Minorities and Majorities; and Facts - "Stubborn Things"

Well, I seem to have hit a lot of sore spots with my remarks of late concerning certain "inconvenient" facts. I’m reminded of Thomas Huxley’s remark, “Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.”

The reaction (I’ve learned a couple of new epithets of the “witty” flavor) tells you – I’ve known since I was a kid – a lot, too. For instance, when I pointed out that it might be time to consider the contribution to human kind and civilization made by the white, Anglo-Saxon male, I was obviously saying nothing that should have offended anyone who loves the truth. I made no assertions whatever about what would be found, just what ordinary fairness requires. I guess fairness isn’t what some folks are about.

Huxley also said, “The deepest sin of the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” No one does himself or his point of view good when he conceals the truth or when he lies (same thing, in my estimation). Or do we assume that the contest of issues goes to the biggest lie? Should go to the biggest liar? Who benefits from that?

What does it say, really, when the truth becomes politically incorrect?

“Facts,” 2nd U.S. President John Adams said, “are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” There is also, however, no prick that stings more and draws more violent slapping and scratching in reaction than that of the truth.

For the sake of illustrating a point by analogy, let's stay with the question - is it an issue? why? - of the German-ness of the United States. There isn't, for instance, any historical or statistical doubt about the racial, cultural, and ethnic composition of the people who founded, built, and established the United States of America.

http://usa.usembassy.de/germanamericans.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-American


It simply isn't rationally debatable (so why do it, then - what's the point?) According to the 2000 census, there are nearly forty-three million Germans in the United States, at least fifteen percent of the population. Many more have German ancestry, and at least one demographer estimates that seventy-one percent of all native U.S. citizens have names of Germanic origin. The maps at the top here show the areas where German-American citizens are concentrated (shades of red) and where they are the majority (blue).

When you hear the "silent majority" spoken of, the maps are something to think about.

It is also true, incidentally, that Irish-Americans constitute another 10.8 percent of the U.S. population. Neither can their contribution to the nation and culture that the United States became be questioned. It's a matter of historical record. Fact.

It's also a matter of historical record that the ethos of the United States was that of the people who built her. It was long known as the "protestant work ethic." The term was first coined by Max Weber, a German, in his essay, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." Whereas the people of countries like Spain, Italy and France historically had a more relaxed attitude toward work, the ethic holding that work defined people in turn defined the societies of Northern Europe and the countries where Protestantism was strong - the countries whose people soon comprised the vast majority of U.S. citizens.

It is interesting to note (and maybe a little inflammatory - the truth often stings, like I said) a comparison once made by Albert Camus (I think), that of the Germanic Law and religions as opposed to those of the Mediterranean peoples. In Greek and Mediterranean mythology, a king named Sisyphus was condemned to push a heavy rock up a hill only to have it roll down again each time. For eternity. Strangely, Camus noted, in the Germanic legends, a man similarly struggled all day only to fail - be wounded or killed on the battlefield. Collected from the field and taken to Valhalla by goddesses called Valkyries, he was healed - to return each time to his labors on the battlefield.

To the German, Sisyphus was in heaven. To the Mediterranean peoples, he was in hell. To the German, heaven was a physical place of ideal living and labor; to the Greek, the Roman, or the Arab, it was a spiritual place of ease and comfort.

When I was reared, what might be called "the John Wayne" version of the ethic was considered sine qua non. Nothing else was honorable, or acceptable. "Americans" regarded it as the keystone of national prosperity. So steeped in it was I that for me it was synonymous with the "Yankee Spirit" everyone attributed to themselves and their nation. It was celebrated by everyone, nowhere more than in the paintings of Norman Rockwell and in the movie screen persona of John Wayne. "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do those things to other people, and I expect the same of them" - Wayne's lines in the role of the "Shootist" - was part of it.

It was indisputably masculine - rooted in maleness and a kind of knighthood. A man - it was a title much more than gender, then - was loyal to his country, polite to women, kind to children and animals, and he kept his word. He worked hard, but held wealth in contempt as axiomatic proof of dishonesty and robber tendencies. "Corporate America" wasn't held in high regard, even then.

Recently, I've had some nasty things to say about corporate capitalism, and my remarks have drawn some of the heaviest cannonades of invective ever for this website. "Capitalists" - especially the would-be or wannabe variety - do not tolerate any offense of their religion. They will not permit any of what they see as equivocation, either. All capitalism is good. Capitalism that uses women like pigs and sheep, sells its wives and daughters - even its mothers and grandmothers - is good. Anything short of actually brutal rape, after all, the woman wants. The poor are that way because they choose to be, too. Vae victis (woe to the vanquished). Et cetera.

Sorry, but that is NOT the Protestant Work Ethic of the German. That's the Mediterranean ethic of Arab and the Moor, where kings, sheiks, and royalty still flourish, still enslave as many as they can, and measure their supposed greatness and worth in those terms. It's historian Quigley's Iran-Peru Axis, where patronage and strong-man government has long had the same result.

During my lifetime, lamentably, I've watched as the nation that is the U.S. - Land of the Free - changed its Germanic Sisyphus to the Greek, Mediterranean, Arab one. To work all day for a lifetime has become a definition for hell. One does not work, one has a "career." "Success" is to gain ascendancy over others by any means possible, in order to have them working for you. Slavery, once hated enough to fight and die in civil war over, now is a matter of justification. Peonage is moral. Slavery isn't.

A man in the same conditions as a slave once was - even if he eats less and lives in worse squalor - is no longer a slave, his master no longer a slaver, because he is paid something.

Today's Horatio Alger - remember him? Rags to Riches? - dreams of being a sheik, a king. To labor, to sweat, after all, is unbecoming, even "un-American." No young lady dreams of marrying (were she to do so equally a demeaning thing) a man who earns his living with his muscles or physical skills.

Even the definition of male has changed. The "metrosexuality" of Leonardo diCaprio has supplanted the masculinity of John Wayne. Today's nubile woman dreams of a "sensitive" man, one dominated by his need to give her a life of financially secure ease. Fancying his mind more than his body, she considers his clothes, his car, and his income before his physique. In society, to take a lady's hand nowadays with a calloused one all but invariably signals the end of the "relationship."

Some years ago, parenthetically, a survey I did revealed that seventy-six of one hundred people younger than twenty didn't know what a callus was. Not long ago, a commercial (inadvertently) pointed out that grade-schoolers did not aspire to work - which was "failure."

In short, in the Home of the Brave, where men once demanded only to be left alone to work, the masculine republic has given way to the feminine democracy. One the hallmark of the society, the male spirit of individual independence has given way to the female spirit of social and group dependence. A people who once considered government dependent upon them now depend upon government. Once willing, eager to work, we now look for someone to work for us.

Poet Carl Sandburg's "big, brawling," hard-working nation of the big shoulders is now the chintzy, limp-wristed nation of consumers.

Almost daily now, we are told that illegal aliens are a great benefit to the nation, because they will do work U.S. citizens won't. And who can rationally argue when the same apologists say that corporate capitalists - the U.S. version of the Mediterranean kings, sheiks, patrons, and strong-man rulers - need the workers their kind have always exploited?

Of course, I see these things because I have been watching for a very long time, lived before all the changes started. I know how it was, and see how it is. Time was, in just about every society, ever, that that kind of knowledge was something sought ardently, sometimes even desperately, by the young. No more. Today, the study of history has gone the way of hard work and the callus. Siegfried and Lohengrin are no longer the archetypical male, the hero of legend. The Democratic Capitalism of the Protestant Work Ethic has given way to that of the despotic Mediterranean Ethic.

The Germanic Sisyphus has become the Greek.