Our last post concluded with a rhetorical question: What is that “Western tradition”?
Although that is a mouthful, so to say, we can at least acknowledge one fact which, although incontrovertible, is ridiculously controversial today: our “Western tradition” is essentially a Christian tradition. The fact that the West used to be known and called “Christendom” is not right-wing propaganda. It is fact, as any perusal of older histories and essays makes abundantly clear. In fact, as recently as the mid-20th Century, that term, although in great decline by then, was still used by luminaries such as Winston Churchill.
Most histories of the United States practically begin with the Declaration of Independence of 1776. And such histories, in great measure, interpret the Declaration in the light of modern, Enlightenment tenets, including the oft-repeated but easily refuted axiom that our Founders were a bundle of deists straining against the constraints of organized religion and superstition.
Easily available primary sources and earlier histories demonstrate that the modern standard narratives are simply not so.
Furthermore, in past generations, our histories did not begin with the Declaration of Independence; they began with our colonial era and the background to that experience, which can only be understood by knowing what impelled our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers to come to these shores. And it was not the “1619” narrative.
In other words, our histories required an understanding of Christendom, now known as Europe, and the religious traditions which produced the legal traditions which Americans eventually inherited.
These are truths which are not only neglected but loudly disparaged and shut down today. Indeed, they are denounced as insensitive, misogynist, racist, and worse.
But they are none of those things. Rather, they are true. And a glorious truth, at that. However, the truth requires study and effort beyond what is required to read bumper stickers and memes.
The late Harvard Professor, Harold J. Berman, wrote in his magisterial Law and Revolution (1983):
“The traditional symbols of community in the West, the traditional images and metaphors, have been above all religious and legal. In the twentieth century, however, for the first time, religion has become largely a private affair …. The connection between the religious metaphor and the legal metaphor has been broken.”
Is it any wonder that bonds of race, religion, soil, family, class, neighborhood, and work community have dissolved into abstract and superficial nationalisms? “It is impossible not to sense the social disintegration, the breakdown in communities, that has taken place in Europe, North America, and other parts of Western civilization in the twentieth century,” Berman wrote in 1983.
So when our “culture” is denounced and demands are made to toss it into the trash, such as was done by Jesse Jackson and a minority of the Stanford student body (Hey Hey, ho, ho), what is actually being called for is the abolishment of our Christian heritage. A heritage whose history includes the fact that, for example, 8 of our 13 original states had state supported churches until well after the US Constitution; all state constitutions acknowledged “Almighty God” or “God” and more.
Berman goes on to state, “For many centuries, [the West] would be identified very simply as the people of Western Christendom.”
What does that mean with regards to our history?
Chartres Cathedral, France (1194-1220; built atop the site of four cathedrals dating to AD 400)
In 1987, about 500 students at Stanford University gathered to protest against Stanford’s Western Culture curriculum. The invited speaker was 1984 and 1988 presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson. After his speech, he joined the students as they marched to present their demands to the faculty senate and chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”
News reports led Americans to understand that what students and men such as Jackson were demanding was simply that undergraduates be exposed to other cultures such as the Sumerian or Inca civilizations or the achievements of Japan or China or the Arabs.
However, as usual, the media’s reporting was mere obfuscation.
Here is the chant again: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”
This was exactly what had already been happening in Stanford and universities across the land for decades, and would take on added fury thereafter: a bold attack against our culture. This attack was based on neo-Marxist and other radical doctrines (ironically derived from Western sources). And the attack succeeded.
(Paradoxically, the Western Culture class, similar to its predecessor Western Civilization, was the most popular of the classes in Stanford, and was attended by students of all cultural backgrounds. In effect, the protests were actually against fellow students who saw value in learning about their history.)
So, instead of teaching our inherited culture, universities engaged in counter-cultural warfare, teaching gay, feminist, Afrocentric, and myriad more subjects, all designed to demonstrate how such are oppressed and dominated by Western Culture. And now we see the same attacks waged by high school and elementary school teachers.
In other words, academics are now designed to relentlessly bombard upcoming generations with opprobrium against our heritage, our history, and our historical figures.
This did not start in 1987. I vividly recall a conversation in 1975 wherein a professional colleague slandered George Washington, asserting as fact something he could not possibly know and for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, outside the fervid imaginations of his college’s professoriate.
In the 1960s radicals in American colleges and universities had fully bought into the assertion that “Western Civilization” was an early 20th-century construct, taught only to justify American entry into Europe’s wars in order to defend “our civilization”. That, in fact, such teaching did not form a part of any curriculum of higher learning prior to World War I.
How intellectuals could affirm such drivel and get away with it will one day be a subject of marvel, I suppose. Akin to how their cerebral forebears fervently believed in bleeding, phrenology, and ouija boards.
