It seems no matter what subject I’m writing about I am constantly noting the presence of very smart people who suffer from the short sightedness that truly is endemic amongst our credentialed class. Steve Burton at AltRight brings us a good example…
Steve Sailer has an even more than usually insightful piece up at VDare on “That Texas Schoolbook Massacre” — you know, the Texas Board of Education’s recent “challenge to the Left’s post-1960s dominion over the past” — in which he takes a close look at one prominent example of the sort of high school “history” text that the “Texas Taliban” wants to replace.
The whole article is so good that one hates to single out just one thing, but I was particularly struck by Sailer’s point that, over the past century, “heroes of suffering” have replaced “heroes of accomplishment” in the American imagination — a point that he attributes to the formidable Gregory Cochran.
So the likes of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Claude Shannon, James Watson, Francis Crick, Raymond Spruance, Clarence Wade McClusky, Max Leslie, Clifton Sprague, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and even the Wright brothers, fade into obscurity, while the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony crowd to the front of the educationist bus. Would it be mischievous for me to suggest that this interesting phenomenon represents the ultimate triumph of the Christian aspect of our Western cultural inheritance over both the Greco-Roman and the Germanic aspects? So far as I can determine, neither the Greeks, nor the Romans, nor the Germanic tribes ever regarded the victims of history with anything but contempt. They were champions of achievement — especially military achievement. If any of them ever lost any sleep over the sufferings of the losers, I have yet to hear about it. But the deification of the victim — God on the Cross — lies at the very heart of Christianity.
While this is all true, its also what we in the blue collar trades refer to as pointy headed BS. Let’s break down the problems here, while it is true that Germanic tribes didn’t celebrate losers, neither did Christianity for a really long time.
So what changed? I will note that debating this kind of thing with those who are hostile to Christianity is more than usually foolish, even for someone as silly as me, but this is just such a glaring example of filling in the blanks of history to suit your own predilections and prejudices that I can’t resist.
Its kind of amazing to me how he manages to completely ignore the fact that Christianity has been whole cloth taken over and subsumed by Liberalism, the central tent pole, Jesus Christ, has been removed and replaced with nothing more or less than modern simpering Christianity.
So now it simplers, just like modern Estrogen driven Femi-Nazi Liberalism and this is the fault of Christianity? Huh?
Riddle me this, if Christianity really is this weakling religion why are you not speaking Arabic right now? I mean it was knights of this, per you, simpering religion that kicked some Muslim ass a millenia or so ago.
The real question you should be asking is: why can’t we imagine Christian pastors with battle axes in their hands? There is absolutely no contradiction there whatsoever, yet guys like Burton would have you believe that we will be saved by savage beliefs that have no real place in the West?
Mmmmmk?
I get that Burton doesn’t dig Christianity, I don’t agree with him, in fact I think he has his pointy head rammed up his over educated bazoo, but that doesn’t make me angry. He is welcome to make any argument he wishes. What makes me angry is when very smart people make really stupid arguments as a consequence of their prejudices and ask me to pretend this is something other than axe grinding and prejudice masquerading as scholarship.
It ain’t. And it sucks. Big time!
What’s really fascinating to me is how he manages to drive right by what Steve Sailer is actually saying to take his dig at Christianity. Is it just me or are institutions of higher drinking essentially places for former Starbucks associates to display their prejudices and neurosis for cashee money?
Or do they serve some other purpose of which I am currently unaware?