(Oct 19, 2018 05:52 PM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]Brexit is immoral? Wanting your own, unhindered national sovereignty is immoral?
I think that it is perceived that way, by today's globalist elites.
Especially in Europe, there's this idea that nations are evil, the source of the two world wars in 21 years that almost destroyed Europe (and European civilization along with it). So a big part of the motivation for the European Union was to eliminate all of the European nations. And eliminate all of their histories, languages and centuries old customs and traditions along with the nations that spawned them.
So European borders had to be erased and populations mixed up as much as possible, so as to destroy any surviving vestige of nationalism.
Britain's decision to opt out and to preserve its own thousand year old history and sovereignty was a direct challenge to the grand European project of cultural suicide and historical erasure.
I think that's one reason why European elites hate Donald Trump so passionately and why they see him as such a threat. He embodies American nationalism and precisely what they oppose at home, everything that they are trying so hard to destroy.
That whole post-national vision seems extraordinarily self-contradictory. As populations are mixed up, as national distinctiveness disappears, diversity is supposed to be a wonderful thing that everyone is supposed to "celebrate", precisely as everyone is being homogenized and made the same. The nations that sheltered and fostered the real and true diversity of different and culturally distinct communities disappear.
So we enter into a brave new world in which none of us has much of anything in common with our neighbors.
Community disappears in favor of a
cultural atomism of pure individualism. The question that arises then is, if as all the professors tell us, our values and our mores are all "socially constructed", what happens when the "social" disappears?? It looks like a perfect recipe for universal
anomie.
And we are seeing the results with rising crime rates, social hostility and division, divisive identity politics, drug abuse and school failure, all signs of growing social pathology.
Somehow it's just
assumed that everyone will be on the same page as far as women's and gay rights go, and everyone will share a very similar vision of human rights and how societies should be conducted. But the values that everyone blithely assumes will automatically prevail aren't simply self-evident, they didn't just pop out of nowhere. They are precisely the values that Europe generated over a long and turbulent history of ideas, the product of the Classical Greco-Roman world, of Christendom, of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and on and on.
If your next door neighbor is a Shariah-observant Muslim or somebody recently arrived from a Honduran village or from sub-Saharan Africa, why should we expect them to share the values and outlook of educated and fully indoctrinated modern Europeans? Why shouldn't the brave new post-national world take their image? Why should females ever be allowed out of their homes except when accompanied by a male family member? Why shouldn't there be a death penalty for homosexuals?
And there's the annoying fact that China is exceedingly unlikely to sign on to the utopian post-national vision. The Chinese are exceedingly nationalistic and they can be expected to retain their Chinese distinctiveness indefinitely into the future.