A cursory review of the writings and speeches of our colonial and early republic religious and political leaders, as well as great amounts of surviving correspondence from many lesser lights of the era, clearly demonstrates their understanding of our heritage, which was first described as “Christendom” and much later as “Western Civilization”.
Just to take one example, Jonathan Edwards, the American Puritan minister most associated with the 18th Century Great Awakening in America, preached a series of over 30 sermons on God’s providential dealings with men, which he had intended to develop into book form but died before realizing that intention. Nevertheless, the sermons were published posthumously in the 1770’s as A History of the Work of Redemption, and you can find this work in Banner of Truth and Amazon, should you be so inclined.
In this work, Edward’s integrated landmark moments in the story of Christendom, such as the conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Guttenburg Press, the Enlightenment deism, and more, and tied these into God’s providential history of His creation. He refuted atheistic Enlightenment narratives by demonstrating God’s work through history and nations.
Edwards is just one of a great many American founding luminaries who not only possessed a deep knowledge of our heritage and culture, but also taught it to future generations. This is the heritage our academic, communications, corporate, medical, political, and other classes have so casually cast aside.
Nevertheless, as Professor Stanley Kurtz has written, “The Western tradition is the source of our founding principles and constitutional system. That is the most important reason for civic-minded citizens to study it.”
What is that “Western tradition”?
Jesse Jackson in Stanford, 1987, seeking to keep the majority of students from learning our heritage.
We have embarked on a series of posts designed to state some easily verifiable truths about us and our heritage as Americans. Although this blog is principally about Venezuela, the careful reader can easily discern the mutual interests and benefits between the United States and Venezuela, especially in the first half of the 20th Century which saw great progress in Venezuela’s infrastructure alongside an expanding and self-assured middle class while the United States benefited from basic raw materials, especially iron ore and oil.
I’ll not clutter this post with links to earlier articles, but if memory needs refreshing, please use the search bar and insert key words such as Mene Grande, Bethlehem Steel, US Steel, Petroleum, Pérez Jimenez, Juan Vicente Gómez, Ranchitos, and much more.
Although this recently begun series of posts primarily addresses the United States, they have a major bearing on Venezuela and the route to bankruptcy she has embarked.
In 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a timeless essay, Live Not By Lies. In it he urged his fellow countrymen to resist the seemingly resistless pull to agree to obfuscations and deceits. His point was that if many determined to not agree to the official lies, the source(s) of the lies would weaken and collapse. Solzhenitsyn’s essay was much shorter and more concise than The Power of The Powerlesswritten by Václav Havel four years later, which expanded on the same themes.
As we continue with this series of posts, it is good to first remind ourselves of what those who looked to us, and who eventually became disheartened by us, would urge upon us now when we are being compelled to say “yes” when we mean “no”.
Towards the end of his essay, Solzhenitsyn wrote:
Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.
And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries? And from that day onward he:
Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;
Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;
Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;
Will not cite in writing or in speech a single “guiding” quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;
Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;
Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;
Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;
Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;
Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible and necessary ways of evading lies. But he who begins to cleanse himself will, with a cleansed eye, easily discern yet other opportunities.
Yes, at first it will not be fair. Someone will have to temporarily lose his job. For the young who seek to live by truth, this will at first severely complicate life, for their tests and quizzes, too, are stuffed with lies, and so choices will have to be made. But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid even a single one of the listed choices—to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.
For us, who have grown staid over time, even this most moderate path of resistance will be not be easy to set out upon. But how much easier it is than self-immolation or even a hunger strike: Flames will not engulf your body, your eyes will not pop out from the heat, and your family will always have at least a piece of black bread to wash down with a glass of clear water.
Betrayed and deceived by us, did not a great European people—the Czechoslovaks—show us how one can stand down the tanks with bared chest alone, as long as inside it beats a worthy heart?
It will not be an easy path, perhaps, but it is the easiest among those that lie before us. Not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul. No, not an easy path, but then we already have among us people, dozens even, who have for years abided by all these rules, who live by the truth.
And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!
But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.
And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin asks with scorn:
Why offer herds their liberation?
Their heritage each generation
The yoke with jingles, and the whip.
February 12, 1974
And that, dear friends, is the power of the powerless [RMB].
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s (1918-2008) essay was published the day he was arrested (for the final time) and deported to the United States: February 1974.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his creation. – C. S. Lewis, 1943
Was C. S. Lewis right to believe that subjective truth is anathema to liberty?
Let’s just take the recent history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI):
Sent a swat team to the front door of a pro-life family and arrested the father of 8 for a charge so ludicrous it was thrown out of court.
