I have had some interesting discussions with my good friend Ohmyrus, who is an ethnic Chinese man but appreciates some aspects of Western civilization that many Westerners themselves appear to have forgotten, or rejected. He is not unique in this regard. One of the best books about European culture published in recent years is Defending the West, written by the former Muslim Ibn Warraq who was born in the Indian subcontinent, not in the Western world. Essentially, according to modern Multiculturalism, every culture has the right to exist — except the Western one. The Iranian-born ex-Muslim Ali Sina denounces Multiculturalism for precisely this reason in his book Understanding Muhammad, which I have reviewed online:- - - - - - - - -“If any culture needs to be preserved, it is the Western, Helleno-Christian culture. It is this culture that is facing extinction. It is to this culture alone that we owe the Enlightenment, Renaissance, and democracy. These are the foundations of our modern world. It would be a terrible mistake not to preserve this culture. If we do nothing, we face a future where democracy and tolerance will fade and Islam’s more primitive instincts will subjugate humanity. All cultures are not made equal … We owe our freedom and modern civilization to Western culture. It is this culture that is now under attack and needs protection.”
As a native European, it is strange to notice how many (non-Muslim) Asians apparently appreciate my civilization more these days than so-called intellectuals in my own country do. It is challenging to explain how the West could make so many advances in the past and yet be as stupid as it currently is. The question of what went wrong with the West is far more interesting than what went wrong with the Islamic world. The best answer I can come up with is that maybe our current flaws are related to our past virtues, at least indirectly. For instance, being stubborn can be a strength or a weakness, depending upon the situation. The West is a non-traditionalist civilization. We have unquestionably made advances that no other civilization has done before us, despite what some critics claim, but perhaps the price we pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before us. Organized science is a Western invention. Organized national suicide, too, is a Western invention. The Western university system once represented a great comparative advantage for Europe vis-à-vis other civilizations. Today that same system is undermining the very civilization that gave birth to it.
Read the rest at the Brussels Journal.
23 comments:
Thank you for posting. I have all the notes that I need for a history of European music, from Antiquity to The Beatles. I will post it one of these days, probably at The Brussels Journal, but maybe I will publish my long-announced history of beer first. I haven't really decided yet.
fnord --
Gates of Vienna's rules about comments require that they be civil, temperate, on-topic, and show decorum. Your comment violated the last of these rules. We keep a PG-13 blog, and exclude foul language, explicit descriptions, and epithets. This is why I deleted your comment.
Use of asterisks is an appropriate alternative.
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fnord said...
ah, youre going to get in serious trouble. We have you now, all your IP-adresses and locations. M**********rs, didnt you think that AFA would monitor you? Lol, your bosses may get some mails if you dont desist spreading hate. Not a promise yet, but soon.
How curious. Having had his @ss handed to him on a plate with respect to his last few comments at this site, fnord now descends into foul language and menacing threats.
Of late, this has become a consistent pattern of behavior for those who follow Islam and their fellow travelers on the Left.
It seems that peace-loving Liberals are about as peaceful as Islam itself. Go figure.
GOTCHA.
YOU LOST THE ARGUMENT FNORD.
Here's the draft of a comment I wrote BEFORE fnords outburst:
Czechmade wrote: "Fnords still feel like fathering the poor muslims, enjoying sort of PC superiority feelings - towards us, towards them. Independent judges. Sweet self-delusion."
Yeah. That's exactly what it is. For him to not be condescending to the Muslim rabble means you must become a Nazi-like hater.
What kind of person feels stuff like that? Maladjusted 'tards if you ask me. Or people with a "poor self-image" as ConSwede opined about the real and actual Neo-Nazis who identify with the defeated Third Reich."
It is challenging to explain how the West could make so many advances in the past and yet be as stupid as it currently is.
The answer's gist lies in technology's amoral character. As an example, guns are not inherently evil. They are a tool that can be used to hunt food or murder people. It is the user who places a given tool into context.
A huge amount of Western civilization's progress has been in technological terms. While this has conferred innumerable benefits upon mankind, maturity is not necessarily one of them.
Albert Einstein observed as much when he noted that nuclear weapons had given man a capacity for destruction that far exceeded his maturity in terms of using them. The following quote of his sums this up:
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
While I would argue about the West's sense of humanity, there is no doubt about the lack of it in Islam.
We have unquestionably made advances that no other civilization has done before us, despite what some critics claim, but perhaps the price we pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before us.
Perhaps not "mistakes", so much as that we willingly undertake risks that were previously quite impossible to take. Additionally, due to the ready proliferation of technology, we incur extra risks arising from high technology falling into the hands of those without compunction or hesitation over committing slaughter and genocide on a previously unimaginable scale. If there is a "mistake" we have made, this may be our gravest.
