In my previous essay ( Love and Stuff, Part 6: Personalities, Minds, Genetics, and Blood-shed in Western History), I relied heavily upon a book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, published recently by Professor Kevin MacDonald, an emeritus professor in psychology at California State University—Long Beach. A specialist in both the evolution of human psychological attributes and in personality traits, he knows darned well that human groups that are selected under conditions of different opportunities and problems have different cognitive abilities and different personality traits—not just different complexion or robustness or musculature. At the end of that previous essay, I summarized, in a simple but not simplistic or distorting way:
There are family lines of human beings with well-defined personality types and such family lines likely won’t support and maybe won’t even tolerate one another’s political and social systems—though genetic variation allows for such outliers as an egalitarian individualist being born to parents who are aristocratic individualists.
MacDonald’s book dealt with a difference in personality traits between Indo-Europeans and Western Hunter-gatherers:
- both peoples are extreme in their individualism—no other people has ever been identified at such an extreme in their balance of individualism and communalism (such as the opposite `balance’ of the sort of tribalism seen in Sub-Saharan Africans or in Jews or some East Asians); but
- Indo-Europeans had aristocratic traits, often being highly successful warriors and being willing to accept other men of military talent into their bands, and
- Western Hunter-gatherers had egalitarian traits, having evolved those traits while living in groups which often changed as they foraged during berry- or fruit-harvesting seasons, hunted the large aurochs or the various sorts of large or small deer, fished or gathered shellfish on the shores of the rivers or the Baltic Sea or North Sea.
Both of the above types of individualists, unlike more tribal peoples, had a will and various ways to adopt outsiders into their communities. Thus it is that these European individualists—of both types—were and are more vulnerable to peaceful invasions of fundamentally nepotistic aliens who first take advantage of the openness of individualistic human communities and then take over the particular institutions which they enter.
In that prior essay to which I’ve already made reference— Love and Stuff, Part 6: Personalities, Minds, Genetics, and Blood-shed in Western History, I had this to say:
It’s likely that most high-achievers in Western history were, and are, probably individualists with aristocratic personalities—Michelangelo and Newton as well as Alexander the Great and King St Louis IX. (See At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie and The Genius Famine by Edward Dutton and Bruce G Charlton for a different take on the issue of genius, a take fully compatible with my views and, so far as I can judge, with the views developed in MacDonald’s book: Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.)
This is the sad punchline: egalitarian individualists have taken over the cultures of Western Civilization and have proven to be levelers, advocates of the cheapest forms of popular culture over high culture and advocates of comfortable mediocrity in science and engineering and sainthood—not sports; they have greatly damaged the intellectual and moral traditions of the West, doing equally great damage to the minds and characters of individuals in the West. This lowering of standards, glorification of the mediocre followed by idolization of the truly horrible and disgusting—technically high-quality and morally trashy works such as The Silence of the Lambs or Blazing Saddles. This lowering of standards started first in politics—sometimes under the guidance of those such as Thomas Jefferson who believed a democracy or even a democratic republic could maintain high standards by way of a natural aristocracy rising to the top in a more or less continuous process; this is an attitude more than a thought and is consistent with the general behaviors of Indo-European warriors over the past 3 millennia or more. In fact, largely through the war waged by the egalitarian individualists of New England and New York upon the partly-democratized aristocratic individualists of the South, various forms of collectivist pseudo-individualism as well as egalitarian individualism became dominant in American politics. This seems to have been the result of a sometimes retreating glacier which began its first advance in the years after the 13th century, the peak of the High Middle Ages; this great advance of glaciers would eventually destroy and level the European cultural landscape.
The pilgrim Body of Christ would be whipped with a frenzy and then crucified as cans of tomato soup replaced the Blessed Virgin and her crucified son who was also the Son of God. This followed upon the reduction by mostly Protestant but also some Catholic theologians and other thinkers and clergy from One who was son of Mary and also Son of God to one who was only the carpenter son of an illiterate peasant woman from a backwater region.
Most recently, we can see the ascent of low-culture in the United States, and eventually other regions of the West, as television in the 1950s overwhelmed the cultures brought to the United States by Puritans in New England—though they were the main villains in this story, Cavaliers in the South, Borderlanders in the mountains; the particular parts of these cultures brought to the United States were far from the most distinguished or the `highest’, but they had at least the sorts of rich folk-arts not so far distant from the likes of Shakespeare and Purcell. Mediocrity gave way to the horrors of All in the Family and other trash which only tore down what was at least a facsimile of a morally well-ordered human community and sometimes more than a facsimile.
