Blame Church or TV?
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy
By Paul Gottfried
158 pp. University of Missouri Press 2002
Not many great works are out there on political correctness because most people in the position to write books are themselves sufferers of the disease. From what is available, Paul Gottfried’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt is one of the best. Unlike mainstream conservatives, he sees the current era for what it is. And unlike the far right, he doesn’t spare the people when talking about what’s happened to their civilization.
The Shared Premise of Left and Right
Mainstream political discourse allows for discussion on abortion, taxes, size of government and a host of other things. What it treats as settled is the focus of Gottfried’s book. Liberals charge that conservatives are racists, sexists and homophobes, while conservatives charge their opponents with misunderstanding the legacy of Martin Luther King and not appreciating all the great things that have been done for women that make life so much better than “before the sixties.” “Whatever crusades against discrimination that have been launched by the administrative state since the 1960s have become a sacred legacy-and one that only those who are condemned as hopelessly bigoted would challenge.”
While critics complain about unofficial PC and speech codes at universities, the state itself rarely comes under attack. While wanting to present itself as a neutral player among competing forces “The therapeutic state undertakes the building of a multicultural society, pledged to ‘diversity,’ by treating citizens as objects of socialization. Some will be pumped up to feel good about whoever they are, while others will be required to forfeit, disavow, or disparage their inherited identities.”
Although the US doesn’t legally prohibit speech that offends “minorities” the way Europe and Canada do, political correctness has the same effect. Confederate flags are taken down while black school children salute the Pan-African flag. The Department of Education instructs school teachers to portray the “normalcy” of homosexual relations and families. To take an example not from Gottfried’s work, the federal government gives same-sex partner benefits to its employees. Pity the citizens who thought that by voting against the state sanction of homosexuality they would influence what their government did. Whoever wins elections, the diversity state marches on.
It would be a mistake to see the managerial state exclusively in terms of power. True, it makes sense that minorities and homosexuals would look for special rights and government would look for more to do in order to expand its power. But there’s no political gain and some risk in Bill Clinton going around reminding whites that they’ll soon be a minority. In November 2001, two months after the September 11th attacks, he gave a speech at Georgetown University saying that “the nation is paying the price” for the Crusades. Putting aside the obvious facts that America was centuries away from even existing at the time and that the Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression, this was a period of intense flag-waving patriotism and Clinton’s castigation was not what the country wanted to hear. More recently, John McCain called for the Confederate flag to be taken down from public buildings and said that the biggest mistake of his career was voting against the Martin Luther King holiday. For his trouble, and the cost of alienating white Southerners, he got 2 percent of the black vote. Our elites can be cynical manipulators and true believers at the same time.
Censorship in Germany
As the nation burdened by the Holocaust, in Germany the process of sensitization by force has gone the furthest. Every year 8,000 journalists and scholars are put on trial for opinion crimes. There are more German political prisoners today than there were in East Germany under the communist government. The American media, even the conservative one, rarely raises a peep. All mainstream thinkers either are ignorant of the fact that Europeans in general and Germans in particular don’t have free speech or treat as settled the idea that the existence of thought crimes is a reasonable price to pay to stomp out “intolerance.”
Particularly disturbing is the Holocaust cult. The “Weimar 1999” event was put together to commemorate the 250th birthday of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. With federal funds organizers of the even decided to display artifacts from the concentration camp 5 miles away from where Goethe was born.
Exhibitions of the works and effects of Goethe and Schiller (another former resident of Weimar) were interspersed with reminders of the Nazi death camp nearby, including samples of the hair of Nazi victims. Essential to these proceedings were what turned out to be the halting dialogues arranged between former camp inmates and German schoolchildren.
Books are monitored for ideas that might harm the young. A judge in 1994 said that “He who denies the truth about Nazi extermination camps threatens the very foundation upon which the German Federal Republic is erected.” The murder of Jews in WWII is even used against the country that fought and defeated the Nazis. In the movie Freedom Writers, the teacher gets the inner-city blacks and Mexicans to stop shooting each other by teaching them about the Holocaust! Other times, America has more contemporary victims of “hate,” like murdered homosexual Matthew Shepard and blacks lynched decades ago, to use as clubs furthering leftist goals like legislation against “hate crimes.” Pointing out that whites are many times more likely to be attacked by a minority than vice versa is treated as a digression against the rules of acceptable discourse.
Looking for the Source of White Guilt
In 2000 Ford CEO Jacques Nasser, talking to subordinates, said that he was “not liking the sea of white faces in the audience.” In college orientations across the country, videos are shown attacking the heritage of white students while minority leaders encourage non-whites to hurl epithets against the representatives of Old America. (The article that Gottfried’s source is based on is itself worth a read). It’s hard to see any other group submitting to such treatment. Where did this ethnomasochism come from?
