What's the Alternative to the Left's Program?
I was reading the blog of Daniel Greenfield, undoubtedly a great writer and an acute analyst of what is wrong in today's world.
But, the more I was reading, the more I felt a sense of dissatisfaction, as you may have when drinking doesn't quench your thirst but paradoxically increases it.
Then I discovered what it was. There was something missing: a conclusion.
We -- the counterjihadists, the "Islamophobes", the conservatives, the "right wing" -- have many excellent thinkers and commentators (of whom Greenfield is an example) who are good in the pars destruens, the critical, negative part, of our arguments; but not enough who develop a pars construens, the constructive part that builds the positive alternative to what we are criticising.
This dearth of a firm propositive aspect in our positions is common to all Western countries.
The reason, I dare say, is simple. There is among us a widespread fear or unease in proposing a kind of society espousing ideas and values (some of which from the past) that have been ruthlessly, thoroughly mauled and massacred by the Left.
We are, probably without realizing, the first victims of Leftist indoctrination. We may reject those ideas rationally, but deep down, emotionally, we have doubts. The Left’s are the views we grew up with, they permeated our culture, were ideologically dominant when we were teenagers and young adults. Our favourite bands endorsed them and were selling them with their records and their lives: sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.
At university, both professors and students were full of them; who thought differently was a pariah.
The most fashionable authors were Marxists of various kinds, from Freudian Marxists to the Frankfurt School.
It would be totally unrealistic to think that an individual can go through all that brainwashing, peer pressure and gentle persuasion by his pop idols without taking with him a persistent scar, a lifelong influence on his mind.
So, when we slowly -- it took a very long, long time -- realised that those ideas (that for want of a better word I'll shorthandedly call "Leftist") were simply wrong, that they didn't correspond to reality -- didn't "save the phenomena" as an obscure scientist named Sir Isaac Newton, among others, put it -- and their acceptance and practical application were destroying both individuals and societies, we found our voice in denouncing them and their manfestations.
What we didn't find in equal measure was the audacity, the resolve to recover and repropose the beliefs and principles that preceded the Leftist ones, and which the Left with its atheism and political correctness had demolished in our eyes.
No matter how much the world around us -- in our surroundings, streets and urban ghettos as well as in faraway lands -- was collapsing, there were words like "defending family values" or "sexual morality" or "not all religions are the same/religion can be a force for good" we just couldn't bring ourselves to utter.
We need to reclaim the convictions supplanted by Leftist barbarism. We mustn't be afraid to say that the alternative to Islam is Christianity, the answer to sexual relativism, pansexualism, radical feminism, and homosexualism is in the Judaeo-Christian civilization, and that the West can survive only if it reasserts its identity as Christendom.
This is the constructive, propositive part that at the moment is largely missing from the anti-jihad and conservative public discourse.
It's not enough to correctly identify what's wrong. If we don't have a positive recipe on how to fix it, we'll lose to those who have a proposal, however abysmal.
Enza Ferreri is an Italian-born, London-based Philosophy graduate, author and journalist. She has been a London correspondent for several Italian magazines and newspapers, including Panorama, L’Espresso, La Repubblica. She is in the Executive Council of the UK’s party Liberty GB.
She blogs at www.enzaferreri.blogspot.co.uk.