George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 October 2019.]

For some decades now, ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ have become a cachet in the Left’s narrative about the sins of the Right when other such appellations fail them.  Few people using such pejoratives can give a coherent definition of these terms, nevertheless they continue to serve a useful purpose to invoke the ire of their lightly read constituents.  Longtime listeners to these commentaries who have visited my blog know that I have a long history of being accused by my leftwing readers as a racist, among other unsavory things.

The nuance that such accusers of those like me miss is that I am a culturist, and not a racist.  Instead, as the years-long archive of my writings show, I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.  Western civilization is united by the formidable intersection of western cultures as practiced in the various countries of what today is known as ‘the west’.  And, absent my making any discriminatory remarks about people based on their DNA or gene set, that makes me and others like me culturists and apologists for culturism.

Yuval Harari, in his chapter ‘From Racism to Culturism’, concurs with and expands on this interpretation in his most recent tome, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century (2019).  Yuval Noah Harari is a celebrated socio-historian and author of best-selling books on humanity, its history, worldviews, and future portents.  Perhaps some of you have read his Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind (2014) or Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017). In the following, the quotes I use come from his ‘21 Lessons …’ published earlier this year.

Totalitarian regimes have always sought to fundamentally transform their nations’ cultures when coming to power.  However, such transformations never succeed.  History shows us this most recently in the recoil of such imposed transformations to their native versions in the liberated Balkans and countries conquered by the former USSR.  The existence of a rich tapestry of cultures around the world has served us well, and their measured and unforced evolution will continue to serve mankind in these tumultuous years of technology paced globalization.

Are some cultures better than others?  Cultural relativists say no, but reality says yes. Harari writes “… few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.”  When people judge others of a different culture on the basis of their display of cultural attributes, then that is NOT a racist judgement or racist behavior.  Such assessments are more accurately known as culturist behavior, and the person so disposed is a culturist, not a racist.  A culturist evaluates the relative worth of another culture based on cultural attributes that may be expressed or carried out by anyone of any race, and not on the basis of an individual’s racial make-up.

Traditional racism was firmly grounded in biological theories, in modern times even incorporating DNA and genes as the basis for attributed differences in such things as intelligence and morality.  This has been shown to have little scientific basis.  In Hariri’s words, “Today, in contrast, while many individuals still make such racist assertions, they have lost all of their scientific backing and most of their political respectability—unless they are rephrased in cultural terms. Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.”

For political reasons, today’s progressives reject this understanding of culturism and continue to accuse culturists of being racists in order to serve their emotive narrative targeting the politically unsophisticated.  Describing another nation as a ‘s-hole country’ is definitely not a racist slur, but instead a slur on the country’s culture.  There is nothing inherent in the people of any country, no matter their racial make-up, that prevents them from practicing a more productive and enlightened culture to benefit their citizens.  In sum, “culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and importance of cultural differences.”

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  I revisit this distinction between racism and (my) culturism because now we have the left-of-center Yuval Hariri, an internationally respected scholar and author of relevant essays for the intelligent reader, who also concurs with what I have argued in these pages for many years.  Followers of Rebane Doctrine know my penchant for more precise and operational definitions, and may recall how my understanding of racist and racism was presented in ‘Who is a Racist?’ and ‘Racism and Racists Revisited’.  The caveat in all this is that with respect to the semantic accuracy of the definitions presented, we are technically all racists if we believe that the racial composition of individuals can now be determined from a detailed examination of their DNA.  To the extent we believe that this technology lets us characterize their aggregated physiological attributes, we are all racists.  But, of course, in the socio-political sense, as Hariri corroborates, that is not true.

As I pointed out above, our irreversibly polarized nation (remember ‘past the tipping point’?) is fastened on two opposing narratives.  The battle between the political parties today is focused on the middle-roaders and those Americans who don’t pay attention to national issues.  The core constituencies of both sides are not large enough to guarantee victory at the polls, so both sides have to attract voters from the politically uncommitted.

The message from the Right is that today’s Democrats have again (as they did in the 1930s) succumbed to the siren song of socialism cum communism, and that ideology has always created misery.  It has never worked as witnessed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s attempt to make state capitalism work, and the Europeans’ retreat from big government control of everything in order to get their economies going again.  The Right’s solution is smaller government, more individual liberty, and promotion of responsible free enterprises that compete in minimally regulated markets.

The message from the Left is that today’s Republicans are made up of deplorable racists who want to return the country to an authoritarian Jim Crow era supported by rapacious free market capitalism that steals wealth from the middle class and the ‘underserved’ segments of our citizenry.  Their solution is a much bigger government which is vigorously involved in controlling and participating in the economy, enforcing massive wealth redistribution through mainly asset-based taxes which they promise will fund a panoply of ‘free’ services and direct payments to favored classes of citizens and illegal aliens.

This contest for the hearts and minds of Americans pits the intellectual arguments of the Right against the emotional arguments of the Left who characterize those of the Right as being fundamentally evil.  Such a tack continues to be supported by confirming national narratives disseminated through our educational, news media, and entertainment industries.  The unchanging focus of the Left’s narrative is the notion that those on the Right are sinister racists who desire to exploit America’s minorities whose votes are critical to the Left’s political power.  To date in this arena the Left has a clear advantage.

If my assessment of our alt-Left progressives is correct, then all these arguments will have the effect of water off a duck's back, or better, a lecture to a 2×4 with a face painted on it.

[18oct19 update]  Patriotism to one’s nation may easily be incorporated as a cultural dimension.  The seminal notion incorporated in patriotism is preservation – the patriot wants his nation to survive and endure/evolve more or less in and from its current state.  In 2003 70% of Americans were ‘extremely proud’ to be Americans; in 2019 only 47% still embrace that sentiment.  And today fewer young people than ever consider patriotism to be a “very important” value.  (I wonder who taught them that.)  Columbia University professor Adam Kirsch writes a thoughtful essay in the 18oct19 WSJ (here) wherein he claims ‘American Patriotism Is Worth Fighting For’.  And I have filched it for those who are thwarted by WSJ’s paywall.  Download American Patriotism Is Worth Fighting For  Thoughts?