When Progressives Get Religion

Progressive passion play

(Part one of two)

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter penned an essay last year which he defended on CNN:

In 2015, among educated Americans especially, Antiracism—it seriously merits capitalization at this point—is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion. It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.

Far-fetched?

For those who insist that religion must include a divine being, not so fast. Communism scholar Peter Sperlich:

Supernaturalism and specific deities are common, but not essential elements of religious systems.  ... Several indisputably “traditional religions” have managed to function perfectly well without specific deities; for example, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Jainism.

... If the chief characteristic of a religion is the belief in the reality of an unseen, it matters not whether this unobservable entity is a specific deity, the “spirit of history,” or the “laws of nature.” (1)

 
But psychology tells us that the conservative is far more apt to traditional religious belief than the progressive. So is McWhorter just blowing smoke?  

As it happens, he is not the first to test the waters of leftist ideology-cum-religion. The 20th century's greatest progressive idea, Communism, has been intriguing scholars for the last 100 years for its likeness to spiritual belief. The millions of pages written on the subject have taught us this if nothing else: The leftist, in his own way, seems just as prone to religious thinking as the rightist.

So to test McWhorter's assertion, let us take a deeper look at how the progressive has succumbed to the religious aspects of both Communism and Multiculturalism. Are there any real parallels? And what can this tell us about the pitfalls to which the leftist mind is vulnerable?

I. LIVING OUR FAITH

If it is indeed a faith, how does the committed Anti-racist / Multiculturalist live it?

1) Zeal and confession

'Under the leadership of the great Stalin - forward to Communism!'

We tend today to think they were just mouthing the words, but many early Communists were in fact fervent believers:

Catherine Merridale notes that “It would be unwise to assume much love for Communism among the rural population as a whole, but where the new ideas struck root, they could be embraced with a fanaticism that calls to mind the Inquisition or the new jihad. This kind of ideology was really faith...”

To Dariusz Tolczyk, a literary scholar, it was more “difficult for a [true believer] to renounce his belief in the Revolution in the face of imminent destruction” than to accept his own destruction. If life is only meaningful within the context of […] Communism, then living without it is worse than dying for it.  (3)

Similarly, the zeal of today's multiculturalists cannot be doubted. Professions of faith and confessions of sin are pouring forth right and left.  English teacher Kim Radersma at the (taxpayer-funded) White Privilege Conference in Madison, WI:

'I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor. I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way.

'We've been raised to be good. "I'm a good white person," and yet to realize I carry within me these dark, horrible thoughts and perceptions is hard to admit. And yet like the alcoholic, what's the first step? Admitting you have a problem.'

North Carolina lawmaker Craig Meyer testifies:

'My own capacity for leadership perpetuates the whiteness within me, beckoning a return trip to look in the mirror. Perhaps I can’t fully suppress all the whiteness within me, and maybe that’s for the better. The process is the task, the journey has no end, and I will always be white.'

Testimonials are gushing forth unprompted on the internet. Author Mary Robinette Kowal:

'When we think of racism, there’s a tendency to think of just the overt, violent sort.  “Oh, no! I’m not racist.” But racism is often quieter and more insidious. So, here are some ways in which I have discovered that I am racist. It shames me. [...] 

   -I had food delivered and the Latino delivery guy spoke perfect English. I was stunned. 

   -Being unsurprised at the fact that my friend plays violin beautifully, because she’s Chinese.    They’re good at things like that. Right? 

[...] Oh, there’s more, but that’s all I can face at the moment.'

Or Duke student Andy Chu:

'I am one of the organizers of last week’s Race is not a Party protest. I am straight. I am male. I am white (mostly). I am comfortably middle-class. [...] It’s obvious. I am a racist. I am a sexist.  I wish I wasn’t. But I am. I understand racism—not completely, of course, but I have a good idea of what it means, what it looks like. I know it’s wrong. But I’m still a racist.'

Like the old passion plays, confession even comes in theatrical form, as seen recently in Barbados where a group of Whites admitted their guilt to acts committed hundreds of years before they were born:

We caused your ancestors' pain--don't ask us how, but we did it.

