Time to defend Western culture’s patrimony

Kevin Donnelly I 14 November 2024 I Spectator Australia

The Russian author and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, when writing about the importance of initiating each succeeding generation into the culture in which they are born, argues, ‘To fight against untruth and falsehood, to fight against myths, or to fight against an ideology which is hostile to mankind, to fight for our memory of what things were like – that is the task of the artist. A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul.’

Spoken in March 1976 on a BBC Panorama program, Solzhenitsyn’s prescient warning about the dangers of cultural amnesia is even more relevant now. In the 48 years since the Russian author spoke, the patrimony associated with Western culture has been vilified, attacked, and ignored.

The reasons for this cultural amnesia are many. Those committed to cultural-Marxism, originating with the Frankfurt School in the late 1920s, have long argued the most effective way to bring about the socialist utopia is to infiltrate and take control of key institutions, including schools, universities, the media, the family, the church, and intermediary organisations.

Drawing on a phrase made famous by a German socialist activist, the strategy centres on taking the long march through the institutions. As argued by Antonio Gramsci, Western capitalist societies reproduce themselves by enforcing cultural hegemony.

This cultural hegemony must be negated as it enforces false consciousness; thereby allowing the elites to manipulate and control citizens by duping them to believe all is well even though they are oppressed and marginalised. Instead of ensuring prosperity and safeguarding inherent rights and liberties, Western culture is condemned as structurally inequitable and guaranteed to enforce disadvantage.

A recent iteration of cultural-Marxism involves Critical Race Theory and the move to decolonise the curriculum now prevalent in schools and universities. According to Woke academics Western societies are structurally racist and Western civilisation’s history is one of imperialism, colonialism, and enforcing white supremacy.

James Lindsay in an essay titled Decolonising the Curriculum writes: ‘For those who would ‘decolonise’ our curricula, then the curriculum is that which power and privilege have decided should be taught because it is in the interests of the powerful and privileged to teach it.’

Ignored, for all its flaws, it is Western culture that has the ability to rectify injustices and past wrongs. It was the British and Christian activists like William Wilberforce who were responsible for making slavery illegal.

Underpinning Western culture is the belief as all are made in God’s image all have the right to equality and freedom. Liberalism’s belief citizens must be treated equally and justly regardless of class, sex, race or ethnicity and that free speech is paramount is another unique characteristic underpinning Western culture.

In addition to cultural-Marxism the belief there are no absolute truths, that knowledge is a social construct and the impact of cultural relativism have also conspired to destroy the patrimony associated with Western culture.

In schools and universities students are warned about a curriculum that enforces white supremacism and taught that the science and mathematics associated with the Enlightenment are instruments of power guilty of marginalising and oppressing the ‘other’.

Australia’s national curriculum asks students to study Aboriginal algebra and science and while there are hundreds of references to Indigenous culture, history, and spirituality students can leave school bereft of any knowledge or appreciation of Judaeo-Christianity and the contribution of ancient Greece and Rome.

If knowledge is a social construct enforced by those more powerful than rationality, reason, and the belief it is possible to better approximate the truth of things no longer apply. The only alternatives are silence, epistemological suicide, or violence.

Cultural-relativism and its progeny multiculturalism, even though contradictory, are also responsible for cancelling Western culture. Since Al Grassby was Minister for Immigration during the Labor Whitlam government young people have been taught there is nothing unique about Western culture worthwhile preserving.

Given young people have grown up culturally illiterate and as foreigners in their own land, lacking any sense of continuity, kinship, and belonging to a higher and more enduring purpose, it shouldn’t surprise so many appear lost and prone to Woke ideology.

In a quote attributed to GK Chesterton, the problem is, ‘When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.’ Whether worshipping climate alarmism, radical transgender theory or the belief Western culture is misogynist, the prevailing ethos is nihilistic and devoid of optimism and reason.

Proven by the 60/40 vote against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the electoral success of centre-right parties in Europe or the millions of Americans voting for President-elect Donald Trump, the reality is citizens are proclaiming ‘enough is enough’.

Now is the time to reassert rationality, reason and common sense, for championing the importance of family, community and what is unique and best about Western culture, truly the culture of freedom.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the ACU and editor of the just released Defend The West The Culture Of Freedom. Available at kevindonnelly.com.au