Excellent encapsulation of the challenges we face, particularly in the West. We need clarity to understand the nature of the threat, and this helps to provide that. Thank you!
Thanks. This was more of an initial exploration. I have other ideas, about the way these changes are affecting parenting and childhood, romance and mate selection, and their roots in the selfishness of the baby boomer generation. I also think that the progressive tendency of many young women is kind of a pull factor for these changes. If 50% of young women believe in progressive values then men can compromise and adopt them themselves in order to pair bond, or many, many people will end up alone. Neither option is good for society.
My big (unanswered) question is: can people intentionally reform a culture? If men feel that the culture of relationships and dating has become warped and perverse (for example) can a bunch of individuals make changes to address that? Or is the world now so big and interconnected, and individual action so trivial, that we're all just passengers being carried along on waves of cultural and technological change? I'm not sure. I know that there are things that people can begin to do and that's what I want to explore.
You mention two words which are key: ‘selfishness’ and ‘progressive’. As the 50’s utopian panorama shrinks into the distance we might be seeing more clearly now that progressivism was partly a disguise for selfishness. A selfishness which had been formerly out of the grasp of all but the very rich and privileged but which post-war modernity brought within reach of the middle class. It’s a thought. I very much look forward to reading more from you.
I don't think a hyper-concern for individual interiority is anti-Western at all, but rather the opposite: it is Western civilization's values taken to the breaking point, a caricature of the European approach to human life. Most of the people outside the West who see the West as an enemy are far, far more collectively minded than Western conservatives--the (left wing) scholar Orlando Patterson noted in the introduction to his book *Freedom Vol. 1* that most human cultures have traditionally had no concept of what we would call freedom, and their closest equivalent usually meant something like "licentiousness". The mainstream of human culture throughout various places and ages is that you *are* your social role and the primary objective of the "good life" is to know your place and fit into your place. Even personal names are often contingent on your role in society and you receive a new name when you assume a new role. What the individual might want deep down inside is a particularly Western interest, and attempts to dissolve social roles and norms entirely are this tendency running out of control and obliterating all competing values.
I think one source of this confusion is the false belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans were the ancestors of our civilization. They were not; our civilization did not get going until around AD 750-800, in response to the defeat of the Moorish invasion of Frankia and the subsequent rise of the Franks to hegemony over northern Europe. Most Islamic and South Asian cultures understand this way better than we do, which is why so many of them call Westerners in general and white Westerners in particular some variant of "Franks"--Farangi, Franj, Ferengi (yes, Star Trek got the name from here), etc. We are not the descendants of classical antiquity's civilizations, but of its barbarians, who even then were noted by Romans as being more individualistic and prideful than the Romans, Greeks, or Punics.
Excellent encapsulation of the challenges we face, particularly in the West. We need clarity to understand the nature of the threat, and this helps to provide that. Thank you!
Thanks. This was more of an initial exploration. I have other ideas, about the way these changes are affecting parenting and childhood, romance and mate selection, and their roots in the selfishness of the baby boomer generation. I also think that the progressive tendency of many young women is kind of a pull factor for these changes. If 50% of young women believe in progressive values then men can compromise and adopt them themselves in order to pair bond, or many, many people will end up alone. Neither option is good for society.
My big (unanswered) question is: can people intentionally reform a culture? If men feel that the culture of relationships and dating has become warped and perverse (for example) can a bunch of individuals make changes to address that? Or is the world now so big and interconnected, and individual action so trivial, that we're all just passengers being carried along on waves of cultural and technological change? I'm not sure. I know that there are things that people can begin to do and that's what I want to explore.
You mention two words which are key: ‘selfishness’ and ‘progressive’. As the 50’s utopian panorama shrinks into the distance we might be seeing more clearly now that progressivism was partly a disguise for selfishness. A selfishness which had been formerly out of the grasp of all but the very rich and privileged but which post-war modernity brought within reach of the middle class. It’s a thought. I very much look forward to reading more from you.
I don't think a hyper-concern for individual interiority is anti-Western at all, but rather the opposite: it is Western civilization's values taken to the breaking point, a caricature of the European approach to human life. Most of the people outside the West who see the West as an enemy are far, far more collectively minded than Western conservatives--the (left wing) scholar Orlando Patterson noted in the introduction to his book *Freedom Vol. 1* that most human cultures have traditionally had no concept of what we would call freedom, and their closest equivalent usually meant something like "licentiousness". The mainstream of human culture throughout various places and ages is that you *are* your social role and the primary objective of the "good life" is to know your place and fit into your place. Even personal names are often contingent on your role in society and you receive a new name when you assume a new role. What the individual might want deep down inside is a particularly Western interest, and attempts to dissolve social roles and norms entirely are this tendency running out of control and obliterating all competing values.
I think one source of this confusion is the false belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans were the ancestors of our civilization. They were not; our civilization did not get going until around AD 750-800, in response to the defeat of the Moorish invasion of Frankia and the subsequent rise of the Franks to hegemony over northern Europe. Most Islamic and South Asian cultures understand this way better than we do, which is why so many of them call Westerners in general and white Westerners in particular some variant of "Franks"--Farangi, Franj, Ferengi (yes, Star Trek got the name from here), etc. We are not the descendants of classical antiquity's civilizations, but of its barbarians, who even then were noted by Romans as being more individualistic and prideful than the Romans, Greeks, or Punics.