Our Mannkal team has entered the Western Civilisation ‘debate’ through our Sun Rises in the West Conference in Oct. 2010. In doing so, we have added another dimension to our activities which offends the usual politically-correct crowd and commentators who are always ready to denigrate their own society.
Whilst ‘Western Civilization’ is no longer taught in most Australian universities, our use of the term itself has stimulated debate beyond our expectations.
An example of this can be seen at here where one of Australia’s leading Education Commentators, Dr Kevin Donnelly, made similar comments to our recent publication, (The National Curriculum – A Critique). We are happy to mail to you copies of this publication at no charge.
At this time of writing, Kevin Donnelly’s factual and seemingly uncontroversial comments attracted 421 responses, the majority quite emotionally irrational. A small number were particularly vitriolic about the suggestion that we should actually teach key aspects of Western Civilisation.
So the debate continues and we certainly encourage this.
It appears that the main cause of such vitriol is the unclear concept of what Western Civilization (or ‘the West’) actually is.
The West is not a linear progression of the ‘great and the good’. History never runs in a straight line, it zigzags with its numerous unintended consequences and we can all learn from this.
However, attacks on Western Civilisation are not entirely without some humour:
• American university students are told that ‘the West’ is bad because it comes from Europe and has an unsavoury history of exploitation, oppression, racism, sexism, so America should de-Westernize.
• European university students are told that ‘the West’ is bad because it is American and is an attempt to subjugate Europe to American ideas of uniformity, capitalistic, hyper-democratic, egalitarian models of how to live and do things that are alien to Europe and should therefore be rejected.
Now, back in Australia, we invite your comment on why these subtle, successful and exciting ideas of ‘the West’ are no longer taught in most Australian universities?
Congratulations on a great effort with Mannkal and I hope momentum keeps growing.
The success of western culture and its undisputable achievement in taking humanity to a higher level of civilisation is beyond debate.
May I suggest that we of like minds do not get distracted by semantics over what is western civilization, a question readily answered in a broad sense by any person in the world with access to TV.
A critical question is why does the left still exist in our midst to attack the west, given its proven record of failure?
Why has the right in the west failed to embarrass and humiliate the left out of mainstream existence?
It is an absurdity that eastern Europe freed itself from the oppression by the socialist intelligentsia while in the west our values and way of life is under attack from our own socialist intelligentsia whose minds have been warped by the same Marxist inspired nonsense as Lenin et al.
Yes, there is the odd battle over a particular issue. Yet where has the right been since the 1960s while the socialists rewrote school content (and still at it), while they removed university courses concerned with the west to be replaced by Marxist inspired sociology, femminist and multicultural studies?
Alas, we have allowed the socialists to run our social science academia for many decades and they in turn have brainwashed, I mean educated, people who dominate education, politics, especially the public service, media, arts and even increasingly the law, particularly those who rise to the Highest Courts.
The task of undoing the damage may take a long time but efforts like Mannkal will hopefully speed up the process.
evolutionary biology may well lead one to believe that in spite of the cult of multiculturalism, the west might well be connected to the european gene-pool.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/WesternOrigins.htm