J.P. Zmirak has a good piece up at VDARE about the idea of the West and higher education.
The West has given us modern liberal democracy and science. No matter what the multiculturalists would have you believe, almost all of us who live in the West are children of the West, even those in opposition to it live and breath part of the promise of the Western idea (dissent, the overturning of one age’s orthodoxies) . The modern American liberal ambivalence, and often hostility, to the idea of the West is probably the main reason I still consider myself a man of the Right. Of course there are many intellectual traditionalists on the Left side of the political spectrum who would concur on the importance of the Western tradition without considering themselves Rightists (Camille Paglia for example), but often these individuals have to protest that they aren’t really conservatives, and some of us simply tire of defending a word when the substance behind those words are what matters to us.
Those of us who stand around the banner of the Enlightenment need to keep speaking up, because in the end, modernity is dependent upon us. The “opposition” is parasitic upon the affluence that the Enlightenment Project has unleashed, balance must be returned to the system, or our civilization will collapse, and Nietzsche’s pessimistic eternal recurrence may come to pass….
Posted by razib at 09:38 PM