We are all familiar with the person who "has it all" yet manages to ruin their life. Not all such individuals have unconscious guilt which causes them to seek ways to punish themselves, but unconscious guilt as a motivator for masochistic, ie self damaging, behavior is an extremely common occurrence.
The predominantly white European world from which our Civilization emerged was, like any civilization past, present, and future, comprised of many different elements. Much that was evil was committed in the name of Western Civilization yet there are more people alive today, living in relative comfort and security, with more personal freedom, than any Civilization has ever managed before. Our technological civilization would never have come into being if not for the acts, often excessive, of those who came before. Yet our very success in the midst of overwhelming evil, penury, and sorrow, engenders feelings of guilt in those who do not feel that they have earned or deserve their privileges. There are a great many among us who, once having jettisoned God, are left struggling to understand why luck has granted them such ease while so many others struggle and die in abject despair and poverty. The liberal impulse, to help others, is a healthy response to such guilt but it can become so intensified as to tip over from a well meaning desire to help others into a less conscious desire to harm oneself (or those like oneself) in order to diminish the disparities that are so intolerable.
When the unconscious guilt is leveraged by a Narcissistic investment in the desire to "heal the world" and erase disparities, a toxic societal Moral Masochism can result.
Part of the rot at the center of many of our elite institutions is the result of just such over-valued Utopianism, an outgrowth of unconscious guilt, and the corresponding compensatory Moral Masochism. The academic who declares that "Amerikkka" is uniquely evil or the Cleric who preaches that "white folks' greed runs a world in need" are emerging from a weltanschauung that embodies an unconscious need for punishment for our successes. (The fact that these people are richly rewarded for their attacks on our legitimacy is a measure of the degree of Moral Masochism that our culture has accepted.)
The desire for equality (ie, to erase disparities) can be a rational and reasonable response to inequality, but in recent years it has become a dangerous source of instability in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies. Thomas Sowell writes in Race and Politics:
Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.
You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stay away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed.
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Obama has promoted to the Supreme Court a circuit judge who dismissed a discrimination lawsuit by white firefighters, whose case the Supreme Court later accepted and ruled in their favor.
He preceded this appointment by talking about needing people on the court with "empathy." That is a pretty word but the ugly reality is that it is just another euphemism for bias. For generations, white Southern judges had all kinds of empathy for other white Southerners, which is to say, bias against blacks.
The question is whether you want equal treatment or you want payback. [Emphasis mine- SW] Cycles of revenge and counter-revenge have been at the heart of racial and ethnic strife throughout history, in countries around the world. It is a history written in blood. It is history we don't need to repeat in the United States of America.
Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they have lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country-- now called Sri Lanka-- that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.
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We know-- or should know-- what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A "race card" is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
When society regresses under duress, once unified societies undergo pathological splitting. Where once was e pluribus unum, there ensues a descent into civil strife. Yesterday Richard Landes linked to a very troubling article describing the descent of South Africa into racial conflict; he drew some conclusions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the experience of South Africa. In fact, his conclusions have much broader implications:
South Africa’s Second Coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome
The reason I have written so little art this blog (and not participated in the excelllent discussions) recently is because I’m preparing the manuscript of my book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience for Oxford U. Press. One of my chapter deals with the Xhosa Cattle-Slaying of 1856-7. In trying to keep up with the recent literature on the subject, I ran across an article by Achille Mbebe, a Cameroonian post-colonialist writer who has penned a blistering indictment of the post-Apartheid government of South Africa which i thought would interest the readers of this blog. Here it is, below, with comments.
Among other things, it underlines two major points: 1) the difficulty of establishing a working democracy; and 2) the almost certainty that any Palestinian state - a fortiori a “one state solution” to the Arab-Israeli problem would produce a failed “democracy.”
South Africa’s second coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome
Achille Mbembe, 14 June 2006
A dozen years after apartheid ended, a dangerous mix of populism, nativism and millenarian thinking is inviting South Africans to commit political suicide, writes Achille Mbembe.
The deputy chair of the South African Institute of International Relations, Moeletsi Mbeki speaking recently at Witwatersrand University, made an arresting comparison between the current political situation in South Africa and the one prevailing in the period leading to the Xhosa cattle-killing in 1856-57.
As is his wont, Richard's post is long, but it is very valuable; read the whole thing.
Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize because when South Africa gave up apartheid he led the way to a peaceful transition and eschewed revenge in favor of enabling the emergence of a functional multi-ethnic democracy. This is now failing in South Africa. Governance in South Africa has been poor and the economy is failing its people. It is now a nation descending into magical thinking, splitting, and paranoid delusion.
