Geza on Derbyshire on Spencer

Geza, the one and only guest columnist of this blog, sent me the following comments, yesterday, to John Derbyshire's review of Robert Spencer's book "Religion of Peace?". Penetrating analysis and interesting remarks as always from Geza. We are also awaiting Lawrence Auster's "review" of Derb's review.

Here's Geza:

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Derb has written a review on Spencer's new book and I was wondering if you read it. Despite his idiocy regarding Islam, he makes some good points and talks about the inverted ethics of Christianity and separationism.

He blames globalization on Christianity which I think he is right but I think capitalism shares an equal amount of blame. Christianity did put colonialism into overdrive and made a complete mess of it (for us).

Here is where I think Derbyshire is wrong:

"Spencer's more general assumption that our civilization is a child of Christianity can likewise be fairly doubted. Does religion in fact explain anything about history? It is of course impossible to know how different the world would have been if Jesus of Nazareth, or Mohammed, had died in the cradle; but the suspicion lurks that it might not have been very different. Would the Arabs have come surging out of their desert oases in the seventh century without the Prophet and his faith to inspire them? Would Frankish knights have taken ship to recover the Holy Land, if they had not considered it Holy, only a lost province of the Roman Empire? Would white Europeans have developed science and consensual democracy if they had been only white Europeans, not also Christians?"

The Arabs were too divided to do anything before Muhammad began his ministry. The fatalism which is intrinsic in the Arabs (even pre-Islamic) would have ensured that they stayed divided and unorganized. Science as we know it today I think would have developed with the Europeans due to their high IQ and their special way of thinking (which is quite different from the high IQ East Asians). Things obviously would have been different if Derbyshire is to claim that globalization was caused by Christianity. Either it wouldn't exist or exist in a very restricted form. That right there is a big change, but for the better! This is where Derbyshire's zoology-lite gets him, thinking religion has next to no effect on history. How can that be when politics in itself is derived from religion?

And again:

"One cannot help noticing that in Japan, where Christians form less than one percent of the population, and Christian traditions are not a significant component of the national culture, Islam is neither a problem nor a threat, simply because Japan does not let Muslims—nor any other foreigners—settle in great numbers. The Japanese don't give a fig for the universal brotherhood of man, and still cherish their national sovereignty. We no longer care much about our sovereignty, so long as our bellies are full and we have gadgets and clowns to amuse us; and our bishops, not to mention our Christian President and the globalist elites who surround him, tell us that doubts about the wisdom of mass Third World immigration are unkind, if not actually "hateful" (not to mention damaging to their stock portfolios)."

The Japanese don't care about universalism because it doesn't appeal to their people. It is not their tradition and to them it seems like a foreign curiosity but nothing that should be seriously considered. Not only is this true about the Japanese but all non-Europeans. Egalitarianism is an anomaly only found in European nations. Diversity exists outside of Europe but not in the same sense it does in the West. The laws can be arbitrary and assimilation isn't implemented nor is it even tried.

Japan has been monoracial since its inception as a nation and it has a long history of isolating itself from the rest of the non-Japanese world. A counterpoint to Derb: South Korea is 26% Christian and growing and it is still monoracial, even more so than Japan. Japan is 98% Japanese whereas South Korea is 99.6% Korean. China is also another success story that boasts a 91% ethnic Han majority (the largest race on earth) and Christianity is gaining ground there as well. The lack of Christianity isn't the reason why East Asian countries are so successful with banning non-desirables from coming into their respective nations, but rather it is their attachment to their ethnopolitical ideology, Confucianism, that stops all pleas to open up the borders to the rest of the world. Asians know that their political system only works for them and that their culture cannot be adopted by a non-Asian and that is why they would laugh at any liberal in the face if they tried to argue that an Arab, a Somali, or even a Frenchman could "assimilate" into the culture of Japan, Korea, or China.

And on to his conclusion:

"A sensibly exclusionist, separationist policy like Japan's is therefore not available to us, because of our principles—those principles Spencer tells us are rooted in Christian thinking, those principles that send our author into such raptures of cultural superiority. Well, well: Christianity got its start as a religion of slaves. Perhaps it is fated to end the same way."

Wrong. Liberalism is only a symptom but the cause of it losing our identity slowly over time. We simply do not know who we are anymore. Just "Christians", "Americans", or "Europeans", or even the dreaded "Citizens of the World". All of these definitions are vague and that is how we define ourselves today. We cannot even bring ourselves to say that we are white without feeling ashamed, let alone say where we are from or rattle off (or even remember?) which villages our ancestors came from. You cannot exclude something if you do not know what should be included.

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