lives with only his mother, his father being at first unknown to him.
At first he doesn't see any difference between himself and his classmates at school. He observes that there are black children at his school and they are looked down upon, even the ones that prove themselves exceptionally intelligent. He feels pity for them, but looks down on them as well.
One day his teacher asks all the white students to stand up to be counted. He stands up as well. The teacher tells him to sit back down, that she is only counting the white children. This is the first time he is made to understand that he is not white. He rushes home for an explanation. His mother tearfully informs him that she was a servant in a prominent gentleman's house in Georgia and became pregnant by him. Even though she is fair-complexioned, she is counted among the black race and so is he.
This alters the whole course of his life and how he views himself. Even though his white friends continue to befriend him, his attitude changes towards the black students as he realizes he is, in fact, counted among them.
He chooses to join his own race and live among them. He goes to Atlanta to go to college, but after losing all his money at a porter house, he moves to St. Augustine, Florida and gets work in a cigar making factory. His time in the south allows him to make observations about the different classes of black people. While he admits there is a criminal element in a certain segment of black society, he also observes that there is a respectable working class group and also a wealthy, highly educated community of black people as well.
The white people, according to him, refuse to acknowledge any sort of demographic among blacks, except the worst criminal class, a group that the other groups of blacks despise as well.
He makes a lot of money working in the cigar factory so he decides to take his savings and move to New York City. There he becomes involved in the world of gambling and rag time music. A world where white and black people mingle. He eventually meets up with a white millionaire who takes him as a companion across Europe.
After spending a number of years in Europe he becomes overwhelmed with the desire to immerse himself in the black culture of the deep south so he leaves his friend and moves to Alabama. Here he endeavors to preserve and celebrate black culture by collecting and publishing the stories, songs and poetry of the Southern black.
While living in Alabama, he witnesses a brutal lynching that resolves him to leave the south and his race forever. He becomes determined to pass himself off as a white man for the remainder of his life. He returns to the North where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful white woman. She falls in love with him as well, but before he proposes he feels he must inform her of his actual race. This takes a lot of courage on his part and when he finally confesses she breaks down and sobs.
This all seems very strange to us living a hundred years after the book was written. I can't imagine living in a reality that learning that somebody was part 100th-something of a different race it would be such a trauma and impediment to my marrying them.
That is what I find to be valuable about this book. It opens to us the attitudes towards the racial groups of a time past. I have thought quite a bit about this, how someone can be so repulsed by someone for no other reason than the color of their skin. Not even the color of his skin but the "race" he's supposedly from even though he's more white than black and his culture is for all practical purposes white as well. It's easy to chalk it all up to how a person is raised and I know that has a lot to do with it, especially if one never questions the values they were imbued with while growing up.
But at the same time I know people who were raised in households that were as racist as the worst of them but did not allow themselves to be a product of their environment. My father is one of them. My dad was born and raised in the deep south but never in my entire life under his roof did I hear him utter a single racial slur.
Johnson originally published his book anonymously in 1912 for fear of public reaction. Later in the 1920's at the height of the Harlem Renaissance his book was republished with his name.
While written from a black person's point of view, his intended audience was white people. No doubt he was trying to call attention to the absurdity of race distinction and the prejudices that produced it.
He is one of the founding fathers of the NAACP and wrote a number of poetry and songs, including God's Trombones and the Black national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing. Fluent in Spanish and French, he became the first African American, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt, to become a U.S. consulate to Venezuela and Nicaragua.
James Weldon Johnson
1871-1938
