Monday, May 8, 2017
BUTTERFIELD AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
"So under desperate stresses, the creed of the secular liberals tends to become subject to a gradual process of inversion. The very weaknesses in that liberalism have assisted the growth of the monstrosities of 20th-century political thought."
He is talking about secular liberalism as originally a new quasi religion, spawned by the Enlightenment on the continent and enforced by the French Revolution and its aftermath.
We here shared this secular liberalism tradition from the beginning, say 1776.
But we also here have a sort of evangelical and conservative Christianity, a Christianity no longer deeply held in Europe, as an overlay to this now-Atlanticist secular liberalism.
So, we here have a sort of double inversion, so to speak, in the simultaneous turn from secular liberalism on the one hand among many, and from liberal and conservative Christianity among others, toward either fascism or communism.
I think secular liberal Americans are kidding themselves if they think that they are not fully as susceptible to inversion, in a clash of civilizations, as the American liberal and conservative Christians they abhor.
The secular liberals, of course, have more to lose, and they well know it, in the clash of civilizations they never dreamed of, now looming, since the liberal international economic order has been their baby, since 1776.
This is why the NYT, for example, Brooks, Friedman, Krugman, fight tooth and nail against even acknowledging the concept or the existence of a clash of that kind.
I think secular liberal Americans are kidding themselves if they think that they are not fully as susceptible to inversion, in a clash of civilizations, as the American liberal and conservative Christians they abhor.
The secular liberals, of course, have more to lose, and they well know it, in the clash of civilizations they never dreamed of, now looming, since the liberal international economic order has been their baby, since 1776.
This is why the NYT, for example, Brooks, Friedman, Krugman, fight tooth and nail against even acknowledging the concept or the existence of a clash of that kind.
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