In his comments, Richard Landes makes an important point that is never considered or even recognized by so many who so easily criticize the West:
One of the sad and difficult things for liberals to learn is that before the advent of modern civil polities (with some rare exceptions like the Jews), elites have never treated their own people well. The idea that the black elite would treat blacks better than whites did was a liberal fantasy. (And in this case, the whites hardly treated the blacks well.) In the case of Israel, the observation that just does not compute with liberals and progressives who blame Israel, is that they treat Arabs better than Arab regimes treat Arabs. And all those Palestinians who want to be in Israel rather than in Palestine makes it clear that they understand.
By surrendering to our unconscious guilt and our need for self punishment, we no longer support fundamental elements of Western Civilization, especially the dignity and autonomy of the individual, that have led to more people being treated better than at any time in human history. Our Moral Masochism damages our ability to speak up for those who are less fortunate. It is no coincidence that a President who emerged from the elite Academic left and received spiritual sustenance from Reverend Wright would be disinclined to support the Iranian people in their efforts to escape the tyranny of their masters or is blind to the tyranny of the Palestinian "freedom fighters" with whom he is so sympathetic.
Notice that Black Power groups, La Raza, Islamist groups, and a myriad of separatist and supremacist ethnic groups who in reality represent majorities in various parts of the world are now accepted as simply part of the fabric of America. Yet the mention of White Power or White Pride instantly (and correctly) conjures up images of neo-Nazis and Christian supremacists. What our guilt blinds us to is that the separatists and supremacists of non-"White" ethnic groups are as evil and dangerous as any White Supremacist group could hope to be. The difference is that Western Civilization, whether in its American, European, Australian, Canadian, or Israeli iterations, (and overwhelmingly White), have repudiated, as a society, notions of ethnic or religious supremacy. This is a healthy response to past excess. The corresponding refusal to condemn non-White Supremacists, who often have mirror image goals to the White Supremacists we all condemn, is a measure of our Moral Masochism.* It is suicidally self indulgent and it represents an ongoing threat to the coherence of our society.
[* This is one part of an answer to Noah Pollack's question, Why Does the New York Times Only Cover Some Kinds of Anti-Semitism?]
This morning, Bookworm notes two classic examples of the expression by predominantly white Western elites of their unconscious racism, which is fueled by and fuels their guilty Moral Masochism:
Getting a closer look at why liberals continue to feel that blacks should be held to a different standard
A few days ago, in the wake of a concerted (and almost certainly fraudulent) attack against the Tea Party by claiming its members are racist, I wrote a post in which I said that, if I’m going to be called a racist, I get to define the term to accord with my understanding of race.
I was wordy (so, sue me; so was Charles Dickens), but it boiled down to my firm belief that, while blacks needed a helping hand in the immediate aftermath of first wave of Civil Rights (the mid-1960s), the system has become perverted, encouraging blacks to become dependent on rich white liberals. I contrasted the black experience with the Asian immigrant experience (or you could contrast it with the Irish immigration experience, or the Jewish, or the Italian…), all of which show groups that had the same handicaps as post-Jim Crow blacks — illiterate, poverty stricken, and ghettoized — but that nevertheless managed to mainstream within a generation.
The problem, I said, does not lie with blacks; it lies, instead, with liberal policies that persist in treating blacks as if they are helpless, intellectually incapable, non-rational beings. If I’m racist, it’s because I look at blacks and think that, without the smothering influence of white liberal guilt, they are, as a group, every bit as competent, capable and rational as any other group.
And:
Even self-styled victims have lines their fellow-travelers aren’t supposed to cross
We all know that Palestinians are victims, right? That’s why they get a free pass for eating up billions of dollars in foreign aid without establishing viable communities, for launching tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israeli civilians, and for periodically boarding Israeli buses or entering Israeli restaurants to get an up-close-and-personal approach to massacring Jews. Still, even self-styled victims have their limits. In Israel, Palestinian women in Israeli prisons drew the line at being portrayed in Turkish television shows as the victims of sexual assault. Their gripe is that it makes them look so . . . so . . . victimish:
For the White left, racism is the worst possible thought-crime. They remain unaware of their own unconscious racism and project it into their enemies. (All Republicans, Conservatives, even liberals who slip from the assigned ideological line, are incipient racists until proven otherwise by adopting the Left's ideology.) Their intolerant Morality, an expression of Moral Masochism, finds fault with all that emanates from Western Civilization and excuses all evil done by non-Westerners, ie, non-Whites, which expresses their racism in a hidden manner. It is ugly and very destructive of Civilization. When groups are excused from adhering to the basic lowest common denominator of civilized behavior, merely by virtue of their ethnicity, while those who struggle to uphold civilization's norms are constantly under assault, the greatest danger is that, in the immortal words of the poet:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
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