Again, another quote of Einstein is particularly applicable to Islam:
Force always attracts men of low morality.
Islam's inhumanity and abject misogyny, along with its utter addiction to force betray the low morality of so many Muslims.
Organized national suicide, too, is a Western invention.
This is open to debate. Being a tale told by winners, history may not necessarily record the fate of stubbornly pacifist Eloi-type cultures that are now submerged in the sands of time. Perhaps the West has re-invented the concept of national suicide but human history—as with its frailty—is far too rich and varied that we should be the very first to do so.
Today that same [Western university] system is undermining the very civilization that gave birth to it.
Au contraire, the destruction of Western civilization is not—nor has it ever been—the intrinsic goal of University education and its academic processes. In fact—even as you yourself observed—the tradition of European and, respectively, American university education is largely responsible for much of the enrichment in life experienced by those ln the West. It is the infection of academia by Cultural Marxism that has rendered it a de facto enemy of modern civilization. This is in no way an inescapable byproduct of the university system but, instead, a sad fact of post communist infiltration and demoralization of Europe and America in particular.
There is no preserved corpus of classical Islamic music comparable with that of the European musical tradition.
I would expand Bernard Lewis’ observation to include many other portions of Islamic culture other than just music. Throughout Islam’s exceptionally violent history, it is difficult to imagine just how many librarys, coin or jewelry collections and other assemblies of priceless artifacts have been put to the torch or melted down.
Our modern day world awaits a similar fate—think the Bamiyan Buddhas—should it fall into Islam’s withering embrace. Indeed, it is without irony that some of Islam’s most enduring features are its least complimentary.
I hesitate usually to use someone´s name in plural. It is always pejorative in meaning. A too easy effect to produce, but in this case I hit the target perfectly:
Fnord is cowardly hiding behind "we".
"We" is the essence of all totalitarian regimes - an anonymous army of weaklings with nearly zero responsability for their deeds, eager to hit someone, who can speak for himself. A nazi thing.
Kick your mirror.
As to any parallels between Islam and Nazism: I will excerpt my own article from several years ago about this subject.
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Foremost among these similarities is the pursuit of genocide. No other single feature should overshadow the menace connoted by this despicable goal.
1) The way Islamists seek to recreate Hitler’s “final solution” and routinely speak of “finishing the job” begun by the Nazis as reflected in connections between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el-Husseini, Yasser Arafat and Adolph Hitler. This vile goal and its counterpart, Holocaust Denial, represent a central feature of these evil ideologies.
2) The status of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as a best-selling book in the Muslim Middle East. The popularity of Hitler’s book is a direct reflection of its shared content with the Qu’ran.
3) Restoration of lost glory with respect to the Caliphate or the reconstruction of post-WWI Germany’s Reich both represent similar goals whose attainment would mean death on a massive scale for the world’s population.
4) Assigning blame to the Jews for lack of success is used as a misdirection and scapegoat with regard to the actual faults of poor leadership or failed military adventurism.
5) Cultural purity as a dominant theme of philosophical chauvinism to elevate existing ideology above any possible dissent or questioning as personified by German “übermensch” or pious Islamic jihadism.
6) The tacit approval shown by both moderate Muslims and WWII Germans for absolutism and the atrocities committed in its name and the infrequency of outward condemnation made by either of them.
7) The impossibility of negotiating with Nazis or Islamists due to their ideological mandates and pursuit of global dominance.
8) An absolute prohibition of apostasy under penalty of death similar in nature to rigidly enforced ideological purity within Nazi ranks.
9) The use of terrorist atrocities and crimes against humanity as legitimate tools of war.
10) Commingling religious tenets and fascist doctrine with the intent of disguising political ideology as theistic creed.
11) The imperative aspect of totally eliminating such a dire threat to world peace. Both Nazism and Islamism are wholly incompatible with modern civilization.
12) The totally unacceptable nature of appeasing or coexisting with such a dangerous mindset.
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Again, Einstein furnishes an apt quotation:
The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
I don’t think it’s bigotry to state that Beethoven and Mozart represent a peak in the world history of music, not just in the European tradition.
If you add Bach, then neither do I. The Western European Orchestral Music Tradition remains one of the highest artistic achievements in all of human history. Period. Full stop.
As a musician who is self-taught on a number of instruments plus a composer of classical music and many other styles, what I find most curious of all is this:
How is it that just a couple of centuries ago some few dozen men managed to compose classical orchestral works of such towering stature that no one since that time has been able to replicate, much less exceed, their inate musical qualities?