Issued a memorandum identifying parents who opposed boys using girls’ bathrooms as “domestic terrorists”
Illegally queried data on 278,000 Americans
Stonewalled Congress on unclassified documents which allege corruption at the highest levels, including briberies from foreign countries to influence our foreign policies (the stonewalling had to yield once a leading member of Congress actually read from the document, thereby showing it actually existed)
Knowingly lied in a sworn affidavit to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) in order to spy on an American Citizen
Ad infinitum
The prevarications and misdirections employed to justify the above are breathtaking.
We can safely say this is not the FBI my generation remembers as synonymous with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.
But, lest the reader think that I trust Congress, let me say that it was Congress who authorized The Patriot Act (our founding patriots must be spinning in their graves) which further opened the barn door to these unprecedented intrusions into Americans’ lives and it is Congress who kept reauthorizing that infamous act until it finally was allowed to exhale it’s last pollutant in 2020.
What about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court? This was authorized by Congress to enable an orderly process for surveilling foreign agents operating within the United States. Is anyone surprised that it now routinely approves surveillance of American citizens? For example, during the Obama administration, the court secretly authorized a warrant which ordered Verizon to provide a daily feed to the National Security Administration (NSA) of comprehensive call detail records, including location data, about all calls in its system, including local telephone calls.
That alone should have ended the funding of this freakish tergiversation of our historic liberties. But Congress goes on funding these courts, year after year.
Examples abound.
For instance, on June 16, 2023, 20 armed IRS agents raided Highwood Creek Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana. The agents confiscated all the 4473 forms. These forms contain ZERO financial information. But they do contain sensitive personal information of all citizens who purchased firearms legally from the store.
Why would an agency whose raison d’être is to collect taxes seek to track individuals who exercise their Second Amendment rights? And the Congress recently funded billions more for that same agency, including the hiring of 87,000 more agents, in addition to funding military grade weapons for the “tax collection” agency.
Many posts could be drafted with similar examples of questionable (putting it charitably) activities by the State — federal, state, and local — including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Administration, ad infinitum.
None of this should surprise anyone with a passing knowledge of totalitarian regimes and their antecedents.
In discussions with friends and family I often hear the riposte, that “this is America” or “Americans wouldn’t do that” or similar sentiments.
(Sentiments, as in subjective truth.)
What makes Americans immune to the enticements of power over others? Are we not all sinners with an inherent bent to usurp authority and to seek power that does not belong to us?
Did not our colonial fathers and mothers leave England precisely to escape the clutches of an increasingly totalitarian regime, which refused to acknowledge it was totalitarian? Did not our Constitutional founders struggle mightily to limit and restrain the reach and power of the central government?
Why would they do that if they believed that “Americans are different”?
They did it because Americans are sinners just like anyone else on any spot of the planet. And as sinners we need to be restrained from evil. Especially men and women who hold reins of power. They, more than most, need to be blocked from usurpations and despotisms.
Well, subjective truth allows (compels!) the bureaucrats who run the myriad federal and state agencies to consider American citizens as “foreigners” or even as “enemies”. Without batting an eye, they will classify anyone who does not toe the line — who does not conform — an enemy.
Based on recent incidents, we can now identify some of those who do not conform:
Parents who believe their children are either boys or girls, not something in between. In other words, most parents.
Folks who believe the state — whether federal or local — exists to serve, not lord it over, the citizenry.
People who love their country but are skeptical of powerful central governments; in other words, people like Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, etc.
Citizens who don’t look kindly on bureaucrats and judges usurping powers that belong to the legislature.
Americans who peacefully exercise their Constitutional rights, including the Bill of Rights.
Families whose first allegiance is to the Triune God, not Caesar.
In sum, anyone who loves ordered liberty.
Subjective truth is putty in the hands of men and women determined to impose their will on the rest of us. It does not matter what the Constitution, the law, the statute, or the regulation actually says; subjective truth runs roughshod over all written documents because it applies its own meaning to such, thereby deconstructing what has been understood for millennia.
Jack Gleason has given us a partial list of what subjective truth has given us:
Judges who refuse to judge
Anti-American American presidents
Prosecutors who don’t prosecute crime
Peaceful protests labeled as domestic terrorism and domestic terrorists labelled as peaceful protestors
Representatives who don’t represent
News reporters who do not report the news
Scientists who do not use the scientific method
Teachers who push pornography on children
Psychologists who push dysphoria onto children while keeping parents in the dark
Men playing against women in women’s sports and assaulting women in locker rooms
Doctors who don’t heal
Free speech that isn’t free
Ad nauseum
George Orwell in his 1984 had a good grasp of this phenomenon. His dystopian novel tells of newspeak and of memory holes and of erasing history and more, all the while a giant boot grinds the face of humanity.
Subjective truth is a weapon used throughout human history to enable the few to compel the many. It has always been and will always be so. Subjective truth is the artillery for compulsion.
