The Top Ten Myths

The other day I received in the mail a flyer from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Without mentioning their own candidate for Congress in my district, the Committee attacked the Republican candidate by linking him with “George W. Bush’s failed economic policies.” I could not contain a chuckle as the flyer lamented “high gas prices” and “higher property taxes,” supposedly caused by the conservative, “anti-middle class” policies of the Bush administration.

This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the mythology that will no doubt be regurgitated this week at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The spin and propaganda mill will be working overtime to package His Highness for public consumption.

When confronting the output of that mill, it is important to keep in mind that the Obama phenomenon did not appear out of nowhere, like a summer thunderstorm passing through an otherwise clear day. It is the result of decades of sociopolitical deterioration, based on a comprehensive ideology of anti-Western collectivism.

In this light, I thought it would be a useful exercise to remind ourselves what exactly is at the root of this ideology. Below are what I believe to be the top ten myths underlying the structure. No doubt I will have left something out; I welcome additions (and of course suggested revisions) in the comments to this post.

1. Feminism has helped women. The feminization of the West is arguably at the core of our deterioration. The damage it has caused is incalculable, first and foremost by rending the fabric of the nuclear family. It has reduced an entire generation of women to a state of chronic frustration, bitterness, vindictiveness, and dysfunctionality.

The assumptions of feminism have seeped into the rhetoric to become unassailable maxims. The fact that able-bodied men are on the run, as it were—hounded and pilloried—is one of the most shameful spectacles I have witnessed in my lifetime. If only Aristophanes knew that his parody Ecclesiazusae would one day become reality.

2. The environment is on the verge of destruction. Someone should do a study of Global Warming ideologues, to uncover the factors that have rendered them capable of disseminating such wild hysteria. Was it their dumbed-down education that tipped the scales? Exposure during childhood to Marxist ideology? Pathological aversion to freedom?

Or was it that the dire predictions of an earlier era—when air and water pollution really were suffocating many of our cities—failed to materialize? Lo and behold, the capitalist-imperialist-war-mongers solved the problem all by themselves, rationally and calmly. In such circumstances, a good, solid myth is needed to terrorize the public, who would otherwise shift its concern to other issues.

3. Islam is just another religion. This is the one of the most dangerous myths in a larger conglomeration, that of multiculturalism. The most obvious fact in all of history is that cultures are not equal. They have different assumptions, beliefs, values, goals, and methods. “Islam is just another religion” is another way of saying “I don’t want to deal with the tough issues involved here.” This is a typical reaction to a major historical shift, one whose implications are as daunting as they are deep.

A sub-species of this fallacy is the assertion that only “radical” Islam is the problem. President Bush helped inculcate this wishful thinking with his “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra. As it turns out, the problem is Islam, tout court. It must be put back in the box, and kept at a great distance from our lives.

For further discussion of this myth, see my post on Mark Steyn’s America Alone.

4. Poverty is caused by profits. In spite of the enormous wealth produced over centuries by the free market, it is a persistent belief that economics is a zero-sum game: If one man profits, another loses. This myth is so ingrained that a business can open a branch in a poverty-stricken region, provide jobs for thousands, turn the local economy around, and still you can find critics harping about the salaries of top management, said to be earned at the expense of the workers.

Related to this is the myth that “everything is economic.” I will treat this separately in an upcoming post.

5. The agenda of the Left is progressive. Even those who admit that implementation of the Left’s agenda would not be practical wax sentimental as they expound upon some glorious future that awaits us. They declare “how wonderful it would be” as an angelic smile creeps across their lips, and their eyes glaze over.

This myth is caused partially by an unflinching belief that the cutting edge of the contemporary “intellectual elite” is by definition the apex of human evolution.

6. The United Nations is a force for peace. The post-WWII international order has been marred by this clubhouse for the world’s despots. While certain UN operations led by the United States could be considered beneficial, the overall record has been one of cynical corruption. The most egregious and longstanding example may be UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees), which has been a full partner in the advent and prolongation of the “Palestinian” scandal—the ex nihilo creation of “refugees” out of ordinary Arabs who were displaced following their compatriots’ invasion of Israel in 1948.

The UN myth is the handmaiden of another: The belief that only international organizations can “save” us. This dangerous notion is spread by those who think that such anti-democratic bodies must save the world from—you guessed it—the evil West.

7. The Third World is oppressed by the West. This is related to the previous myth. Its adherents are constantly upping the ante in their claims for redress, including reparations and mass atonement. This, despite the fact that the “oppressed” are at this moment colonizing Western Europe and a large swath of North America.

8. Fascism and conservatism are just different points on the same continuum. See my post about Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism for a full discussion of this myth.

9. Man is nothing but an animal. The dominant trend in Western thought since the French Revolution has stripped man of his spirit, his soul, and his connection to the long train of intellectual history; in other words, of all the unique qualities that make him human. This world view received a boost from various schools of psychology in the twentieth century, notably behavioralism. Theorists such as B. F. Skinner propagated the myth that man is little more than the sum of his nerve synapses. By virtue of its contribution to the degradation of Western culture, this thinking has indeed moved man closer to an animal state.

10. “Abstract art” is art. Beethoven’s ninth symphony, the paintings of Vermeer, and the Parthenon of Athens are examples of artistic accomplishment that are second to none in world history. The anti-art rebellion, now fully institutionalized in the West, has brought this mighty heritage to its knees. Our aesthetic consciousness has been degraded almost beyond repair. We expect garbage, and we get it.

Lurking behind this phenomenon is the myth that an explosion of purely subjective, personal, and animalistic feeling, manifested in some visual or auditory media, is art. The “educated” segment of the population is under the spell of this myth, even if their personal taste, their gut feeling, often tells them that something is awry.

The role of the arts in the formation of society is not to be underestimated. As the great classicist Werner Jaeger wrote in 1939:

It is usually through artistic expression that the highest values of mankind acquire permanent significance and the force which moves mankind. Art has a limitless power of converting the human soul—a power which the Greeks called psychagogia. For art alone possesses the two essentials of educational influence—universal significance and immediate appeal. By uniting these two methods of influencing the mind, it surpasses both philosophical thought and actual life. Life has immediate appeal, but the events of life lack universal significance: they have too many accidental accompaniments to create a truly deep and lasting impression on the soul. Philosophy and abstract thought do attain to universal significance: they deal with the essence of things; yet they affect none but the man who can use his own experience to inspire them with the vividness and intensity of personal life. Thus, poetry….is more philosophical than life (if we may use Aristotle’s famous epigram in a wider sense), but it is also, because of its concentrated spiritual actuality, more lifelike than philosophy.

[Quote taken from Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (trans. G. Highet), New York, Oxford University Press, 1939, 2nd ed., vol. 1, pp 36-37.]