Seriously, why were a few dozen DWM (Dead White Men) able to elicit such evocative and stupendously complex emotive force from relatively primative instruments whose quality has been improved and brought to greater heights of individual virtuosity?
Why is it that "Modern Classical Music" remains widely regarded as an oxymoron?
I have composed many pieces in the style of Bach and other classical composers. I may yet use my computer controlled music system to assemble a virtual orchestra and play my pieces in full multi-part harmony. That task will take years of my life and time I simply cannot spare as of now without some serious artistic patronage.
The West's current music industry is not about what you know but who you know, which goes a long way towards explaining the triumph of style over substance that typifies so much of its modern art in general.
No to Beethoven.
If you lived in a totalitarian society, you would not like Beethoven. The mental corruption is there, the coming revolutionary spirit and the wounded psyche of a silly social giant as well.
Bach is best for your survival, just like Vivaldi or Monteverdi, but covering more of your dying soul - replacing the missing functions. Mozart is really helpful. They all know how to disperse the evil jinns, not so the haughty plagiator of Hayden and Bach - Beethoven.
Czechmade: You should read the book How the West Was Lost by the Russian author Alexander Boot. He invented the term "glossocracy," which I have used before as a good way of describing the modern West. He focuses a lot on music and he notes, as you do, that it is possible to find traces of ideological corruption in Beethoven which you cannot find in either Bach or Mozart. His fascination with Napoleon is not shared by me. But there is no doubt that he was a genius. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed in human history. A person capable of creating that cannot have been all bad.
Baron,
"our current flaws are related to our past virtues",it also seems likely that our current flaws are related to our current virtues. Multiculturalism grew from cultural relativism which itself seems to be some kind of warped product of the laudable desire to eliminate racism in the West. From this process the idea that religions have "rights" developed and the equally bizarre concept that Western civilsation has to tolerate primitive tribal behaviour in the name of racial harmony.
mace --
If you look closely, you'll notice that Fjordman wrote this, and not me.
My view on why the Islamic peoples are so low in terms of culture and achievement is the polygamy. It is that which makes the "foundation" of their society, rotten. At best a few men have most of the women, and women are mere property.
Thus, no surprise that a people comprised of Big Men and serfs would prefer the Austrian Watercolorist, and genocidal maniac, to the gentle and brilliant Austrian musical prodigy. Their entire family foundation is built on violence (polygamy).
As for the decline and fall of the West, we have the opposite problem. It is no mystery. We are dominated and run by women, who disconnected from most men and with no real interest in them, pursue private and public vendettas against their "real" enemy: Joe Average in the cubicle next to them.
You can see this even in the decline of classical music, as more dance-able stuff replaces the classical canon, and nothing new in classical music has been produced that is beautiful (as opposed to trendy-hip stuff by Philip Glass).
I am not as taken as Spengler with China. That nation having far more men then women, that never ends well.
Forgot to mention, my best to Dymphna. I saw on the blog about her unfortunate accident, but had no time to post anything.
My sympathies and get well soon!
Baron,
I wasn't implying that you wrote it, you're the author of the post so conventially, I addressed my comments to you.
Geeze Whiskey, here we go again with the "women are the root of evil in western society" meme. I have read several of your constructs and couldn't agree less...
Yeah, western women have been sold a bill of goods that have proved and continue to prove false. Where have the men been in this discussion?
I hate to say it but your continuing harping on female domination in western culture makes men sound like baby cats...
Whiskey,
your claim should be supported by studying other societies with polygamist laws. I do not know that much.
One thing is obvious, an educated free respected mother can push you
from tender age to become someone of significance in your society based on your knowledge and education.
An ambitious mother or wife can be somewhat annoying, but in the end you get real results. Your father has never the time or physical closeness to do the same job. He goes "hunting" to often. If he can only respect your mother and sisters, you get some early lesson from the respect/love department.
The Jewish and Chinese mothers 1push more for the success of their kid. It is rarely mentioned, but from my friends I know that Chinese women are quite dominant a feared by the Chinese men. They escape from them by being successful.
Also in India the women are officially lower creature. But elderly women with kids/grandsons exercise already much more power within the house. Outwardly we get the image of a silent wife, but the microcosm of the house can show other qualities in action. It changes from caste to caste.
In India you find also supersuccessful women with no family around. No kids. No husbands.
In India the polygamy was accepted, but mostly praciced in order to get a son or any kids at all. A son was a clue to the capacity of performing rituals after your death feeding you that way in the other world.
So you get a Jesus Christ like figure - the God incarnate Rama with his only Sita kidnapped by a demon Ravana.
