While not an admirer of the uber-liberal director Sydney Pollack, nor the muzzy-headed fin de siecle romanticism of Isak Dinesen (Karen von Blixen-Finecke), I was reminded of certain poignant passages of her memoir Out of Africa during consideration of the intense spotlight being shed by certain media organizations on Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright and his anti-American tirades, which have recently come to broader public scrutiny. This train of thought led me to ponder the phenomenon of black Liberation Theology as we find it in churches across the country, its relationship to black Christianity in the U.S. in general terms, as well as the possibilities for the adoption of “Kinism” by blacks more specifically. The memoir casts an interesting light on the contemporary conversation (argument) concerning the place of the descendants of Africans in modern Western civilization, and how deep the roots of race and culture go -perhaps even to the core of what we are as humans. Certainly that is the position we take as Kinists.

In the memoir, which I will admit is nonetheless occasionally very stirring, the Baroness von Blixen-Finecke (Karen) says of her coffee farm, and I paraphrase, “Everywhere I turn it keeps trying to go wild on me,” whereupon the character (and the story’s “love interest") named Dennis Finch Hadden -an old style “free thinker"- answers, saying, “It will go wild, you know.” [cf. Chesterton on “free thinkers."]

The connection to the topic of blacks in the U.S. and Liberation Theology is just this: the African and his descendant is a very different creature than the white man. Just like his continent, he is always one step away from “going wild,” that is, returning to the state in which we found him. And in that state of nature, he is finally and irrevocably incompatible with European civilization in its purest and best form. To the extent the black man is found, de facto, to be in some degree compatible with the modern civilization of the West is the same degree to which that civilization must be found to have degenerated from the paradigm of its ancestral forebears. While it is admittedly parochial to judge the African’s civilization with the judgment that we do, we can have no other judgment. There is no universal judgment apart from God’s. Still, we judge it with OUR values, derived from OUR past and say, “it is a brutal and sorry state.” It is the height of imperialistic folly to pretend that we are able to “elevate” the African or his descendant, that is, to make him white. The Jim Crow solutions of the past to racial and cultural diversity trafficked in such illusions.

Paternalistic and pitying, as any Southerner worth his salt will confess, did not Jim Crow, beyond the pragmatism of security it underwrote, serve also to highlight what is ultimately irreconcilable among men, and what must be set aside as penultimate (never to say trivial), if men who cannot live together, for reasons rooted both in history and, perhaps, in biology, are to have spiritual commerce with one another?  Whether indeed such “elevation” of the descendants of Africans that we secretly flatter ourselves we undertake is an improvement of the black man is a question not for men immersed in the properly involuntary values of their respective cultures, but a question that transcends them, the answer to which is known only to God. Within the context of white culture, based in the tattered remnants of the Western form of Christianity, it is possible for men to improve. To make a black man more white, if it is even achievable, is not to improve him, it is to make of him a monstrosity. And though it is a harsh truth to acknowledge, the black man in the U.S. is marooned, a civilizational orphan. He is no longer fully African, but he can never be, nor should he want to be white. The opposite is equally true. But when you look to our youth culture, the uneasy tension between the black kitsch of the cultural marketplace and real back identity is easily apparent.

If we have learned anything in the study of history it is this: the struggle for cultural dominance can never be abridged. It will always to some degree be present, whether prominent or not, whether visible or not. The kulturkampf is part and parcel of what it means to participate in, and be a product of a culture. That is, to believe it is best, to take it seriously, to see it as flowing from the deep fountains of identity, not from the artificial, corporate identifications of the cosmopolitan cultural marketplace, where all cultures are equally accessible to everyone for the simple reason that they are all equally superficial, all equally make-believe. If we did not have powerful reasons for believing the culture in which we found ourselves was best, then it could not survive. Rather, it should be said that it did not survive. The culture of critique has supplanted it. We live in as much a post-cultural era as a post-Christian one. To the extent that culture is real and healthy, culture is known beyond doubt to be best. Men do not die for what is arbitrary.

Culture flows from religion, it is a product of the cultus. To the extent that culture is real and not fictional, it cannot be adopted as one might adopt a figure of speech or a particular style of dress. And to the extent that there are real religious differences, the cultures they fund are incompatible. Beyond religion there are the influences of historical memory and biology itself. As Mark Twain wrote, the past isn’t even past, but Western paternalism will make it past if it can, in order to make unlike things like for the sake of a secular salvation whose source is man himself. This was the great sin of Babylon, not that it built a tower too proud and too lofty.

