WebsterMark
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Interesting review of a book from Jonah Goldberg’, “Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.”
Jonah Goldberg is from the National Review and is no fan of Trump so maybe you leftist will keep reading as he’s something of a Benedict Arnold to us on the Right.
Homo sapiens are between 200,000 and 300,000 years old. Yet the modern world, with all the conveniences that we take for granted (I wrote this article sitting on a plane 8 kilometers above ground, using an internet connection provided by a satellite orbiting 37,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth), is merely 250 years old. Put differently, for the first 99.9 percent of our time on earth, progress was painfully slow. Then everything suddenly changed.
The Miracle emerged, probably by chance and after hundreds of years of trial and error, in the splendidly quirky island of Great Britain. It then spread, however imperfectly, into other parts of the world.
I’ve not read the book but knowing Goldberg, I assume The Miracle is a combination of freedom and capitalism that unleashed the creative human mind.
I believe that, conceptually, we have reached the end of history. We are at the summit, and at this altitude [political] left and right lose most of their meaning. Because when you are at the top of the mountain, any direction you turn – be it left toward socialism or right toward nationalism … the result is the same: You must go down, back whence you came.”
True? Have we gone as far as we can go? In the book of Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel relates a method God used to prevent mankind from advancing. His method was language which instantly divided people into groups. Over time we’ve found ways to overcome language differences and now basically the entire world can communicate. So here’s a thought just popped into my head this Sunday morning, is identity politics a new version of the Tower of Babel? It’s a way that blocks us from communicating. I don’t understand antifa rioters, militant transgenders, BLM fanatics anymore that I would understand someone speaking Greek.
Is identity politics our Tower of Babel?
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