2) Sacrifice

Always and everywhere, sacrifice has been a part of religious experience. Christianity forewent both human and animal sacrifice in favor of the eucharist and self-sacrifice (i.e. fasting for Lent). And in Communism? Nanci Adler:

If the Gulag experience is perceived as brutalized forced labor, it is repression. If it is perceived as a “labor of love,” according to Frankl’s definition of meaning, it “ceases to be suffering” and veers in the direction of devotion.  (3)

Adler also quotes Olga Shatunovskaia, an early Bolshevik who, despite 17 years in the Gulag, went on to work for the Party:

'It now seems like wild nonsense to me, but at the time we thought that this sacrifice was absolutely necessary for the good of the world proletariat. Revolutionary legality was higher than moral legality.' (3)

For the multiculturalist true believer, almost no sacrifice is too great, be it our military, our women, our environment, our health, our school districts, our safety, our very lives: 

Amy Biehl arrived in South Africa in 1993 as an exchange student on a Fulbright Fellowship  …. She wanted to fight apartheid, which she passionately opposed.  … On August 25, 1993, Biehl was driving three Black companions through Cape Town’s Guguletu Township.

A mob of toyi-toying supporters of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), fresh from a raucous political meeting, attacked her car …. As she tried to flee, stumbling, across the road, she was surrounded by a throng of Blacks who repeatedly kicked, stoned, and stabbed her.

After being killed by those she had come to help, her death was fêted as a martyrdom.

Amy’s father, demonstrating how thoroughly he shared his daughter’s anti-racialist convictions, shook hands with her murderers and encouraged their release.  … Nelson Mandela said of Biehl, “She made our aspirations her own and lost her life in the turmoil of our transition as the new South Africa struggled to be born in the dying moments of apartheid.”

Simply put, the blessed state of multi-ethnic cohabitation must be attained at all costs. Old Bolsheviks thought the sacrifice of so many lives was 'absolutely necessary,' and our believers today think the same. 

Remember Chief of Staff Casey's response to Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan mowing down thirteen co-workers while crying 'Allahu Akbar':

'I'm concerned that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers ... Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.'

Such believers are thus not bothered by foreign men pimping their daughters or raping their women. They're indifferent to the thousands of Whites forced into violent Afro schools and neighborhoods, or the endless white suffering and death at the hands of random black criminals. According to our new priests, these sacrifices are just a bump on the road to a future paradise (or even a penance for past sins), and so must continue.

Black-on-white violence: A neccessary sacrifice

3) Acts of piety

UK writer Fionn Westron has noted that in our new anti-racist fervor, 

Having mixed raced kids is regarded as the height of piety, and you see certain middle-class mothers with a new African husband gushing about her little brown ‘jewel’… to make them appear good; holier-than-thou; righteous; and pious – the new high moral ground……the new religion, the snobbery of the multicult.

Failing that, one of the most visible acts of piety the faithful can perform is to adopt a child as racially distant from themselves as possible. Celebrities have led by example:

Top left to bottom right: Madonna; actresses Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, and Mariska Hartigay, celeb fitness guru Jillian Michaels; actresses Kristin Davis, Sandra Bullock, and Mary Louise Parker; Mitt Romney (grandchild), Steven Spielberg, Jane Fonda

To hasten our rainbow-colored future, the faithful are also showing their piety by importing as many 'refugees' as possible-- the more racially distant, the better. Thus white Christians from Ukraine are low on the piety scale, mestizo children from Guatemala higher, and black Muslims from Somalia at the very top. 

 Low, middling, and high piety guests

This explains why the most fervent multiculturalists on the planet, Swedes, are replacing themselves with the latter as fast as they can, be it in Stockholm or Saint Paul.

 The new faces of Minneapolis and Malmo

(It is also of note that in this case, Multiculturalism and Christianity have joined forces, as the most zealous sponsors of these unassimilable newcomers are the Conference of Catholic Bishops, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, and Evangelical Church World Service and World Relief Corp.)



Having seen how the true believer lives his faith, let us now examine the doctrine on which his belief is based.

II. DOGMA

On what doctrine does the true believer base his faith?

1) Doctrine

All religions have their holy writ. Christianity has its Bible; Communism had Marx:

In the words of Dudley Young, "The gospel according to Marx, with amendments and glosses by Lenin and Stalin, is a gospel of hope and courage, offering to its adherents a measure of certainty and assurance amid the political and personal defeats of day-to-day life."  (1)

Berdyaev was harsher:

Soviet philosophical literature as a whole … is most unenlightened, most fanatical and stereotyped. The dogmatism of this literature exceeds anything that has occurred in Christian theology.  (2)

 Franz Boas demonstrating ritual dance of Kwakwaka'wakw Indians

Multiculturalism, too, has its holy writ. For blank-slatists, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) by Franz Boas is one of their founding scriptures. In 1931 at age 73, culminating a life's work of researching human groups, he stated:

While individuals differ, biological differences between races are small. There is no reason to believe that one race is by nature so much more intelligent, endowed with great will power, or emotionally more stable than another, that the difference would materially influence its culture.  (Race and Progress)

 The doctrine flourished during the war years and afterwards:

It was really in the 1930s and 1940s that a significant and powerful group of scientists ... argued instead that culture, and not some natural essence, was the most significant determinant of human behavior and capabilities.

Exemplifying this shift were scholarly works such as Ruth Benedict's Race: Science and Politics (1940), Ashley Montagu's Race: Man's Most Dangerous Myth (1942), and especially Gunnar Myrdal's landmark An American Dilemma (1944), all of which gained a wide, popular audience during the war years. (4)

We mustn't forget modern multicult prophet Stephen Jay Gould, whose 1983 Mismeasure of Man, said the NY Times Book Review, 'brought the whole edifice of biological determinism crashing down.'

Harvard biologist Bernard Davis, in his review, did not miss the Communist link: 

Gould's own degree of bias is unusual in a work by a scientist. … The Mismeasure of Man ends up as a sophisticated piece of political propaganda, rather than as a balanced scientific analysis.

In effect, we see here Lysenkoism risen again: an effort to outlaw a field of science because it conflicts with a political dogma.  ...  A chilling atmosphere is quite sufficient to prevent funding agencies, investigators, and graduate students from exploring a taboo area. 

 Lysenko and Gould: Two peas in a pod?

He also saw it becoming canon before his eyes: 

The crucial lesson to be drawn from the case of Stephen Jay Gould is the danger of propagating political views under the guise of science. Moreover, this end was furthered, wittingly or not, by the many [positive] reviewers... For these reviews reflected enormous relief: A voice of scientific authority now assures us that biological diversity does not set serious limits to the goal of equality…

 
'Structural racism,' too, has its holy writ.  One of its high priests is Derrick Bell, and his doctrine is known as 'Critical Race Theory.' J.J. Pyle:

Derrick Bell

While mainstream civil rights reformers assume that racism is a product of ignorance and can be overcome by education, critical race theorists insist that racism is pervasive and immutable, and "lies at the very heart of American--and western--culture."  

To critical race theorists, white racism is a "defect in the collective unconscious," a cultural phenomenon that automatically "reproduces hierarchy" even in the absence of conscious discrimination.  In a racist society, everyone is either an "outsider" or an "insider," a "victim" or a "perpetrator."

2) Indoctrination

With doctrine comes indoctrination. We must be given a new way of thinking about our past and present. The Church in Europe had a real genius for taking pagans' tales about themselves and melding them into Christian narrative. (The date of Christmas, veneration of saints, and the cult of Mary are but a few examples.)  So, of course, did Communism. Peter Grothe, on East Germany's school system:

 Images of industrious Soviet children

It is evident, then, that not only contemporary history, but the descriptions of the distant past, also, are couched in proper Marxist interpretation.  …  An example: "The poverty of the first Franciscan monks was only a show to win the trust of the poor people." 

…  A description of Paris says, "The city streets were widened in the 19th century in order to enable the ruling classes to turn soldiers loose on the workers in the wider streets."  One geography text says only capitalists in America have bathtubs. Another geography book has a picture of "a typical American street." (It is taken in a New York slum area.)  (5)

Like the holy men of Christianity or of Communism, our new priests have found a way to take ethnic Euros' past accomplishments and wind them into a new narrative: 'White Privilege.' This creed is now being taught in school districts from Baltimore to Portland.  What is it?

The mission statement of PEG, founded in 1992 by Glenn Singleton, is fairly straightforward: “At Pacific Educational Group we believe systemic racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished capacity of all children, especially black children, to achieve at the highest levels, and contributes to the fracturing of the communities that nurture and support them.”

 School districts dispensing 'white privilege' training (click to enlarge)

This curriculum included, in one Milwaukee class, the following excerpt:

'There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from society.'

Grothe again, on Communist schoolwork:

Pulitzer Prize winner Herblock, the political cartoonist, once depicted a Moscow schoolboy returning home from class and being asked by his father, "Well, what did you unlearn today?"  The cartoon was no exaggeration. Lesson material must not only be learned in the DDR; some also must be "unlearned."

Imagine Miss Jones getting up before her sixth grade class in Paoli, Indiana, and saying, "Remember what we learned last week, class, about Abraham Lincoln being a great, wise, and humanitarian President? Well, it's not altogether true. Since last week, I learned from our government that he was actually a murderer, a deceiver, and a villain of American history.

And so don't read your textbooks on Lincoln, since they have a wrong interpretation. Next year, we will receive revised textbooks which will clarify Lincoln's role in history." Such an occurrence in America would be so unthinkable that it must be banished to the realm of fantasy.  (5)   

Grothe in 1958 could not, of course, have imagined our soviet-like present. Today's college professors and students are indeed repeating history, this time as farce.  America's founders and seminal figures--too pale, stale, and male--are to be swept away. UC Berkeley's 'Occupy the Syllabus' has proclaimed:

Sit-in at Princeton over 'racist' Woodrow Wilson 

We have major concerns about social theory courses in which white men are the only authors assigned. These courses pretend that a minuscule fraction of humanity are the only people to produce valid knowledge about the world. This is absurd. … 

Furthermore, the classroom environment felt so hostile to women, people of color, queer folks and other marginalized subjects that it was difficult for us to focus on the course material. Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lecture. … We must dismantle the tyranny of the white male syllabus.

Others have claimed to be so traumatized by studying dead white men that they can't graduate Princeton on time, or that the classics should come with trigger warnings for the sensitive. 

Our true believers now seem to be in a Stalinist race to see who can erase history the fastest.  Yale's Calhoun College, Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, Georgetown's Mulledy and McSherry Halls are all up for re-naming due to past connections with slavery. The very name of Lebanon Valley College's Lynch Hall (that of a beloved ex-president) has to go--it gives black students chills.

 Under a sheet at the University of Kentucky

Brown University has made Columbus Day 'Indigenous Peoples Day', and Cambridge University's Empire Ball was nixed (nostalgia for the Empire verboten). Even the U. of Kentucky's old mural showing slaves and Indians is now under a sheet.

For anyone familiar with Soviet historiography, of course, none of this is new:

 

The Soviet version was top-down, ours today is bottom-up, but the results are starting to look strikingly similar.

3) Utopianism

Christianity waited for a future kingdom of heaven; Communism tried to create one on earth:

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

Clearly utopian in nature are these characteristics of the (future) communist society:  ... the ability of any and all persons to run the machinery of government, the distribution of goods and services based only on need, the withering away of the state, the absence of all exploitation and alienation, the harmony/identity of individual and collective interests, .... (1)

If Communists were 'hard' utopians, today's anti-racists may be said to be 'soft' ones. Reinhold Niebuhr: 

The difference between a soft and hard utopianism is that the former dreams of achieving an ideal society of uncoerced justice through the historical development of altruistic as against egoistic purposes; while the latter [i.e. Communism] claims to embody a social system in which this miracle has already taken place. (6)

Multiculturalism's hoped-for utopia has links to Communism's—perfect equality, brotherhood of Man--with a curious, newly added feature: The end of 'White Supremacy.'
 

This ardent desire to see one's own ethnic group weaken or vanish in order to bring about peace on earth may be unprecedented in human history.  What was once limited to fringe academics...

...is now the subject of mainstream press headlines:

University adminstrators are now convinced that Whiteness = Doom:

A school-wide questionnaire at Western Washington University asked the community “How do we make sure that in future years ‘we are not as white as we are today?’” 

“Every year, from this stage and at this time, you have heard me say that, if in decades ahead, we are as white as we are today, we will have failed as university,” [President Bruce] Shepard said in the 2012 speech. “In the decades ahead, should we be as white as we are today, we will be relentlessly driven toward mediocrity; or, become a sad shadow of our current self,” he wrote.

 

The 'end of whiteness' doctrine has also swept political leaders of all stripes. Even after Tony Blair's attempt to forcibly convert the UK to the faith was revealed...  

Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, said the [mass immigration] policy was designed to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. He said there was ‘a driving political purpose: … to make the UK truly multicultural.’

…Blair continues to confess his multiculturalist faith:

'The vision of a country of different cultures and different faiths mixing together is the right one. That is not to say you don’t have problems at certain points, but those problems are to be overcome without losing the essence of what has actually allowed this country’s people to get on and do well.’

French president Nicolas Sarkozy (conservative) has said,

'The goal is to meet the challenge of multiculturalism which the 21st century presents us. It's not a choice, it's an obligation. We can't do otherwise…We have to change, so we will change.'

'The new France will be a France where the expression "native Frenchman" has disappeared.' 

Angela Merkel, though she has been know to criticize multiculturalism for electoral reasons, does not take kindly to group Pegida, which is fighting against the Islamization of Germany:

Angela Merkel’s relative epithets have been 'vile,' 'disgusting message of hatred,' 'spreading hate,' 'shameful,' 'no place in Germany' and 'not my country.'

  'First black president' Bill Clinton is a member of the faith:

To Clinton, an America without a white majority is a worthy destiny. As he put it a year ago to a small gathering of black columnists, “Along with our founding, which was an act of genius, and the freeing of slaves in the Civil War and the long civil rights movement, this will arguably be the third great revolution of America, if we can prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture.”

General Wesley Clark famously said, in the wake of the Yugoslav wars,

'There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That's a 19th-century idea and we are trying to transition it into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.'

  E.U. Immigration Commissioner Peter Sutherland concurs:

'We [British] still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.'

And at the truly ethnomasochistic end of the spectrum:

'Everywhere you saw nothing but this superb brown color that only the loveliest human beings have. ... Personally, I don't want to be Western. I don't want to be a white Catholic; I'd rather be a black atheist.'

--French Socialist MP (and white Catholic) Jean-Luc Melenchon, describing a political rally full of immigrants

'Look at all the beautiful colours the women here are wearing. Within ten years this is what it is going to look like all over Europe. Back home it’s so bleak and dreary, the colours are devoid of life. ...'  

--Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg on a state visit to Lagos, Nigeria

Swept up in their own anti-racist fervor, from schoolteachers to political leaders, ethnic NW Euros may be the first group in human history to actively wish for their own demise. Will this wish be granted? And are we sure that Utopia will follow?




Having considered (1) the believer's acts of faith and (2) his doctrine and its sources, let us now explore how he keeps heresy at bay.

III. FIGHTING HERESY

How does the Anti-racist keep his doctrine pure?

1) Science Denialism 

One striking similarity between Christianity and Communism is their frequent aversion to science. The Church had geocentrism, the Soviets Lysenkoism, and now the Multiculturalists have embraced blank-slatism.

Sperlich:

The defining attitude of science is disinterestedness, that of ideology is commitment. ... The style of ideology relies on the power of moral sentiments and seeks to motivate engagement and action.

The truth claims of Communism typically are supported by tautologies, circularities, proof by definition, unverified premises and auxiliary assumptions, dogmatic deductions, and, above all, by appeals to authority.  … Marx, at heart, was a moralist rather than a scientist, and Marxism is a normative doctrine rather than an empirical theory.  …  (1)

In the West, from Darwin on, the leftist took himself to be the defender of science against superstition.

But today's blank-slatist, in a curious reversal, seems to believe that natural selection stops at the neck. We may have differing malaria resistance, lung capacity, or sprinting ability, but the brain ...well, the brain is surrounded by a magic forcefield which protects it from natural selection. It is therefore impossible that different ethnies could have different cognitive capacities, character traits, and so forth.

Surprisingly, this kind of magical thinking can be found in high places. Despite geneticists telling us that yes, race is in fact quite real, we have everyone from the American Anthropological Association the  American Association of Physical Anthropologists  to UNESCO to  Psychology Today to Newsweek to The Guardian to Bill Nye the Science Guy assuring us that it is not.

The 'r' word has become so toxic that scientists are even asking such questions as 'Should genetics focus on ancestry, not race?' (Should brewers focus on fermented barley-based liquid, not beer?) 

The American Anthropological Association hosted a conference in 2004 which prompted one blogger to exult:

Bad news for folks who are deeply invested in the popular conception of race. The most recent national conference on the topic, attended by experts in genetics, history and anthropology, reports that ‘race’ doesn’t exist. Again, people in the know say that what most Americans think of as race is a cultural construct, not supported by biology.

What to think, then,  of the fact that bone marrow can only be donated by someone of your racial group? Or that a criminal's race can now be identified from DNA left at the crime scene? Acccording to speakers at a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, acknowledging such truths may be termed 'neo-racism.'

 A social construct?: 'Mug shots' created from DNA, 2015

In psychometry, the implications of genetics and intelligence are so harrowing to experts that they are now seriously asking, in true Stalinist style,

Comrade Lysenko would be proud.

Is all this science denialism really the fruit of true belief?  Not necessarily. USSR expert Sperlich reminds us how it can infect even well-meaning scientists:

It seems unlikely that many [Communist] intellectuals voluntarily sacrificed their professional integrity. On the other hand, there were many material and non-material rewards—most important, perhaps, that their activities were taken seriously … To be taken seriously—or at least seeming to be—is not a mean reward for intellectual endeavors.  (1) 

2) Ethnic Denialism 

Though a universalist religion ('there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus'), early Christianity didn't seem bothered with the ethnic question.  As for the first Communists, they were sure that ethnic cleavage would soon give way to an international brotherhood.

'Higher the flag of proletarian internationalism!' 

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had written: “The working men have no country.” They could not have been more wrong; and they were equally wrong when (in the same place) they wrote that “national [ethnic] differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing….” (1)

Rosa Luxemburg expressed her disappointment and grief:  "Up to this time we have cherished the belief that the interest of the peoples of all nations, that the class interests of the proletariat ... cannot possibly come into conflict with one another. That was the basis of our theory and practice, the soul of our agitation. Were we mistaken in the cardinal point of our whole philosophy?" (1)

The Marxist saw a multi-ethnic proletarian brotherhood. What does today's anti-racist see?

Though he lauds ethnic diversity from morning to night, he seems unable, to an almost pathological degree, to come to terms with ethnic difference. That such groups might have varying abilities, tastes, or character traits is as far-fetched to him as the idea that the moon is made of green cheese.

The unbearable whiteness of opera

He thus lives his life in endless puzzlement, gnawed by questions for which he has no answer: Why aren't there more black doctors?  More black lawyers? Black physicists? Black philosophers? Black mathematicians? Blacks at tech firms?  He wants to know why more non-Whites don't go to the ballet, or the theatre, or the symphony? Why don't ethnic minorities go camping, or to national parks?  Why aren't there more black winemakers? Or art history professors? Why don't more Blacks want to play hockey? Live in Oregon? Shop at Whole Foods? Drink craft beer?

The multiculturalist's dream

Blank-slatism becomes a sort of brain-eating virus, pushing us to obsess over all the ways in which different ethnic groups act so differently, and how we can put an end to this vexing state of affairs. Occam's razor (that ethnies have different abilities and preferences, some of which are biologically rooted) is too taboo a concept for us to grasp.

This denial that ethnic groups are (1) real and (2) really different from each other has led to scenarios that can seem too far-fetched to be true. 

In the interest of 'fairness' (in response to federal pressure), for example, Minnesotans have stopped disciplining their melanin-enhanced students--to tragicomic results:

 The Lutheran heartland loses its grip 

When the bell sounds the start of class, students remain in the halls. Those who tire of lectures simply stand up and leave. They hammer into rooms where they don't belong, inflicting mischief and malice on their peers. Teachers call it "classroom invasion." Instructors who break up fights get beaten in the process, thrown into bookcases while trying to bar their doors. (Read the whole thing, TWCS promises you will not be sorry)

Whistleblowers in the Rotherham sex grooming case were told to 'never, ever' mention a Pakistani connection...

 Regular old Brits

...nor the connection between the victims:

 Just a handful of the 1400 victims

The black-on-white 'flash mob' attacks which followed Obama's inauguration were almost wholly unknown to the public at large, due to a conspiracy of silence among big city journalists (Chicago, Newark, Milwaukee, Norfolk, Wilmington, to name but a few). Ethnic denialism reigns; the gods of multiculturalism oblige. Tribune reporter Stephen Chapman:

There are good reasons not to identify the attackers by race. It's the newspaper's sound general policy not to mention race in a story, whether about crime or anything else, unless it has some clear relevance to the topic. ...  My question to readers accusing us of political correctness is: Why do you care so much about the attackers' race [in these black-on-white attacks]? If you fear or dislike blacks, I suppose it would confirm your prejudice. But otherwise, it tells you nothing useful.

One is hard-pressed to imagine a similar reaction had the races been reversed.


Depsite victims and German police claiming roving Muslim rape gangs targeted indigenous women on New Year's Eve...

...the multicult priests at the EU are singing a different tune:

EU leaders insist there is 'no link' between the migrant crisis and New Year sex attacks in Cologne - and vow to bring about an end to 'false accusations.' 

One may wonder if all this ethnic denialism is the result of true faith, or rather just a cynical attempt to keep social peace? The jury is still out.

Perhaps the king of modern ethnic denialism in the social sciences, Harvard's Robert Putnam, sat on his depressing data for years trying to massage it to fit his will:
 

Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp … has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.

When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis, ... he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.

And what are these 'negative effects of diversity'?

Alone Together (D. Brandon) 

In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to "distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. … that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings."

We would be remiss not to include John Derbyshire's reaction to Putnam's shenanigans, passed along by Henry Harpending:

'[Putnam's] paper has a very curious structure. After a brief introduction (two pages), there are three main sections, headed as follows: 

• The Prospects and Benefits of Immigration and Ethnic Diversity (three pages)
• Immigration and Diversity Foster Social Isolation (nineteen pages)
• Becoming Comfortable with Diversity (seven pages) 

I’ve had some mild amusement here at my desk trying to think up imaginary research papers similarly structured. One for publication in a health journal, perhaps, with three sections titled:

• Health benefits of drinking green tea
• Green tea causes intestinal cancer
• Making the switch to green tea

 

...Social science research in our universities cries out for a modern Jonathan Swift to lampoon its absurdities.'

3) Purging Heretics

For the Church, the purge of heretics picked up steam in the late Middle Ages. It was also, as we know, widely practiced under Communism:

Soviet show trial

Out of power, communist parties support political pluralism, as this clearly benefits them. In power, they discover that political pluralism is counter-revolutionary. Religious leaders tend to have the same conversion experiences. Calvin, for example, wrote to the catholic kings of Europe, arguing that they should grant toleration to Calvinist Protestantism. Attaining power quickly turned Calvin's mind: There was no toleration of other religions in Calvinist-controlled Geneva. (1)

Party and church claim rights that they will not, of course, grant to others. Their own activities must in no way be restricted, but those of their competitors must be suppressed. “Any idea or…behavior not in line with Communist principles is ipso facto blasphemy, sacrilege, or heresy depending on the nature of the deviance.” [Schein, 1961]  (1)

We may scoff that there is no comparison between the brutal purges of Christian or Communist heretics of yesteryear and our wrongthinkers in the West.

But as it happens, the consequences of Wrongthink can indeed include loss of employment, as we've seen from the travails of Rick Sanchez at CNN, Juan Williams at PBS, Larry Summers at Harvard, John Derbyshire at the National Review, or Pat Buchanan at MSNBC (victim groups offended, respectively: Jews, Muslims, women, Afros, non-Whites).

James Watson: Father of DNA double helix and 

publicly shamed racist

No less than James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, after being caught in an honest moment ('all our social policies are based on the fact that [Africans'] intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really'), just like Galileo was forced to recant:

"Science is no stranger to controversy and I am not one to shy away from tackling issues, however, difficult they might prove to be," he said. "I have had my share of controversy, as many of you know. But I am mortified about what has happened. 

"More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have.  To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly.  That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

… but was still forced out of his post at legendary Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory.

Being fired from a private company is one thing; being prosecuted or imprisoned is quite another.  We in the U.S. are among the last Western peoples to cling to genuinely free speech.  Not so our Euro brethren:

In 2010 French pundit Eric Zemmour was hauled before the Paris Procureur Général for stating the following:

'French immigrants are more closely monitored than others because most drug dealers are blacks or Arabs... It's a fact.'

It is indeed a fact. This fact was considered 'incitation to racial hatred' and cost Mr Zemmour 2000€, but not his job. (Thanks, some say, to his own group membership.)

