Not that I utterly approve of the underlying message, but the memoir by Isak Dinesen Out of Africa is relevant here.
The Baroness von Blixen-Finecke (Karen) says of her coffee farm, and I paraphrase, “Everywhere I turn it keeps trying to go wild on me.” Then a character in the memoir named Dennis Finch Hadden -a “free thinker"- answers, saying, “It will go wild, you know. We’re all just passing through here.”
[BTW, I love what Chesterton has to say about “free thinkers."]
The connection to the topic is just this: the African and his descendant is a very different creature than the white man. Just like his continent, he is always one step away from “going wild,” that is, returning to the state in which we found him. And in that state of nature, he is finally and irrevocably incompatible with European civilization in its purest and best form. To the extent the black man is found, de facto, to be in some degree compatible with the modern civilization of the West is the same degree to which that civilization must be found degenerated from the paradigm of its ancestral forebears. While it is parochial to judge the African’s civilization with the judgment that we do, we can have no other judgment. There is no universal judgment apart from God’s. Still, we judge it with OUR values, derived from OUR past and say, “it is a brutal and sorry state.” It is the height of imperialistic folly to pretend that we are able to elevate the African, that is, make him white. And that is Finch Hadden’s position in the memoir. However, one serious drawback of the work is that the character Finch Hadden nurtures admiration for the African; he has, as it were, “gone native,” as some missionaries are known to have done. And what is the missionary’s work? Is it to bring Christ to the African, or to bring American materialism to the African? Christ and the means of self-sustenance is all that we should bring; to offer more than the tools of self-reliance to the African is to say to Paul, “Men that do not work shall eat” and to make of Christ something human, a social worker.
Now our critics may say that this amounts to genetic determinism. To this I answer, some things are fixed in men and some things subject to change. Many, if not all the elements that combine to create the potential for a civilization we would recognize as such are fixed in the African contrariwise. As Spengler attested, there are many “civilizations”, not one Civilization, and while they can and often do have resemblances to one another, they are essentially and irrevocably foreign one to another.
The black man is the descendant of Africans, and he is suited to his own civilization, if in generosity it may be called that, and not to the civilization of the European. All the more why the draconian, procrustean measures taken to first acclimate black men to white culture, and then, when this procedure failed, to induce in whites a guilt designed to fund in them a tolerance (and even a false form of “love") for alien black civilization within and segregated from his own are totalitarian in scale and scope, as well as being ultimately impossible to achieve.
Kinism of a sort is possible among blacks, one supposes, but it will not look like white kinism. Kinism is a confluence of ideas, some of which are utterly alien to the black soul. And as long as the sun rises, internecine, tribal hatred will be a powerful undercurrent in black civilization. It is only their status in the U.S. and their history here that provides impetus to unity. They have the cheap and false unity of a common enemy. In Africa there is no unity of race or kind; there is no “Africa” in the same way in which there is a “Europe.” And if the black man returns to his natural state of being, he will be at ethnic war with those of his own race until Christ has fully penetrated his civilization. The black church is often brought in at this point of the discussion to make the claim that the African population of the U.S. is “Christianized.” Well, that “Christianization” (to make use of a neologism) appears to have been possible under the conditions of, and even furthered, the natural self-segregation of the races. It is a commonplace observation, a truism, that Sunday is the most segregated day in the U.S. Now, if a white man were to visit a black church, he would be shocked at what passes for Christianity there.
The theology of Black Liberation has become part of our vocabulary due to recent events on the political stage. But those of us who have undertaken serious study of the black church know that the rankling, offending sentiments of Jeremiah Wright are no mere eccentricity. No personal foible of the “crazy uncle,” as Barack Obama disingenuously described it. He is nothing if not a skilled dissembler, like all professional servants of the “public good,” whatver that may be. The black church is dominated by Liberation theology, and black congregations are places for the airing of grievances against the white man, the insistence that the Gospel of Jesus is nothing more than the secular salvation of sanctimony about the plight of the poor. There is a term for it, and that term is Social Gospel. Well, friends, the Social Gospel is an ersatz Christianity that takes the mysterium of Salvation and debases it into mere pity and sentimentality. Black churches are as likely as not seething dens of political rancor, of hatred, of self-pity, and of “racism.” These facts are undeniable. And being undeniable they must be cloaked under such euphemisms of as “the black experience”. One must ask when this black experience ends.
That said, Western civilization has an abysmal record on that score in the Modern era. The “total war” of Africa and South America is a prominent feature of modern Western war. One need only look at the bombing of Dresden in Germany or Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to see the brutality of which modern men of the West are capable, under the tattered standard of ideology. Ideology itself is a leftist contrivance. The West must look to its more ancient past and learn from it, if it expects to avoid the cataclysms and mind rot of its recent past and present -that is, if it expects to save its civilization from becoming a bane to the entire world in the name of so-called “free trade” and “democracy”. The violent export of democracy, or the prevarication of such in the pursuit of more pragmatic ends, is one of our chief sins. And if we expect to survive another century without the attendant horrors of millions more bodies under piles of foreign rubble created by billion dollar, debt financed corpse makers, we’d better alter our ends.