It is only the modern society in which values become a choice, and judgments of cultural fittingness (or fitness) are matters of much reflection. That is when men have already lost their way, that is already when men can never “return home,” just as Karen von Blixen-Finecke never really returned from Africa. But in seeing Africa in situ, she lost her paternalism, finally. In sojourning in other cultures deeply, we never really return home, do we? It is a terrible thing to live in ignorance of the genuine “otherness” of the alien culture, for we never really know who we are, and what we have to fight for in this life, much less what is not worthy of a defense. And do we really appreciate the distinctiveness of the alien if we superimpose upon it a presumed resemblance to ourselves that, were we to know it more fully, we would see as imaginary? Nevertheless, that genuine knowledge of the foreign must never become identification, or the path “home” becomes blocked. Finch Hadden chose to abandon the West, and died in his exaltation of the “ever presence” of the African consciousness, to which only the present exists (the symbol and substance of his mangled biplane, as well as the radical departures of the modern machine culture, to which he was foreign and tragically could not gain mastery of).  To that extent, the African and his descendant is beyond history. The Baroness von Blixen-Finecke, by contrast, left behind in Africa that part of herself that joined with it and its people in joining with Finch Hadden, and the deep sadness of one who is divided against himself ensued.

Is all this a flirtation with relativism? Perhaps. But finally, I think not, for I am arguing for the wholeness of experience and for the relative absoluteness of culture. To look at what black Christianity has become in the U.S., and also to look upon African Christianity, is very possibly to see a different religion altogether. Is this to deny the universality of Christ? No, it is not. It is to revitalize race and ethnicity, and to insist on their importance to identity. In the end, it is only with modernity that identity becomes a thing imagined to be voluntary, a matter of “selection.” In the deracinated West, identity is cosmetic, that is to say, it really isn’t identity at all. And therein is the genuine relativism we face as members of the post-civilized age. 

And that very point of departure is Finch Hadden’s position in the memoir, his habitat, to speak in terms native to the scene. However, one serious drawback of the work is that the character Finch Hadden nurtures admiration for the African; he has, as it were, “gone native,” just as many missionaries and travelers are known to have done, when faced with the mechanization and regimentation of the civilization of which they are by birth a part. But what is the missionary’s work? Is it to bring Christ to the African, or to bring American materialism to the African? Christ and the means of self-sustenance is all that we should bring; to offer more than the tools of self-reliance to the African is at once to return to the imperial paternalism of Cecil Rhodes, and the ham-fisted bungling of liberalism, and to say to Saint Paul, “Men that do not work shall eat” and to make of Christ something merely human, a social worker.

Now our critics may say that all this amounts to is genetic determinism. To this I answer, some things are fixed in men and some things subject to alteration. Many, if not all the elements that combine to create the potential for a civilization we would recognize as such are fixed in the African contrariwise to Western values. This is the real essence of the “blackness” that is so treasured by racially conscious blacks.  To the extent that the U.S. black man participates in a shared historical memory and nurtures an historical grievance that has outlived the effects of its cause, there can be no possibilities of reconciliation. That having been said, and as Spengler attested, there are many “civilizations”, not one Civilization, and while they can and often do have resemblances to one another, they are essentially and irrevocably foreign one to another. The program of black-white unity is an impossibility wrapped within a further impossibility. The former of these twin impossibilities being involuntary, and the latter the result of the quite voluntary nurturing of “difference.” While the latter is no sin, it is certainly a cause in the continued “race problems” of the West.

There is no other way to say it but that the black man is the descendant of Africans, and he is suited to his own civilization, if in generosity it may be called that, and not to the civilization of the European. All the more reason why the draconian, procrustean measures taken first to acclimate black men to white culture, and then, when this procedure has failed, to induce in whites a guilt designed to fund in them a tolerance (and even a false form of “love” -witness the youthful hysteria over the “post-racial” postures of Obama) for alien black civilization within, segregated from, and largely hostile to his own are necessarily totalitarian in scale and scope, as well as being ultimately impossible to achieve. The word foolhardy also comes to mind. Liberalism is nothing if not foolishness and credulity institutionalized.