God isn’t mediocre. Christ isn’t mediocre. The great saints and all the defective saints who have marched behind them aren’t mediocre.
Heaven isn’t a place for mediocrity nor for those trained to take that easy path which leads to small souls, small minds, and small hearts.
God has high standards, probably even higher than those of da Vinci or Goethe. Thus it is that we easily misinterpret these words from the book of the prophet Isaiah:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts. [IS 55:8-9]
As I noted in an earlier essay ( Making God’s Thoughts Our Thoughts, God’s Ways Our Ways: Why Christianity Is Not Simple.):
It’s easy to misinterpret these words, reading into them warnings of a barrier between us and God which can’t be surmounted—despite the ongoing refrain: We are the images of God. In fact, much of the Christian support for human rights, including the rights of the unborn or the mentally disabled or others with little or no power to defend themselves, comes from this belief. I’m going to recommend a different meaning for those words of Isaiah, a meaning which preserves the idea we are images of God in some substantial way—not just an ambiguous handwaving way.
I go on in that essay to claim:
We learn God’s thoughts by studying His manifested thoughts. We learn God’s ways by studying His acts-of-being, both creating and shaping created being. (God’s ways are different from His thoughts only by way of creaturely perspective.)
…
We should learn to respond to God’s Creation when forming our ways of thought, hence, when shaping our minds, rather than holding on to ways of thought which are magnificent antiques, once plausible as well as beautiful but no longer consistent with what is known about Creation. Yet, we should honor those antiques for what they are and for the role they played in allowing us to advance further in human knowledge of Creation and its Creator.
And again, God has higher standards than those of the great artists of Western Civilization; the Almighty won’t sink down to the level of those who have been dumbed-down so as to make them willing victims of the popular entertainment industry—and that includes sports. He wants us to think as He thinks, to act as He acts; He doesn’t want us to train ourselves to think as a corrupt politician thinks nor to act as a morally degenerate movie producer acts.
But it’s not just the moral issues, as I’ve been writing. It’s also aesthetic issues—including:
- the design and construction of churches and other buildings which honor God rather than following the rules set by architects who acted as if doing their part to overcome the Christian aesthetics of the West,
- the quality and maturity of literature, including that for children, which is both dumbed-down and disrespectful—to say the least—toward what is sacred in Creation and in our relationships to God and also toward what is noble in the traditions of the West,
- the quality and maturity of religious thought and emotion,
- the quality, maturity, and strength of ties to God, religious communities, families, countries, and other communities, and
- so forth.
I’ve maybe given the impression above that our cultures have to be relentlessly solemn and demanding of our hearts and minds and hands that they be proper for Christians or others aiming for some high fate after death. I’ll reach for a little better balance as I end.
I don’t wish to explore, at this time, this issue of allowable elements of high culture and of allowable elements of lower culture, but I doubt if God disapproves if you watch a movie such as a silly comedy of the type once common, such as: Bringing Up Baby. For many, Beethoven isn’t bad—at least in small doses…and some of his pieces. But Saturday night is for Celtic folk-music at a nearby pub or Polka down at the Polish-American Club or gathering as a family to sing music reachable by average voices. Shakespeare can be OK, at least when the granddaughter needs help understanding Henry V, and Kenneth Branagh’s film helps to visualize the flow of events. But, settling down for a relaxing night with the television set off? Maybe The Maltese Falcon from that collection of Hammet novels that was so cheap at that yard sale? Maybe a return to the Napoleonic wars with Forester or O’Brian? Or maybe that bio of Eisenhower your son-in-law gave you? Not enough to send you to hell and maybe even a good way to put you in a good state for church the next day. But maybe we should at least end a quiet Saturday night with a little prayer with the wife and a reading of a couple of chapters of the Gospel According to Saint Matthew?
That last possibility gets us back to my real point, one I’ll develop further in later essays in this series I intend to use as the stuff of a book: higher culture, including high religion and not just pop-spirituality provides a global structure for a more complex human community—of which the most complex known to us is a civilization.