The managerial state and their media allies have succeeded in creating a country of spineless sheep. Based on how easily public opinion is led, it can be questioned whether America even has a real culture. In 1996. 53 percent of Americans thought that gays should be admitted to the clergy and 29 percent favored homosexual marriage. Ten years before that there was no real support for either position. Today, nearly a majority favor the latter. Something similar could probably be found on race. A majority of Americans believe that the Holocaust was the worst “tragedy in history” while admitting they know “little or nothing about it.”
Those that think that religion, as a competitor for souls, is some kind of bulwark against political correctness are probably unfamiliar with what goes on in modern mainline churches. The Bible is rewritten in gender neutral language and homosexual and female priests are given leadership roles. Gottfried sees Protestant theology as the culprit behind our secular theocracy. Man as a sinner, non-whites and homosexuals as the suffering just, Holocaust victims as martyrs, etc. His argument is that PC has gone furthest in traditionally Protestant countries like the US, Canada, Germany and Sweden while having less effect in Austria, France and Italy. The fact that it affects all Western nations to a certain extent can be blamed on the cultural hegemony of the US, the land of the victims.
Kevin MacDonald has responded to Gottfried by saying that although what he writes about the deficiencies of Protestantism may be true, by the early 20th century Darwinism and eugenics had won. The problem in his view is the ascendancy of a Jewish elite hostile to the people that they rule. MacDonald acknowledges that the culture of self-flagellation could only work on people who were biologically prone to it. Maybe what appears to be a Protestant/Catholic split is really a Nordic/non-Nordic one. MacDonald and Gottfried can both be right. The Jewish liberal elite certainly does exist but Jews themselves never made up more than two percent of the American population and couldn’t have succeeded without substantial help. When it comes to the story of the destruction of Western civilization, there’s a lot of blame to go around.
Gottfried seems stuck in a time warp where people get their ideas from school or church rather than TV. As someone who grew up while homosexuality was becoming cool, I don’t recall a teacher ever telling me how great gay marriage was but do remember watching show after show where homosexuals were the best looking and most well adjusted characters with the funniest lines. To the extent that TV and movies convey a message at all it’s the sappy pop culture stuff like “don’t be racist” and “women are discriminated against” that inoculates in modern man the closest thing he has to morality.
It also must be pointed out that the least religious people are the most taken in by the politics of guilt. While Gottfried tells horror stories about American Protestants going to the Middle East on apology tours it’s nothing compared to what goes on at our secular universities and among politicians. No doubt that this culture has infected the churches, but can we say it’s worse there than anywhere else in society? Churches have gone along but they haven’t been the leaders of the movement and in some ways have moved slower than anybody else. When rich white Episcopalians select a pro-choice lesbian to lead their church they’re reflecting their culture more than shaping it. I’ll concede the damage done by public education, where the civil rights movement gets more coverage than all Western technological accomplishments combined, but the author exaggerates the influence of religion on Western society and its depravity as an institution relative to everything else.
Gottfried also makes a mistake when he blames the American people. He points out that we live in a democracy and people always vote for the same things. His quoting of poll results showing that people are sheep isn’t impressive. That the masses are fickle and easily led isn’t news. When the Supreme Court banned school prayer more than 90 percent of the public opposed it. In California the people voted against welfare for illegal immigrants but the law was overturned by the courts. Likewise, homosexual marriage came to Massachusetts, Iowa and for a limited time California through the judicial branch. The people voted against all this despite the messages they got from their social betters. Brainwashing about “diversity” and “lifestyle choices” occurs in public schools that citizens have to send their kids to if they can’t afford the alternative. What does Gottfried want the people to do, take up arms? True, different groups of people have fought and died for less than stopping the transformation that has taken place in American society over the last 50 years but expecting it to have been possible to stop through the democratic process the major events and decisions that have changed society isn’t reasonable.
The Case for Optimism: The European Right
In 2002 Gottfried was pessimistic about the US but saw potential in the European right. Recent events have shown him to be correct. While America descends further into the PC hole and closer to a white minority, real conservative parties, excluded from public debate, have seen major victories in Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Belgium and the Netherlands. Even the much vilified British National Party was able to win seats in the recent European election. There’s a real chance that anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders could be the next Dutch Prime Minister. The next ten years will determine the fate of the West. The nationalists have accomplished the hard part: getting their foot in the door. We’ll see how far the establishment will go to protect their utopian vision.
