Saturday 19 June 2021

White Males Are To Blame

So many of the ills of the present day are laid at the door of white males who are said to have usurped power and suppressed everybody else, women, non-white people, even nature itself. In fact, white males are accused of being responsible for most of the evil in the world.

I agree. The horrors of today were created by white males.

But perhaps we are talking about different things. What I blame white males for is not usurping power. Generally speaking, the power they have, they themselves created. No, my finger is pointing at them for a different reason.

It was white males who produced materialism and atheism which came to a head in communism. It was white males who exalted reason over everything else and in the process detached us from the fundamental truths of our humanity. It was white males who were the first to reject God and raise materialistic science to be a new god in place of the divine so cutting off all people from their spiritual roots. It was white males who promoted consumerism and pillaged the natural world for mercenary purposes.

But that is largely because no one else was good enough to do these things as is proved by the fact that practically everybody else has happily jumped on board. White males were the pioneers of a new way of being. The modern world is not a mistake as in the Traditionalist view so much as a necessary development in consciousness that has been hijacked and taken down the wrong path. Human beings were meant to grow into a new phase of being in which they became masters of themselves and of the world. This required the growth of science and of reason and greater emphasis on the individual self. Unfortunately, this growth became one-sided and failed to incorporate spiritual elements as it should have done.

If we go back to the 17th century which marks the ascendancy of white males over everyone else we find that most other parts of the world from India to China and elsewhere had settled into a kind of spiritual apathy and material decay if not decadence. The only fresh impetus to growth, exploration and development was in the West, whether that be Europe or North America. The white males created a new world which carried humanity forwards into the modern age. This was an intended part of the evolution of consciousness, bringing human beings greater self-determination, understanding and awareness of the world and of themselves. But it was a two-edged sword. This new awareness and agency could lead to great new heights or it could result in massive spiritual loss if it was directed towards its own self-fulfilment without acknowledging transcendent reality. It could lead to conscious union with God (eventually) or alienation and despair if pursued without intelligence. 

So please do blame white males but realise that somebody had to do this and they were the best available. Without them we would still be stuck in the past. Their sins are many but their virtues, whether of imagination, intellectual curiosity, pioneering spirit, inventiveness, energy, courage and, yes, even intelligence are also many. They have created unimagined (by others) new things and new understandings but they have also had the defects of their qualities and allowed themselves to be misled by their own  hubris and pride far too often.

And they continue to be at the forefront of so much that is wrong in the world. On the other hand, I don't see anyone else who is willing or capable of rectifying their errors other than white males themselves. As far as I can see, they represent the best and worst of humanity at the moment. If anyone is going to save the world from its disastrous decisions my money is principally on white males.

2 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@William - Well argued and persuasive!

The big problem with atheism/ materialism turns-out to be that (once solidly established and sustained by culture) it causes such severe mental incapacity, that the usual learning and self-corrective 'mechanisms' no longer work. Steiner seemed to understand this in an explicit way - https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/search?q=steiner+atheism -- but I think that it was also evident to some prophetic souls from many hundreds, or thousands, of years ago - which perhaps led to the idea of End Times when the world entered a positive-feedback state in which sin leads to more sin (rather than repentance).

William Wildblood said...

I wonder whether the sort of souls that would succumb to atheism/materialism because of their innate nature are being born in more frequency now. I would even speculate that souls that have failed the test before either here or elsewhere are being given another chance. I do feel this is a gathering in time and summing up of a cycle.