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2003-02-06 00:32 | User Profile

The Western Contribution to World History James C. Russell

A few selections from the essay:

In his book entitled The Birth of Europe, medieval historian Robert Lopez posed the question: “What enabled Europe to emerge finally on top?” His answer was “the absence of great invasions for a thousand years.”
. . .

After the decline of Greece, Rome followed a similar pattern of initial homogeneous cultural achievement followed by empire-building and consequent alien immigration. In order to increase tax revenues, aliens were granted citizenship with its attendant tax obligations. The heterogenization of the Roman Empire contributed to social, psychological and religious destabilization resulting in the increased appeal of religious cults which offered an artificial, non-biological sense of community in this world and the hope of salvation in the next. In a study entitled, Enemies of the Roman Order, historian Ramsay MacMullen has remarked that by the fourth century A.D.:

The civilization called Roman, . . . yields to another, compounded of heterogeneous elements formerly suppressed. . . .[B]eliefs about the supernatural, once illegal or contemptuously relegated to ploughboys and servant girls, after the first century began to infect even the educated, and were ultimately embodied as a principal element in late antique philosophy. . . . In the end [the fourth century A.D.] . . . . [t]here was little “Roman” left in the Roman empire. Rather, the “un-Roman” elements had come to the fore, and now controlled the world in which they lived. . . .

Early Christianity had found fertile ground for its message of individual salvation among the alienated, heterogeneous, urban inhabitants of the declining Roman Empire. Later, in the Early Middle Ages when Christian missionaries sought to convert the Germanic and Celtic peoples, it became apparent that for Christianity to be accepted by a more cohesive, homogeneous, pastoral-warrior society, it needed to appeal to the different concerns of that society. Hence, Early Medieval Christianity appealed to matters of group survival such as victory in battle, healthy families, and abundant crops and livestock. Germanic Christianity addressed these pre-Christian folk-religious concerns through local patron saints and clergy and their holy relics. In an apparent attempt to convert the Saxons who had been persecuted by Charlemagne, an adaptation of the New Testament known as the Heliand was composed in Old Saxon. It portrayed Christ and his apostles as a Germanic warrior-band. Eventually a Middle Eastern salvation religion was transformed into a European folk religion and Christianity became more closely identified with Europe, especially with the emergence of the notion of “Christendom.”

Early Medieval Christianity provided a spiritual impetus and a source of solidarity that are likely to have contributed toward European victories over invading forces. The bond between religious and temporal spheres increased under Charles Martel’s Carolingian descendants. They tended to view Christianity as the religion of a Roman Empire which they admired and sought to reconstruct. The application of religious fervor toward Western military exploits is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in a twelfth-century treatise of St. Bernard of Clairveaux entitled, In Praise of the New Knighthood. Written as an exhortation to the Knights Templar and other Crusaders, it distinguishes between fighting for “empty glory” or “earthly possessions” and fighting to assert Euro-Christian dominance in the Holy Land where Euro-Christian pilgrims and shrines had been attacked. . . .

While Judaism has functioned to sustain the Jewish People, contemporary Western Christianity has, on the contrary, deliberately dissociated itself from its European ethnocultural heritage, and has focused on “universal social justice.” There is now afoot a conscious effort to de-Europeanize and to re-Judaize Christianity, through scriptural revision, internal treachery and external pressure. One possible strategy to counter these efforts is to encourage a re-Europeanization of Christianity into a European folk religion. Such a strategy might be bolstered by the argument that Euro-Christians should only accept the folk-affirming form of Christianity accepted by our ancestors and not accept the specious “bait and switch” arguments of liberal Christians who try to indoctrinate us with universalist propaganda. . . .

While liberals and universalists constantly yammer about “bringing us all together”, and how “diversity is our strength,” it may be suggested that the biological function of human language and culture is just the opposite, that is, to keep discrete groups apart. In my own view, culture in humans is analogous to instinct in other species. Species with more complex brains tend to rely less on instinct and more on learned behavior, which in humans, includes culture. For culture in human societies to accomplish that which instinct accomplishes in non-human societies, it must establish a sense of group identity so that the individual knows whom to act altruistically toward and whom to mate with. In short, among humans, culture functions sociobiologically as an isolating mechanism. . . .

The organized anti-Western media of today seem to scour the gutters of the ghetto for the most vile filth imaginable and then serve it up to our children as “their culture.” Perhaps Konrad Lorenz’s animal behavior research might provide us with some clues as to how MTV has succeeded in contriving the acceptance, if not preference of white adolescents for “rap music” and its attendant so-called “hip-hop culture” of fashion and language. Lorenz gained some popularity for his theories of imprinting when he acted as a substitute for a mother goose soon after her eggs had hatched. Since goslings imprint upon the first moving object they see after they are born as if it were their mother, the little goslings began following Lorenz. . . .

The current of misdirected altruism that permeates contemporary Western society is dangerous when it is divorced from biological reality. It would be better to ignorantly adhere to the laws of human evolution, as do most primitive peoples, than to understand these laws and yet deliberately disobey them. It would be most tragic if the people who discovered the theory of evolution were to perish due to a failure of will to apply it to their own destiny.

It is our duty to maintain and advance the Western continuum that originated in ancient Greece and earlier. To falter at this critical juncture is to allow our people to approach extinction. The greatest achievement of the West will be our extrication from our current dilemma. If we succeed in our efforts, the chroniclers of this age will celebrate our valiant struggle in the epic literature of the future – if we fail, there will be no such literature and our beleaguered descendants will mock us in our graves.

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