Islam versus Europe

A couple of month's ago I read Steven Pinker's book, "The Blank Slate". I had been meaning to write a review of it because it germane to the topics covered on this blog, even if only indirectly. Since Ed West gave an overview of the book on his blog recently, calling it "perhaps the most important book to be published in this still young century", I won't bother summarising it in detail. Just read his account instead.

I will only make a few additional comments about it. It is clear that the denial of human nature is the essence of the left-wing levelling project that first surfaced in the French revolution has been continuing its destructive work ever since, achieving a demonic ascendancy in the aftermath of World War Two. Reacting to the spectacle of a society filled with dramatic economic inequalities, the philosophes concluded that inherited privilege explained all the differences between men, not inborn talent. Only different life experiences made one man turn out a confidently articulate, intellectual aristocrat and another a bumbling peasant. Change their life experiences and you would change their life outcomes. Everything is a social construct. People are all basically the same. These were some of the seminal ideas of the Jacobin project. They have borne the most atrocious fruit in our own time. Because, of course, it follows that if people are all essentially the same and are simply shaped by their life experiences, there's no need to confine yourself to Europe for your raw material. Ship in any number of Africans and Asians, put them through the European education system and their blank slate minds will be imprinted with the government's desired message. That criminally naive idea is the cardinal folly underlying both the Islamisation of Europe and the European Genocide more generally.

Pinker shows how the Jacobin religion of equality has infected and even dominated whole spheres of scientific research in recent times. Openly avowed Marxists would inject their political prejudice into what should have been a dispassionate quest for truth. Dissenters would be branded as Nazis, mobbed, vilified and hounded from their jobs.

While Pinker does a good job of skewering political correctness in the sciences generally, it's notable that he tiptoes around the issue of race, caving in to approved orthodoxy there himself. Still, the book is well worth reading.