To combat, restrain, and reverse our descent into hell, we must affirm objective truth and teach it to our children and grandchildren.
However this is not an overnight thing.
Nevertheless, we can at least begin that process by examining pivotal events which have been distorted beyond historical recognition and how looking at them rightly can yield a change in paradigms and enable a return to right reason. At least for our children and grandchildren.
In short, although this is a time for concern, it is nevertheless no time for despair.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963). His observations were not directly political yet have great bearing on our political situation today
Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (1918-2014), actor who portrayed a straight arrow FBI inspector in the popular television series, The F.B.I.
Patrick Henry (1736-1799), drawn by Lawrence Sully a few years before Henry’s death; watercolor by James Barton Longacre, circa 1835. Henry, like many founders, had a firm grasp of man’s sinfulness. He distrusted the Constitution because he believed it would be abused to concentrate more and more power in the federal government and usurp the liberties of Americans. Others who supported ratification believed that American families would continue to teach their children properly and religiously. This would be sufficient to keep the federal government in check.
As a matter of historical fact the legal systems of all the nations that are heirs to the Western legal tradition have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs. Today those beliefs or postulates — such as the structural integrity of law, its ongoingness, its religious roots, its transcendent qualities — are rapidly disappearing ….
The law is becoming more fragmented, more subjective, geared more to expediency and less to morality, concerned more with immediate consequences and less with consistency or continuity.
Thus the historical soil of the Western legal tradition is being washed away in the twentieth century, and the tradition itself is threatened with collapse. — Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, Harvard University Press (1983)
To destroya people, you must first sever their roots. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Disrespecting, disregarding, dishonoring, distorting, or otherwise dismissing objective Truth in history, is a nasty business whose sequel is violence, tyranny, and death (cf, The Black Book of Communism, The Theme is Freedom, Earthly Powers, Robespierre, The Secret Six for historical proof; see 1984, Brave New World, The Hidden Strength, The Possessed, for philosophical reasoning behind the certainty of such a sequel).
In recent posts, we’ve documented very real consequences of godless philosophies and also the phenomenon of seeing the same atheistic ideologies foisted on and by our academics, our politics, our commerce, our medicine, and more as if we by some magic can escape the repercussions such beliefs have engendered throughout history on any people who have indulged in such foolishness.
This blog is entitled “The Pull of The Land” in agreement with Whittaker Chambers who said, “No land has a pull on a man as the land of his childhood.” That is certainly true for this writer. I yearn for a day, should the Lord grant it, in which I can once again see Venezuela a freer country and a happier people such as I remember in my childhood and youth. I also long to see this country — its 50 states and outlying territories — a freer and happier country such as I knew in yesteryear, a country which my own children and grandchildren can enjoy as I did.
But Chambers’ aphorism runs even beyond the land of one’s birth. I have been very fortunate in that I have been able to visit, and in some cases live in, lands on all sides of the globe. My heart holds a keen appreciation for such lands. However, eerily, should you offer me a free trip to only one of them, I’d be very hard pressed to choose between Spain and England. Why? Because they both are strongly linked to the place of my birth: an American mining camp in Venezuela. My forebears on my father’s side came to Massachussets from England, and from my mother’s side, to Venezuela from Spain.
The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.
The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.
It is that special love and appreciation which impels us to understand what has happened; to understand in order to be able to address the question, especially for the sake of our children and grandchildren.
We must return to Truth. Not my subjective truth or your subjective truth. Rather, the Objective Truth.
And this is very difficult because we are all “men of our times” and our times are characterized by constant, endless propaganda which insists on living subjectively and questioning anyone or anything which claims to know the Truth.
Regardless, we must press on as best we can, knowing that liberty cannot survive on subjectivity. It requires objective truth, which is the most powerful means we have at our disposal in order to push back on those who would transmogrify us into something we never agreed to or otherwise intended to be.
The late Professor Berman said that our legal systems “have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs.”
As we see elites and mobs tear down statues of men we have historically admired, we must ask whether the presuppositions we formerly believed and acted upon were actually true. By their actions for two or three generations now the destroyers and their abetters in media, academia, entertainment, and more, have been forcefully asserting that all our presuppositions have been lies at best, evil at worst.
What is their basis for their insisting upon their infallibility? Are they speaking and writing truthfully?
A major hint that they speak lies is very easy to see: they work overtime to silence anyone who dares to challenge them on the basis of historical fact or Truth.
That should encourage us. It appears we still have a leg up on them.
But we will lose that advantage unless we get a firm grasp on Truth.
In future posts, we hope to look at a few pivotal epochs or events in our history and seek to understand the deleterious effects the deliberate distortion of such episodes has had on the course of our history down to the present.