And you get another God incarnate - Lord Krishna, guiding Arjuna on the battlefield- one of the 5 husbands of their only wife - Draupadi. If you know that Arjuna corresponds with "argentum" and Krishna with Slavic "černý/čornyj" black, in India dark blue-green, you may find all these things part of our heritage. For ancient Greeks Krishna was simply Hercules...for us he is a conflicting figure with our monotheist creed. Or a highly exotic figure - helping some Westerners to deny their heritage en block.
"Draupadi: The most notable wife of Arjuna, she was wed to him following a swayamvar - a practice where a woman is allowed to choose her life mate by placing a garland on his neck."
swayamvar(a) - self choice, free choice, self-boon - interesting, something not reflected in present day India.
Then Krishna sexually satisfied 1 600 women at the same time who were freed from some demon. They were homeless being free at once, getting a God instead of husbands in their plight.
These outward scriptural discrepancies give Indians a lot of freedoms in fact. The much needed flexibility to view the things divine.
Also a large number of prophets
in the Bible display on their own a flexibility, we are not used to.
This is left over to the religious Jews, who are still awaiting the main figure of the Bible.
The Christ may be one, but his sermons are construed in a way, that divine grace, available anytime, is the main hero of his sermons. Not any prescription. Prohibitions etc. Grace plus obedience.
All these settings give us a large space to be people of importance on our own, while being quite different.
This free theophilic idyl was suddenly interrupted by a figure which gives us a maximum low moral model available and nothing else in addition except the order to imitate this appalling meanness.
No grace plus obedience.
Fjordman,
I was with thirteen a crazy fan of beethoven, then only I went on to listen Bach, Hayden, Mozart etc.
I was lucky that way, blinded by Beethoven I had to listen to those only in "good faith" in the beginning. Later I have discover Beethoven had recycled many pieces, I think even Mondscheinsonate
is a recycling of some pieces from Wohltemperiertes Klavier by Bach.
I discovered that Beethoven was skillfully killing or weakening all the beneficient effects I got from his predecessors.
There is something wrong with Beethoven, he cuts us off from our more wonderful heritage.
I will try to find about about the book "glossocracy". It will be hardly any surprize to me as I work with this topic every day.
Every language contains prefabricated ideas and clues to work with shifting those ideas. I read or use various dictionaries every day for the last thirty five years.
The results are amazing, but I can hardly find people to share my views or mistaken ideas.
We may argue endlessly about the Bible, New Testament or Greek Classics, but those three sources were until recently linguistic training grounds available for any somewhat educated person. This is missing and results in glossocratia.
We do not control these three sources of our "new"/"old" ideas any more. We do not know where those old patterns come from and as a result we escape from quality to get consolation in quantity of words, which partition our world endlessly and give us some perception of temporary self-importance.
We might afford many words in circulation just like a weak currency, if we had our sources before our eyes, ready to drive the crazy sheep back to their sheep-fold.
Yes, the afghan buddhas is what we can expect happen to our entire culture if the muslims rises to power. They will raze the Notre Dame and Louvre. They will bomb out the British Museum and the Abbey Road studios as the latter is a symbol for most of 20th century british music in general and as music is haram according to islam, that is probably the final outcome. All symbols of the old kufr religion will have to go, so bye-bye to most churches and cathedrals. All learning centres will also have to, so that the new masters can thoroughly indoctrinate the newly converted kufr into the new faith. Their old history has to go or be re-written completely. The loathsome culture of the kufr means nothing to the people of the right faith. So off it goes as much as possible. Perhaps our classical music will be preserved by the chinese and the popular music of the last half century by the japanese. There would probably be some irony in that I think.
Zenster, you write that you're a musician. I'm not one myself although I have a great love for the music of my youth, the 60's and 70's and to some degree the 80's and onward. You don't have any music on MySpace or something similar to that, where one can listen to it?
I don't know if you have heard the latest song from Paul Potts yet. A perfect fusion of classical music and more contemporary one. As you probably already know, Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale is based on Bach's Air. Unfortunately the sound quality on YouTube is not always the best although there are sometimes exceptions to that rule. Still, it is very enjoyable and I hope you might get the opportunity to listen to it with better sound quality in the near future because it makes your hairs stand on end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY9C6TZEN7U
Here's Muslim pianist playing Mozart. Fazil Say is one of the world's top performers today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Whp1kWZ8Y
I'd like to see any of the ignorant fools commenting here play that piece as well as Fazil.
Fjordman, if you say Hitler is more popular than Mozart in the MENA region, let me tell you this. Mao Zedong is much more popular than Beethoven among the vast majority of Chinese.
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