By Jeff Lukens, AMERICAN THINKER
All people may be equal, but all cultures are not. The rise of Western civilization has led to the greatest progress in human history. It has given the world democracy, freedom, affluence, equality before the law, the separation of church and state, and the notion of a sovereign state to protect it all. No other civilization on the globe can make that claim. Western civilization is the most prominent civilization because it is better than the others. Yet this point is lost on many of those among us.
Western civilization is much more than a geographical area. It is more about the idea of inalienable rights and the intrinsic value of the individual. Beginning in about 1600 until about 1970, Western civilization was exported from Europe to the Americas and other parts of the world. The advances in science, manufacturing, and free enterprise were markedly different from those in Asia or Africa. Closing the gap on these differences in recent years is a result of non-developed countries adopting Western practices.
Central to our civilization is the nation-state, which consists of people who inhabit a specified boundary, who rule their own government, and who hold a national identity. Joined with the incentives and liberties of free enterprise, this paradigm has remarkably reduced poverty around the globe to levels never before thought possible. Only the nation-state and its laws can protect citizens’ liberty. In America, this includes all races, religions, education levels, income levels, and political views.
America was founded on an idea, and the idea is liberty. The American Founding created divided representative government that avoids the dangers of autocratic or mob rule. It is based on Judeo-Christian morality derived from respect for the individual. The Constitution provides for limited government based on natural law and respect for property rights.
Today, we are confronted with people who seek the downfall of the nation-state. They seek removal of the borders that protect it. Without borders, the nation falls into anarchy driven by people who would ruin the structure that has brought Western civilization to its current level of prosperity.
Once defenders of free speech, liberals now work to suppress opposing views in education, in entertainment, on the nightly news, in social media, and in academia. They frequently do so by threats and intimidation. The right to bear arms is also under ceaseless pressure from the left who know that an unarmed, submissive public is necessary for top-down state rule. They believe that global government is the solution for what they view as a socially unjust America.
The leftist self-loathing Faustian bargain with radical Islam to defeat conservatism will not end well. Together, these two groups would extinguish the essence of Western life. This would be the suicide of the West. Leftists will do to Western civilization what it has done to the universities, race relations, the arts, religion, and the moral fabric of America. They will destroy it.
No country outside Europe would ever surrender its national sovereignty to the globalists. Yet this is what we are called to do. Europe is floundering with low birth rates and a rising tide of socialism and sharia. It may already be lost to these trends, and we should not follow the Europeans down this hole. There is no substitute for the nation-state today, or for a long time into the future.
Progressives are pursuing a politics of disruption and division with the intent of overturning society. Their politics are modeled on the tactics of Lenin, not on the constitutional foundation of our country. Their goal is to overturn the founding concept of America and Western Civilization with a global socialist state.
Some vague new world order would never be respectful of our sovereignty or responsive to our local needs. It would bring with it socialism and an economic breakdown, with its empty shelves, its lack of services, and the unintended devastation that happens when these leftists gain control of our lives. It would have the same consequences for the West as it did in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.
A global bureaucrat in Brussels or Davos cannot be entrusted with permanent power and expected to use it for the common good. It is not in the interest of women, blacks, Hispanics, or anyone else to embrace the privileged who are isolated from those they govern.
It’s no exaggeration to say the left is engaged in an ideological war against traditional America. As a result, a new cold civil war has settled in, where compromise seems impossible. Though many middle-class people may not realize it yet, we are in a titanic struggle to maintain our way of life. Health care, education, retirement, and other areas of American life are being more and more socialized, and the opportunity and freedom we have known may soon be lost.
We live today in an age where people like the idea of having rights as long as they do not have to pay a price for them. When it is time to defend those rights, they frequently run away. As sad as it may be, preserving freedom necessitates continuous confrontation against those who seek to destroy it.
Many conservatives wish to return to the days of civility but more and more find themselves surrounded by those who lack any notion of restraint. When that’s the case, we must toughen up and stand up to this nonsense. Our way of life as Americans depends on it. We must ignore their venom and reassert who we are as a civilization. And be proud of it.
@ amnonmuss: Letitimate concerns. World Wars I and II undermined the moral authority and the political-military authority very badly. Unfortunately, the twochief alternative civilizations, the Islamic world and China, have proved to be worse than Western civilization. Tyranny and repression in China despite economic and scientific progress. Tyranny, repression, aggression, terrorism, chaos and poverty in the Islamic world.
Granted that leftism and Islamism are not good. Granted that Western society is an improvement over all other societies, but the opposition might have some valid complaint even though they may not be able to express this complaint coherently. World Wars 1 & 2 suggest that Western civilization has some real shortcomings. I’m not sure the underlying issues have been worked out. Can someone identify these issues?
@ granmur:
The first comment of any User goes into moderation so that I kn ow its not from a spam bot.
You should be able to access the comments by clicking on them in the left column or click on comment below the article in question. No one has ever complained that they couldn’t reach the comments.
Stay logged in.
not a friendly website, I register, but can NEVER access the comments to articles!
I don’t believe Western Civilization is under attack primarily by outside forces.
Islamism is certainly a “non-Westeren” ideology; but without being fueled by Western actors such as Soros and the UN, it would wither and die.
Western society has its roots in a marriage between the various Christian Churches and successors of the Roman Empire. This church-state linkage did not seriously begin to be rolled back until the Separatist settlement in Plymouth, MA in 1620. The Plymouth settlers were joined within a few years, by non-separatist dissenters in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut — who, despite being doctrinally linked to the Church of England, had become, due to their physical isolation, as separated as the Pilgrims of Plymouth. Finally, in 1636, Roger Williams and his associates founded Rhode Island, the first state in the world with true religious freedom.
Back in Europe, parallel events were leading to the intellectual freedom that was the key to so much scientific progress in the West. Galileo Galilei, who had championed Nikolay Kopernick’s theories of a solocentric universe, went to his grave in 1642 having been silenced by the dogma of the Catholic authorities. Sir Isaac Newton, born within the year Galileo died, published his Principia in 1687, which led to the treatment of science as being governed by immutable rules. That publication, which opened the floodgates to every sort of scientific discovery, a major characteristic of Western civilization, was due to the weakening of the force of Catholic dogma in England due to the separation of the English church from Rome.
The third major element of Western Civilization, namely, the nation state, has its roots in the Westphalian treaties that ended the Thirty Years’ War — a war which concluded with the failure of the Holy Roman Emperor to exercise control over the budding nation-states of northern Europe.
The collapse of Western Civilization is not happening, as I have said, because of attack from the outside. It is being undermined from within — from forces unleashed by the very freedom from dogma and imperial repression that formed it. Atheism is attacking the religious values of Christianity and Judaism, Socialism is attacking free enterprise, and Globalist Capitalism is attacking the nation state. Islamic Jihadism is only effective against us, in that the above forces have left us weak and defenseless against them.