In his autobiography, Paul Gottfried remarked that he was once asked “Do you give suicide razors with your books?” Though through most of his life such an attitude was probably justified, today there is reason to hope. The old bourgeoisie world is dead but we’re not going to have a sensitizing one world government either.
See our interview with Paul Gottfried here.
3 Comments
Jun 23, 2009 6:20 pm |
No less an authority than Samuel Francis suggested in a 2003 letter to American Renaissance that “nurturist” sentiment was much more in vogue among the largely protestant progressive movement and New Dealer elites than is commonly known:
http://www.amren.com/ar/2003/07/
Sir — While I appreciate Prof. Steven Farron’s description of my review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in the March 2003 issue of AR as “perceptive,” I have to disagree with him and maintain what I said in the review, that “much of what the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society did or tried to do was justified in terms of the blank slate doctrine.” Prof. Farron writes that he “cannot see how any of the programs of the Progressives … or New Deal … were motivated or justified by” that concept.
But the “blank slate doctrine” is essentially the idea that the minds and behavior of human beings are not the products of nature or genetic inheritance but of the social environment. As historian George E. Mowry wrote of the intellectual atmosphere of the American Progressive movement in The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912 (p. 37), “Central to this new intellectual formulation was the firm belief that to a considerable degree man could make and remake his own world … Both the rising social sciences and the new social gospel promised that basically men were more alike than different and that they were not evil by inheritance, but, if anything, were inclined by their own nature to be good… the great inequalities existing among them at the moment were not natural, and from the viewpoint of social peace and human welfare were decidedly bad.”
Historian Eric Goldman in his standard account of Progressive Era political thought, Rendezvous with Destiny (pp. 78-79), explains how the thought of Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty, the “most rounded and powerful note in a growing chorus,” helped popularize the idea that “an environment that had been made by human beings and could be changed by human beings” “determined all men, institutions, and ideas,” and that “legislating a better environment, particularly a better economic environment, could bring about a better world, and bring it about before unconscionable centuries.” Goldman also discusses the role and impact of Franz Boas himself on Progressivist thought and policies about race.
Historians Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick write in their monograph, Progressivism (p. 24): “Since social scientists accepted environmentalist and interventionist assumptions implicitly, they believed that knowledge of natural laws would make it possible to devise and apply solutions to improve the human condition. This faith underpinned the methods used by almost all reformers of the time: investigation of the facts and application of social-science knowledge to their analysis; entrusting trained experts to decide what should be done; and, finally, mandating government to execute reform.”
The New Deal ideology was not distinct from that of the Progressive Era from which it emerged. As historian William S. Leuchtenberg writes in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (p. 33), “The New Dealers shared John Dewey’s conviction that organized social intelligence could shape society, and some, like [A.A.] Berle [Jr.], reflected the hope of the Social Gospel of creating a Kingdom of God on earth.”
Sociologist and historian E. Digby Baltzell in his classic work, The Protestant Establishment, also discussed the importance of Boas as well as of John B. Watson, founder of behaviorist psychology, and his brother-in-law, New Deal Interior Secretary Harold C. Ickes, who was so solicitous of blacks that he was sometimes called the “Secretary for Negro Affairs.” “It is important to see,” Baltzell wrote (p. 271), “that the New Deal’s efforts to change the economic and cultural environment, largely through legislating greater equality of conditions between classes of men, were a reflection of the whole intellectual climate of opinion at the time. In almost every area of intellectual endeavor — in the theories of crime, in law, in religion, and in the arts — there was general agreement as to the sickness of the bourgeois society and the need for environmental reform.”
Prof. Farron describes the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal eras as consisting of “direct election of senators, referendum and recall at the state and municipal level” and “social security [and] the National Labor Relations Act.” These were certainly reforms of those eras, but much of their theoretical rationalization as well as that of the many other measures supported by reformers in these periods was grounded in the environmentalism advanced not only by Boas and Watson, but also by even earlier environmentalists such as Charles H. Cooley, Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As Baltzell also writes (p. 162), “All were opposed to racism, Social Darwinism, imperialism, and all forms of hereditary determinism; and all assumed the malleability of human nature which was capable of responding to improved social conditions,” and (quoting Dewey), “there must be a change in objective arrangements and institutions; we must work on the environment, not merely in the hearts of men.”
Samuel Francis, Arlington, Va.
Jun 23, 2009 6:37 pm |
You can also find a free online copy of The Protestant Establishment at Google Books.
Jun 23, 2009 6:54 pm |
I would suggest reading through some of The Protestant Establishment to see what the intellectual climate was like among late 19th and early 20th century social scientists. You might be surprised at how anti-hereditrian sentiment was more widespread among prominent social scientists than you would think it was during the golden age of eugenics.
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