"ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 2010 HUMAN CHARACTER CHANGED"

This has been reprinted with permission from Jack Wheeler of To The Point News. I subscribe to his newsletter as a source of good intelligence and fascinating reading and encourage you to consider the same. Go here to sign up.

Jack makes the point that not only should we turn over Congress in 2010, but we should use the momentum we now have to roll back the entire destructive Leftist enterprise. For example, stop supporting "art" that isn't. Stop supporting movies, books and news columns that trash America and promote immorality. Bring to an end the Cultural Marxists' efforts to destroy our culture. In addition to excising the leftists from politics, an even more important task is to remove them from their dominance of popular culture. Let's take this opportunity to get rid of their destructive influence once and for all, and take back the country we know and love!


"ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 2010 HUMAN CHARACTER CHANGED"

By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Those who suffered through being an English major in college may recognize the literary referent.

In an essay written in 1924 entitled "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," the English author Virginia Woolf makes the following comment:

"On or about December, 1910, human character changed. . . . All human relations have shifted-those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910."

The liberal craziness of our day - whether in religion, conduct, politics, literature, or art - is often sourced to that period of cultural insanity known as The Sixties, with its LSD-addled hippies, student riots, the hate-America radicalization of the media, academia, and the Democrat Party, and other such lunatic catastrophes.

But the Sixties had antecedents, which can be traced back to the emergence of a movement called modernism. Virginia Woolf and her "Bloomsbury Group" (named after the London neighborhood where she and its initial members lived) considered themselves founders of the movement, pegging its unveiling at a 1910 London exhibition of "modern art" held by the Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roger Fry.

Modernism and its efflorescence "post-modernism" is a world-view based on the rejection of rationality and objective reality. There is no such thing as truth - it's all a matter of opinion - so of what use is reason as an attempt to discern something that doesn't exist? It quickly follows there is no such thing as objective standards of morality or anything else.

In art, depiction of reality degenerated into grotesque distortion (see Picasso), then meaningless blobs of splattered paint that anyone's four year-old daughter could make (see Pollock), then the very definition of art as "the desire to destroy beauty" (quote by abstract painter Barnett Newman).

In literature, plots, narration, and characters were replaced by unintelligible "streams of consciousness" (see Virginia Woolf or James Joyce). In music, classical rhythm and melody were replaced by atonal dissonance (try listening to Schoenberg). In philosophy and politics, realism and capitalism were replaced by relativism and Marxist fascism.

Typical excrescences of modernism have been arrogant sneering at "bourgeois morality" with a flaunting of homosexuality and promiscuity (rampant in the Bloomsbury Group); arrogant sneering at any and all values of Western Civilization, with sympathy or spying for the Soviet Union, or now Moslem terrorists*, as a result; and the racist, sexist hatred of gender feminists who blame all the ills of society on heterosexual white men.

(*The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928-2007, heralded as "one of the great visionaries of 20th century music," proclaimed the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001 was "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.")

One hundred years of all this lunacy is enough. So here's a modest proposal.

All decent Americans can now hardly wait for the November 2010 mid-term elections to inflict a devastating defeat on the Democrats, with Pelosi and Reid and Waxman and Murtha et al thrown out of power and the current occupant of the White House humiliatingly regarded as a one-term lame duck loser.

Well, that's fine and dandy, looking forward to it - but how about something a tad more ambitious? Something like using the mid-term Dem Debacle as a springboard for junking the entire liberal intellectual agenda.

Doesn't that sound refreshing? Realism in the arts instead of smart-aleck pretentiousness, a confidence in the existence of independent reality instead of pretending it doesn't, pride in bourgeois values of personal responsibility and love of family, an assertion that not all cultures are morally equal - that ours, for example, is in objective fact morally superior to one that enslaves Tibet or imprisons infibulated women in burqas.

This will not be done overnight. It was Italian (actually Sardinian-Albanian) Marxist-Leninist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) who designed the liberal agenda as a "long march through the institutions," steadily seizing ideological control over education, entertainment, the arts, literature, politics, and all other aspects of a culture.

So let's begin our long march through the institutions 100 years after the Left began theirs - beginning with attacking the Left's denial of human nature.

Virginia Woolf could claim that "human character changed" in 1910 because cultural institutions had changed - that is, for the Left, human nature is a "social construct," a "product of the environment." There is only "nurture," there is no "nature" for humans, who thus can be molded like putty into what fascists and bureaucrats desire.

100 years ago, the Woolfs and Gramscis could make that claim. By now, there are overwhelming amounts of evidence from multiple sciences - neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, to name a few - that refute the Left's claim of cultural relativism and demonstrate that there is a universal human nature wired by our common evolution as a species into our genes and present in all human cultures without exception.

Anthropologist Donald Brown has identified over 200 such Human Universals present in all cultures. In addition to basics like use of fire or language with grammar, every human culture on earth has hairstyles, dances, jokes, meal times, rape and proscriptions against it, tickling, proverbs, toys, marriage, gossip, art, music, inheritance rules, feasting... it goes on and on and on.

Armed with this irrefutable array of evidence of a universal human identity - and thus a universal human morality in accordance with it - we can launch a devastating counter-attack on "multi-culti" liberal relativism. We can drive home the reality that Liberalism and all forms of Marxist leftism are anti-human because they deny a common human identity.

The first step in this process is for the Town Hall/Tea Party folks to get this into the thick skulls of Republican politicians. This week (9/01), the best political pollster in the business, Rasmussen, found that a majority (55%) of Republican voters think Republicans in Congress are too liberal - and an overwhelming majority (84%) believe that their Congressistas should not sell out and work with Zero in the name of "bipartisanship."

The message of Republican voters is clear: no more RINOs! With that, Dem political power can be demolished, and we can begin the task of demolishing 100 years of Marxist cultural-intellectual-political insanity with a resurgence of rationality.

Then, perhaps by 2024 some brilliant young conservative intellectual will observe that "On or about December 2010, human character changed" back to what it always was after a century of Marxist perversion, and that Ronald Reagan's prediction that Marxism would end up on the ash heap of history had at last culturally come true.

[Note: For a devastatingly comprehensive and enjoyable refutation of liberal myths regarding our species, see The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Stephen Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.]

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