Read the article here: What happens when white men realize that their perspective isn’t the only one that matters
With this column by David Berry, The National Post provides a vivid example of the sort of content that is causing thinking people to abandon mainstream media in droves. The kind of ego based virtue-signalling and fashionably conformist pontificating that constitutes Berry’s oeuvre is taking up more and more media real estate that used to be occupied by well-reasoned, historically contextualized insight.
What is the point of this column other than to provide us with the opportunity to admire the flawlessness of David Berry’s conformity to the ‘progressive’, politically-fashionable, anti-Western, anti-male, anti-white, anti-heterosexual, anti-intellectual orthodoxy?
In other words, this column does not provide any insight into the objective world. It merely provides an insight into David Berry’s subjectivity.
He writes: “The only people who got to define humanity were white guys: they were the only ones who could own things, who could hold political power, who could have their thoughts listened to. Even as more people fought for some kind of basic recognition — the right not to be treated as chattel, the right to vote, the right to not face state-sponsored discrimination — the (straight) white male notion of ourselves didn’t really change.”
This is really nothing more than a context-free, ideologically biased, ‘progressive’ narrative clumsily grafted onto the evolution of Western culture. Not only is it appallingly self-indulgent and ignorant – it requires approaching history with an excruciatingly narrow focus and a flair for selective reasoning to deliver an interpretation of the past that so exquisitely mirrors the currently fashionable ‘progressive’ worldview.
It is also logically incoherent and self-contradictory. If it’s true that ‘white guys’ believed that only they should ‘define reality’, how does Berry account for the success of all the social movements that he alludes to? Isn’t it more likely that demands for recognition made by women, different ethnic groups and other minority interests would be quickly and decisively silenced if Berry’s version of a society in which white males enforced a totalitarian regime based on their gender and race was accurate?
We only need to look at how European, white male dominated civilization handled these issues and compare it with how non-European, ‘non-white’, male dominated societies have handled them. It becomes immediately clear that European civilization is the ONLY one in which principles of equality, universal human rights, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights etc. arose, were fostered, were enshrined and flourished.
If ‘white males’ were the tyrants compulsively driven to protect their hold on power and privilege as Berry insists, why did they not simply use their power to crush any and all challenges to their societal dominance… just like every other male-dominated society did and continues to do?
For example, how do women, gays, religious and ethnic minority communities fair in most Middle Eastern countries when and if they have the courage to demand equality?
I think we all know the answer….not so well.
Let me suggest what is really happening here. You see, there are two things that people who are attracted to a ‘progressive’/Left worldview hate. The first thing is truth. The second thing is context.
The overwhelming priority for all ‘progressives’ is ensuring the dominance of conceptual-constructs which appeal to their egos. That’s all they care about. ‘Truth’ just gets in the way of them believing what they would prefer to believe. And ‘context’ gets in the way of appearing to others like they know what they’re talking about.
So let me fill-in a little truth and context.
It is true that Western civilization – like all major civilizations – was until very recently, predominantly male-centric. The causal factors for this are primarily biology, practicality and the unguided unfolding of history. It was not a plot. It was not a conspiracy against women or anyone else. It was evolution. It was the natural development of our species and it ensured our survival and prosperity. To put it bluntly, women made babies and men made civilizations. THAT is why every single major civilization in history – wherever it arose on the globe – was dominated by men. It’s what men do. PERIOD.
It is bad enough that arrogant and poorly informed people like David Berry excoriate the people who invented civilization for the unforgivable crime of also running the thing they were creating.
But we cross into the realm of hallucinatory perception when they single out the one civilization in human history which gave rise to democracy, universal human rights, multiculturalism, freedom of expression, freedom of religious belief, the abolition of slavery etc….. and vilify its men as preternaturally intolerant and pathologically compelled to suppress the perspective of anyone but themselves.
The fact is that our’s is the one male created, male dominated society out of all the others in which men actively and continuously relinquished an exclusive claim to “define humanity”.
In other words – it’s the exact opposite of the delusional – but impeccably ‘progressive’ – version of reality advanced by David Berry.
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