What are we losing?

Dumb Jon and Stan are culture warriors.

They seem to have their fingers on the pulse of our suicidal nation in ways that some of the happier-seeming freedom lovers and conservatives in the blogosphere do not.
It’s going to be a long war, and in following these two blogs for some time I’ve come to recognise the extent and magnitude of the threats against what our enemies have left of our great country. What is ‘the good’ that conservatives must protect? Here’s my basic take on its originals, thriftily copied from my comments in Jon's post.

Which in this case is the Judeo-Hellenic moral and philosophic roots of our free and prosperous Western World.

What I was referring to, and what I may have mis-named, is the Christian, later European and ultimately Western underlying assumptions about the world and where they come from and how they work. For a long time the two strands were at war with each other, and to a certain extent they still are.

But, hey, the world’s a complicated place with strange people in it and consistency is rare and often quite disgusting when it does occur.

Which is what makes conservatism wise, and everything else, well; not-wise.

So roughly:

# The Jews and their ancestors worshipped a single, honest, principled god who made a covenant with them: if they obeyed his laws, he would protect them and not destroy the world again as he had done in the flood.

So there’s the Judeo bit; the world is orderly and governed by laws.
Obedience to laws and faithfulness to promises made to God and respect for promises made to God also translated, patchily but ever more frequently, into moral conduct between people.
You get lawful, decent behaviour having sacred meaning and worth.

So far, so potentially Judeo-Hellenic.

# Then the Greeks spread the idea that the human intellect was a thing worthy of value in itself, irrespective of - to risk sounding Lefty-polytechnic diversity policy here – nationality, status, occupation and (implicitly, eventually and not yet completely) sex.

So it came to pass that individual people by dint of their reasoning ability could be of worth beyond whatever the local rulers, vicious local gods, and bullying relatives, held them to be and thus eventually they might be handed some degree of freedom. And responsibility.

Lawful behaviour based on natural laws of divine origins. Individuals matter.

Then one particular Jew comes along, says we don’t have to be vicious animals wallowing in our base lusts and mean-spiritedness, and here are a few simple principles we might want to apply when dealing with the lawful God and His children…

The publicity following his trial and execution, plus some remarkably consistent persecution by the mainstream Jews spread this two-parented belief system far and wide.

Obey the laws. Individuals matter. Treat them well. Freedom and some idea of kindness are implicit and explicit in all this, and all the rest of the process builds upon these parents; the Jews and the Greeks.

Plenty of other stuff involved in creating our culture, of course; all that Germanic fervour Tacitus writes about to give passion in war and common-interest projects (if not too long and expensive) and the Celtic clannishness which is of use when cleaving to the collective is needed in society.

But that’ll do for me, along with fermentation, as pretty much the well-springs of the good life in Britain.

So when Dumb Jon and Stan are disappointed – to say the least – when the supposed conservers of this tradition in Britain [The Tories, remember, in jail briefly and out] as often as not go along with the Marxist wreckers and their bureaucratic hordes and multi-culti social saboteurs, then I share their disappointment. And anger.

Stan and Dumb Jon chronicle how the Left and others are sawing away the branch of civilisation on which we are all perched, as our Islamist and feral/criminal/savage and fascist enemies, domestic and foreign, circle around the tree, waiting for us to fall and be eaten.

Do read them.

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