To conclude, Kinism of a sort is possible among blacks, one supposes, but it will not and cannot look like white Kinism. The outpost of black separatism is the nearest black thinkers might approach Kinism, as Kinism is a European doctrine, a confluence of ideas, some of which are utterly alien to the black soul. An historical realization blocks their path: as long as the sun rises, internecine, tribal hatred will be a powerful undercurrent in black civilization. It is only their status in the U.S. and their history here that provides impetus to unity. They possess the cheap and false unity of a common enemy, just as we whites possess the false unity of agreement to the rules of polity, and not much else, our racial and civilizational unity having largely been destroyed by liberalism. From this we derive a new application of the Augustinian maxim that is a central tenet of Kinism: in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.  In Africa there is no unity of race or kind; indeed, there is no “Africa” in the same way in which there is a “Europe.” And if the black man returns to his natural state of being, he will be at ethnic war with those of his own race until Christ has fully penetrated his civilization.

Having come so far, and said so much about the lack of black unity in Africa and the unreality of black unity on the domestic scene, this much must be admitted, that Western civilization has an abysmal record on the score of “unity” in the modern era. The “total war” of Africa and native South America is a prominent feature of modern Western war. One need only look at the V2 bombings of London, or the Allied bombing of Dresden in Germany to see the brutality against their own of which modern men of the West are capable, and all under the tattered standard of ideology. It is the same thing as the tribal machete wars, writ large. Ideology itself is a leftist contrivance. To heal and be one, the West must look to its more ancient past and learn from it, if it expects to avoid the cataclysms and mind rot of its recent past and present -that is, if it expects to save its civilization from becoming a bane to the entire world in the name of so-called “free trade” and “democracy”. The violent export of democracy, or the prevarication of such in the pursuit of more pragmatic ends, is one of our chief sins. And if we expect to survive another century without the attendant horrors of millions more bodies under piles of foreign rubble created by billion dollar, debt-financed corpse makers, we’d better alter our ends.

The black church is often brought in at this point of the discussion to make the claim that the African population of the U.S. is highly “Christianized.” Well, that “Christianization” (to make use of a neologism) appears to have only been possible under the conditions of the natural self-segregation of the races. It is a commonplace observation, a truism, that Sunday is the most segregated day in the U.S. This is a mutually desired segregation. Were a white man to visit a black church, he would be shocked at what passes for Christianity there in many cases. And this brings us to black Liberation Theology, a species of the more general Liberation Theology that sprang out the Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant denominations, and a child of the so-called “Social Gospel.”

The theology of Black Liberation has become part of our contemporary vocabulary due to recent events on the political stage. But those of us who have undertaken serious study of the black church know that the rankling, offending sentiments of Jeremiah Wright are no mere eccentricity. No idiosyncrasy of the “crazy uncle,” as Barack Obama disingenuously described it. Obama is nothing if not a highly skilled dissembler, like all professional servants of the “public good,” whatever that may be. The truth is, the black church is dominated by Liberation theology, and black congregations are largely places for the airing of grievances against the white man, and the insistence that the Gospel of Jesus is tantamount to the secular salvation of well-worn sanctimony about the plight of the poor. Well, friends, the Social Gospel is an ersatz Christianity that takes the mysterium (not to say the Magisterium) of Salvation and debases it into mere pity and sentimentality. Black churches are as likely as not seething dens of political rancor, of hatred, of self-pity, and of what blacks themselves, if objectivity were possible for them, would term “racism.” These facts are undeniable. And being undeniable they must be cloaked under such euphemisms as “the black experience.” One must ask, after so much time has passed and so much treasure been spent on “fairness”, “equality”, and other euphemisms for pity and paternalism, when this black experience ends.

“Out of Africa” is where white men must remain, so that the black man, in the dignity that is owed to all humans, may choose his own, independent course. The liberal, culture destroying paternalism of empire has marooned both black and white in a deracinated, alien, inhuman world, bent to the ends of the machinery of commerce. So much is certain, it’s time to end the experiment of forced integration in th U.S., time that blacks and whites, respectively, each made a return to his ancestral cultural home, if such a return is still open to us. If not, God help us.

Comments: