War of the Worlds
Poseidon 55
From: sergio calderon <sergio....@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: War of the Worlds
Date: Monday, September 17, 2001 6:32 AM
Following is an interesting and incisive op-ed piece published in
today's Wall St Journal. Enjoy....
Sergio
===============================================
September 17, 2001
Commentary
War of the Worlds
By Shelby Steele. Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, is the author of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal
of Black Freedom in America" (HaperCollins, 1998).
A week ago today, I set out to write a piece for this page on the
recent United Nations conference against racism and intolerance in
Durban, South Africa. My point was to be that the conference was an
absurd and theatrical confrontation of First World guilt and Third
World anger born of ineffectuality. Then, after last Tuesday morning,
I put all that aside. Against the horrors of that day, the conference
seemed remarkably trivial.
But now I believe there is a relationship between that bizarre little
conference and Tuesday's horrors. After all, Tuesday's events were
also a collision of the First and Third worlds, and I believe their
subtext was also one of Western guilt and Third World ineffectuality.
Decisive Heritage
In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the
years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for
granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture.
There is no space here to reiterate the vast and invisible web of
ideas, principles, values and understandings that have evolved over
the millennia to undergird the American civilization.
To mention only the fewest highlights, there was the magnificence of
Greek thought, the Roman development of law, a renaissance of reason,
the concept of a social contract, the idea of the individual as a
self-contained and free political unit with rights and
responsibilities, free markets, the scientific method, separation of
church and state -- all this and so much more converging to make the
American and Western way of life successful in so many ways. It is not
too much to say, as Francis Fukuyama did a few years back, that the
West now represents -- all things considered -- the Hegelian "end of
history." If the Second and Third worlds now "Americanize," it is more
out of Darwinism than a love of blue jeans and Big Macs.
The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept
their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary
struggle. The great white advantage has been living inside history,
adapting to its constant demands, nurturing the values and the habits
of life that allow one to keep pace. This is the cultural capital that
whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in
the former victims of exclusion. It is so easy to look at minority
weakness and think of sweeping programmatic solutions when a simple
insistence on responsibility for one's own development might serve far
better. (After all, this is how Israel came to thrive after the
Holocaust.) Oppression made such attitudes irrelevant, so that even
when freedom came there was an incomplete knowledge of how to seize
it.
And this is where a new kind of trouble began. Where slavery and
colonialism once imposed inferiority, new freedom has too often only
added the fresh embarrassment of inferiority without the excuse of
oppression. I think the Durban conference was inspired by this
embarrassment. Its founders realized they would never get reparations
of any significance. The wiser among them know that reparations are no
answer anyway. I believe this conference -- with its almost religious
embrace of victimization -- wanted to keep racism alive as a
face-saving excuse, to let it temper the shame of so much
ineffectuality in the face of freedom, so much correlation between
independence and decline.
Today the First World is dealing with an embarrassed Third World that
is driven to save face against the anguish of an inferiority that is
less and less blamable on others. The deep appeal of a Jesse Jackson
or a Yasser Arafat, one reason they hang on as leaders despite every
kind of public and private failing, is their ability to hide
inferiority behind blame, to be the parent who sees no wrong in the
child.
But blame is only the most common defense against this embarrassment.
Terrorism is another. The shame of languishing in the midst of freedom
generates a touchy, narcissistic sensibility and an abiding faith
that, but for the evil of others, one's superiority would be
self-evident. The terrorist act is a self-referential event, a
self-congratulation that smothers the feeling of inferiority in one
glorious blaze of spite. Here, finally, is the effectiveness that is
so absent elsewhere. Even if you cannot build the World Trade Center's
towers -- emblems of demonstrable Western superiority -- you can come
along of a Tuesday morning and, like God himself, strike them down.
But there is another actor in this drama -- white guilt; one of the
most powerful yet under estimated forces in modern societies. At least
50 whites have told me in the same conversation both that they feel no
racial guilt and that on some occasion they have not said something
they truly believed for fear of being marked a racist. But white guilt
is precisely the latter, not a belief in one's guilt but a
vulnerability to being stigmatized as a racist because of one's skin
color alone. And this is the larger terror that hangs over the Western
world.
White guilt is what causes minority and Third World "inferiority" to
stand as a negative moral judgment on the Western way of life. It
presumes that Western success is the result not of three millennia of
cultural evolution (much of it enhanced by contributions from what
today we call the Third World) but of the ill-gotten gains of slavery
and colonialism. Western success is presumed to have come at the price
of Third World inferiority.
This doesn't just mean that Western moral authority is hostage to
helping the Third World overcome inferiority. More importantly it
means that Western culture is inherently sinful, that its superiority
is a measure of its sinfulness. Thus, the World Trade Center towers
become monuments not of a great civilization but of a great evil.
Moral Equivalency
White guilt pushes the West into a place where it can redeem its moral
authority only by making a virtue of moral equivalency. This means
that weakness, backwardness, even sinfulness in minorities and the
Third World are unmentionable. Yasser Arafat visited the Clinton White
House more than any other world leader. American civil rights
organizations almost entirely live off white corporate and foundation
money despite their total ineffectiveness in solving black problems.
Western money has gone to blatantly corrupt Third World leaders for
decades.
White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the
First World apologetic. And this, of course, only inflames the
narcissism of the ineffectual. In the vacuum of power created by
guilt, a world-wide class of guilt hustlers has emerged. America and
the West must cease this three-decade-long indulgence in guilt, moral
equivalency, and apologia. None of this redeems the West or uplifts
the Third World.
In the place of this there should be only a profound commitment to
fairness. Here, something like fanaticism is not out of place. After
this, America and the West should unapologetically pursue their
self-interest, let others take the lead in their own development, and
allow the greatness of Western civilization to speak for itself.
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