Fighting the Homogenous Regime of Dull Diversity | Jerry Salyer | CWR
A review of James Kalb’s new book, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It
“[O]ne cannot abstract from the
historical situation of the nation or attack the cultural identity of the
people. Consequently, one cannot passively accept, still less actively support,
groups which by force or by the manipulation of public opinion take over the
State apparatus and unjustly impose on the collectivity an imported ideology
contrary to the culture of the people.”
– Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Clearly it is not science but rather scientism which is central to the society depicted in Aldous Huxley’s 1931 science fiction classic, Brave New World. Toward the end of this dystopian novel about a hedonistic global order comprised of shallow, self-absorbed clones, one member of the ruling elite admits that he and his fellow rulers are deeply suspicious of any sort of intellectual exploration. “Science is dangerous,” explains the World Controller, “we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.” True, the elite constantly bombards its biomanufactured subjects with propaganda about scientific achievements, yet what slogans like “Science Is Everything” actually refer to is not science as traditionally understood but a kind of god, an absolute authority figure which demands unquestioning obedience to the status quo in exchange for the creature comforts of advanced technology. Science as the pursuit of truth has long since been banished by the soft-totalitarian global government, since such truth might provoke reflection about the ultimate nature of the cosmos and thereby destabilize society.
I found myself recalling all this as I read James Kalb’s new book, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013). A timely, incisive work, Against Inclusiveness builds upon themes introduced in Kalb’s previous work, The Tyranny of Liberalism, and presents a precise, methodical examination of the real-life dystopia we inhabit. “[S]cientism and postmodernism go together,” Kalb observes, “and the two can exist independently of actual science.” The rationalist who denies the soul, the deconstructionist who denies the ability to know anything at all, and the globalist who denies national identity are all working together to dehumanize the planet, as it turns out:
In effect scientism tells us that there are no transcendent goods, just desires, that there are no essences of things that we should respect, and that the world is what we make of it. From this it follows that the rational approach to politics, social life, and morality is to treat the world as a resource and turn the social order into a kind of machine for giving people in equal measure whatever they happen to want, as long as what they want fits the smooth working of the machine.
Human beings themselves become mere cogs, continues Kalb. “To demand inclusiveness is to demand that these human components be distinguished only by reference to the demands of the machine and otherwise be treated as interchangeable.”
Neutral though the social machine purports to be, it inevitably exhibits de facto preferences.
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