Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Culture matters, and it is inescapable. A culture is any group of people bound together by certain core beliefs. These beliefs are fundamental. To dispute them is to invite ostracism. Examples of these include forbiddances against incest, child molestation, or cannibalism.
Onto such fundamental truths are hung manners, habits, folkways, fashion, music, architecture, art, philosophy, religion, and technology. These things are what most people think of when they think about culture. But, they are all secondary to those bedrock convictions that make many into one.
Consider the Lakota Sioux, the Zulus, the Bedouin, the Inuit/Eskimos, the Irish, the French, the Romanians, the Greeks, the Turks, the Kazakhs, the Punjabi Sikhs, the Hmong, the Australian Aborigines, the Maori, the Mongols, the Japanese, and the Mapuche. All of these cultures embody conspicuously different visions of the best way to live life.
Culture is not merely a diverting travelogue of exotic places and peoples. Cultural values determine what is good or evil, right or wrong, mandatory or taboo. These convictions are about nothing less than what we deem to be worth living for, dying for, and even killing for.
I grew up among the (how I have come to detest this word) diversity of worldviews found in New York City neighborhood enclaves of Italians, Jews, Irish, Poles, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Yankees. All were proud Americans, but each ethnic subculture maintained its own vivid set of values.
Religion is typically central to cultural convictions. My Christian faith indicates the urgency of truth and the demands of conscience. Any believer may at any moment be faced with the need to risk their one and only earthly life in order to be true to the divine.
Today, a wide coalition of leftists agree that our Judeo-Christian West must be destroyed. Their attacks take many forms. They are not intellectually consistent. If an idea is caustic to the West, no matter its characteristics or implications, it will be extolled because it serves their purpose.
They imply that the West is unique in its sins of slavery, racism, and imperialism, ignoring the reality that all human civilizations everywhere on the earth practiced such things before industrial modernity.
The West is white supremacy, they argue, whose goal is the establishment of a series of apartheid ethno-states. This ignores the reality that only the West has developed concepts of universal and inalienable human rights. What makes us in the West unique is our insistence that we purge ourselves of racism and the rest in order to hopefully embrace a colorblind meritocracy.
They simultaneously argue that Western nations must accept endless waves of illegal and unacculturated immigrants which inevitably transform communities. Ireland is on fire right now because of the vicious crimes of such invaders, and the damage being done to Irish society. Yet, anyone who asserts that the Irish should rule in Ireland is castigated as being a bigoted thought criminal.
They damn America’s melting pot, conflating cultural assimilation with being an “Uncle Tom.” Advocating multiculturalism, they forget that the United States can only exist if we all slough off the ways of the old country and join into the English language Judeo-Christian mainstream.
Western traditions are demonized as being a patriarchal, heteronormative, white-power cult that is lethal to all other ways of life. They forget that a tolerance for counter-culture and ideas at variance with the majority is an exclusively Western virtue.
They undermine their own multicultural argument when they say that the natural blending of cultures that happens when differing peoples live peaceably together is cultural appropriation. They make truly racist arguments that only people of a certain ethnicity are allowed to partake of that culture.
These leftists forget that all of their own ideals stem from Western notions of individual worth and human rights. They further encourage a victimhood mentality which infantilizes anyone foolish enough to adopt it.
I love our culture too much to allow leftists to destroy it. I love the West and delight in the free exchange of cultural ideas. I love the possibilities of embracing colorblind meritocracy and defeating tribalism. Shouldn’t you?
