British intellectuals loathe Britain

Self-hatred is neither attractive nor constructive. It is not only insincere but unjustified

The British, Dalrymple writes,

are fortunate enough to be the inheritors of a tradition as great as (though not necessarily greater than) any. Why reject it?

He writes from India, where he says

it is far easier to find genuine and knowledgeable admirers of British culture than it is among Britain’s own political class. This is the saddest commentary on the condition of England.

In Great Britain, says Dalrymple, you find

officially-sponsored indifference or hostility to anything which might be considered part of the European and British cultural and religious heritage.

This is combined with

a tender regard for any non-European and non-British cultural heritage.

For example,

no British minister would go to Brick Lane in East London and say it was horribly Bangladeshi; but a British minister had no compunction in complaining of an institution that it was horribly white.

English intellectuals, Dalrymple points out,

have long harboured a hatred of their country and its culture. The attitude has deeply infiltrated the political class, and has come to affect legislation.

Moral exhibitionism

But it is

insincere. Those who adopt it are not admirers of other cultures, for to admire other cultures it is necessary to study them. To know another culture is not a matter of slipping down once in a while to a restaurant that serves its cuisine: it is very hard work indeed, and the more different that culture is from one’s own, the harder the work it is.

When members of Britain’s political class express their adherence to multiculturalism,

they are not expressing their love of other cultures, they are expressing hatred of their own. It is this which explains the discrepancy in the way a Christian who derides Islam can expect to be treated by comparison with a Muslim who derides Christianity.

The hatred of that section of the political class for their country’s culture, traditions and past is insincere in another sense, Dalrymple notes.

By expressing that hatred, they imagine themselves to be exhibiting their moral superiority for all the world — and especially the intelligentsia — to see.

Rubbing their noses in diversity

Another factor in the political class’s hatred of their culture is that it is politically advantageous. Mass immigration,

with the concomitant ideological glorification of the multicultural society, has had as its purpose the production of a permanent change in the nature of the British population, which can be relied upon to vote for ever for the kind of politicians who brought it about. It is one thing to encourage immigration because your commerce is so strong that there is a labour shortage; quite another when neither of those conditions obtains. Britain’s commerce was never strong and there never was a labour shortage. The country imported people while there was still mass unemployment (disguised as sickness) to create a vote bank for those who brought this about.

Why young occidentals hate

Cretinous iconoclasm

Youth in the West, writes Dalrymple, is deliberately kept from any deeper knowledge of civilisation by the

ideological self-hatred that has been so strong a current of Western intellectual life for the last three or more decades, that precludes any pedagogic affirmation of the Western tradition.

This self-denigration

explains in part the kind of hatred (and contempt) that young Muslims feel. Not only does the ideological self-hatred of Western intellectuals prevent them from learning anything of the Western tradition, other than Radio One and McDonald’s, but it supplies them with the tropes with which to justify their pre-existing anger and violence.

Dalrymple notes that the self-hatred of Western intellectuals

is not genuine or sincere: they do not really want to beat our supermarkets into souks, as swords into ploughshares. Rather, the intellectual’s expression of self-hatred is directed at other Western intellectuals, to prove the self-hater’s broadness of mind, moral superiority and lack of prejudice. It is not only rebellious youth who experience peer pressure; and anyone who pointed out, for example, that for a very long time now the Western medical tradition has been incomparably superior to all other medical traditions in the world combined and multiplied a thousandfold, would forfeit approval, even though what he said was true, and obviously so.

Barbarism

Insincere ideas can become official orthodoxies, with very real consequences. The Muslims of the West

are hardly to blame if they do not realise that the posturings of our intellectuals are not intended to be taken literally. When Western intellectuals express no admiration for or appreciation of the cultural achievements of their civilisation’s past, when only denigration and iconoclasm appear to advance an intellectual’s career, when moral stature is measured by the vehemence of denunciation of past or present abuses, real or imagined, it is hardly surprising that Muslims conclude that the West is eminently hateful; it must be, because it hates itself. They haven’t heard of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.

The insincere play with fire

Those who claim to hate and despise themselves

will very soon be taken at their word by others, particularly by those who believe themselves to be in possession of an all-embracing creed. Far from promoting reconciliation and tolerance, therefore, multiculturalism breeds contempt, hatred and violence.

No attempt, writes Dalrymple, is ever made to explain the West’s hitherto overwhelming superiority in many fields

except by reference to injustice, exploitation and colonial depredation. That the phenomenal and unique inventiveness of the West might be connected in some way with its long philosophical and cultural development, going back to ancient Greece, is a thought that is never for a moment entertained.

In the mental world of many young people in the West, and especially Muslims,

the difference in the wealth of nations is the result of plunder, not invention and innovation, to be redressed by more effective plunder in the opposite direction.

No attempts are made at school to induct young people into the tradition of Western civilisation,

for fear of offending their parents’ cultural sensibilities if they are, say, Muslim; though no more efforts in that direction are made on behalf of kafir youth. Both kafir and Muslims enjoy the fruit without ever knowing the tree. They are like the East End boys of old, who thought that milk came in bottles because they had never seen or heard of cows.

Hirsi Ali versus Islamism’s fellow travellers

Proselytiser for the European Enlightenment view of the world

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, says Dalrymple, is right to insist

that a profound change in the relations between the sexes is the key to Muslim integration into Western society.

For many young Muslim men in the West, Dalrymple points out,

a powerful appeal of Islam is the sanction that it gives to their domination of women. This domination provides them an ex officio source of self-satisfaction that discourages further effort, and simultaneously deprives their society of the talents of women. The natural result is material and intellectual failure by comparison with other religious groups; and disappointment leads to morbid hypersensitivity to criticism, insensate rage and the blaming of others.

Many in the West,

from a combination of fear and self-hatred, are unwilling to make the distinction between a respect for the right of people to practise a religion within the law, and an exaggerated respect for the religion itself. Hirsi Ali rightfully pours scorn on the fellow travellers of obscurantism.