A Tough One: Intellectual Giants clash By James Reed

     Whoaaha…this is a problem. There is a major philosophical clash between two intellectual giants, loved by all of us at this site: Jordan Peterson and that great defender of the West, Canadian academic Ricardo Duchesne:
   https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/02/jordan-petersons-rejection-of-identity-politics-allows-white-ethnocide/
  http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2018/02/jordan-petersons-rejection-of-identity-politics-equals-ethnocide-whites.html

     Peterson argues that he is not an Alt Righter because he rejects identity politics, and instead is a classical liberal believing in the rights of the individual. So far, so good. From this position he has done enormous good critiquing all matter of politically correct nonsense. But, there is a limitation to this, as Duchesne notes:

“This attack on postmodernist identity politics is all good. The problem is that a politics of individualism in our current age of mass immigration and multicultural identities is fatal to White individuals. Europeans were uniquely responsible for a politics of individual rights, and this libertarian way of thinking worked as long as European nations were not open to millions of immigrants coming from inherently collectivist cultures.

Europeans were classically liberal only under the taken-for-granted assumption that their nations were actually created and inhabited by a people with a strong ethnic identity, strong traditional customs, and ancestries. No nation was ever created by abstract individuals without ethno-national identities and a strong sense of who belongs and who does not, friends and enemies.

Western nations were unique in successfully combining individual rights with a strong ethnic identity, as was evident in their immigration restrictions before the 1960s. Minority rights for historical minorities is consistent with ethnic liberal nationalism. What is not consistent with liberal rights is the mandate that all Western nations must grant citizenship rights to millions of alien immigrants.

The libertarianism Peterson is defending is hardly “classical” and really a cultural Marxist version concocted by the same leftist academics he despises. John Locke (1632-1704) took for granted the fact that the “liberties” he valued were meant for “British” individuals rather than for hundreds of thousands of immigrants coming from vastly different collective cultures. ..

The claim that the left and the Alt-Right play the “same identity politics” but from opposite ends is extremely misleading. Alt- Righters recognize there is a spectrum, a certain “fluidity” between races and sexes. But they disagree with postmodernists in believing that this fluidity does not invalidate clearly demarcated identities. The postmodernist focuses on multiple differences without a proper sense of which differences amount to substantive distinctions.

The Alt-Right focuses on primordial and millennial differences, and accepts the political dynamics that follow from these differences. The Alt-Right does not deny the crucial role of constructing-socializing natural identities and improving national cultures. Traditional conservatives have always emphasized socialization, except that they work on bringing out the full potential of what nature has given us rather than socializing nature out of existence. “

     In this, I agree with Duchesne. Things have just been let go too far to simply hope that an appeal to classical liberalism, will save the day. The West, for example is set to be colonised by Islam, as detailed now even in mainstream books, such as  Harold Bloom’s The Muhammad Code (2016), so it is very late in the day for such a weak response. It is not going to work and sometime Western man needs to recognise some hard truths, before all fall.

 

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Friday, 29 March 2024

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