But Mr Zemmour is only the tip of a large iceberg:

Multicult dissidents: Those investigated and/or prosecuted for crimethink in the West include  French pundit Eric Zemmour,  Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard ,  Austrian anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff,  Danish MP Jesper Langballe,  the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci,  French author Michel Houellebecq,  Finnish MP Jussi Kristian Halla-aho,  Austrian MP Susanne Winter,  the late Canadian psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton,  Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

Handles Haus has been kind enough to compile a list of those purged for wrongthink these last decades. 

The internet has become a prime battleground in the fight against wrongthink. Governments such as Norway and Germany have promised to come down hard on heretics against the reigning ideology.

And in Communism as in Christianity, even the most fervent believers are not safe from charges of heresy:

Early in the terror, it might have been relatively easy for Party loyalists to feel insulated in and by their ideology. But as the victimizations extended to friends, family, and to themselves, falsely accused Communist prisoners were faced with the emotional problem of reconciling their loyalty to a Party that vilified them as disloyal ...  (3)

In the same spirit, U.S. campuses have been roiled this year as the current crop of leftists begins to charge the previous crop with heresy. Prominent Yale husband-and-wife profs were not spared in the merciless purge against their heretical position on Halloween costumes: 

 Leftists eat their own at Yale (edifying video at link)

“I have disappointed you and I’m really sorry,” Nicholas Christakis told about 100 students gathered in his living room on Sunday ... Christakis said his encounter on Thursday with students in the college’s courtyard, in which numerous black women upbraided him for being inattentive to them, broke his heart.

“I thought that I had some credibility with you, you know? I care so much about the same issues you care about. I’ve spent my life taking care of these issues of injustice, of poverty, of racism. I have the same beliefs that you do … I’m genuinely sorry, and to have disappointed you. I’ve disappointed myself.”

*     *     *

The Russian Nicolas Berdyaev said:

Communism … wants to be a religion itself, to take the place of Christianity. It professes to answer the religious questions of the human soul and to give a meaning to life. …  Intolerance and fanaticism always have a religious origin. No scientific, purely intellectual theory can be so intolerant and fanatical, and communism is exclusive as a religious faith is. (2)

 'Let's raise the generation that is utterly devoted to Communism!'

Communism, we have now seen, is not the only progressive idea that can take on the guise of religion, nor to be 'intolerant and fanatical.' The Anti-racists / Multiculturalists of today confess their faith, spread their gospel, deny science, and fight off heresy with a seemingly bottomless zeal.

In his 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay famously said:

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. ... Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history.

The popular delusion under which we now live-- 

• that all ethnic groups have identical brains and so must behave the same way,
• that high-trust and low-trust groups can live side-by-side happily,
• that foreigners deserve more consideration than our own countrymen,  
• that the weakening or extinction of Whites will usher in a new peace,

--has so tightly gripped us, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that John McWhorter may well be right in calling it a 'religion.' Yes, the rightist is more prone to religious belief than the leftist. But it seems clear that whether it is Marxism or Multiculturalism, the progressive brain has a tendency to be deeply drawn in by equalitarian fantasy.

A final word from Sperlich:

The psychologies of committed atheists and of the traditional faithful, in any case, are not true opposites. For one, atheistic opponents of religion “have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.” [W. James, 1958] For another, “the great majority of the irreligious are not liberated from religious behavior, from theologies and mythologies.” [Eliade, 1961]  (1)

So, having seen what it looks like when progressives get religion, next time we shall try to explore the why. Thank you as always for reading.

REFERENCES

(1) Sperlich, Peter W., Rotten Foundations: The Conceptual Basis of the Marxist-Leninist Regimes of East Germany and Other Countries of the Soviet Bloc, Westport: Praeger, 2002. 

(2) Berdyaev, Nicolas, The Origin of Russian Communism, trad. R. M. French, London:  G. Bles, 1948. 

(3) Adler, Nanci, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 

(4) Baylor, Ronald H., Race and Ethnicity in America: A Concise History. NY: Columbia U. Press, 2003.

(5) Grothe, Peter, To Win the Minds of Men:The Story of the Communist Propaganda War in East Germany, Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1958.

(6) Bennett, John C., Christianity and Communism Today, NY: Association Press, 1960.  

Previously:

Racism: The New Witchcraft?,

Bring Low the Enemy of Multiculturalism,

Five-year Plan in Four Years