The encroaching Western void—and what might fill it

A benefit that comes from running this website is the very intelligent correspondence I receive from readers. In the below, a reader puts liberal alienation and Islamic expansiveness side by side, and arrives at a new and disturbing prospect for America and the West.

You mention America’s rush towards “dhimmitude from within” through the liberal instinct. One of VFR’s readers Carl Simpson states that the purpose of Muslim aggression towards the US is to subjugate American civilization & culture under Islam, not to destroy it.

However here is another way this can be accomplished. The liberal psyche has a void at its center. There is no essential core—no identity of substance and principle. Children of liberal families gravitate towards totalitarian solutions that fill this void. Example: 1950s liberal families whose 1960s children embraced Marxism. Or Afro-Americans, who, after Martin Luther King Jr. (liberal), fell under the spell of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan (Muslims).

Liberalism is emptying the American spirit of all traditional beliefs and negating our historical framework. The American psyche is well on its way to becoming a void. What will fill this void? As Muslims grow in this country and extend their reach, the next generation of Americans, whose minds and spirits have been emptied by liberalism (through our schools and media), will become open and susceptible to their teachings. Already the younger generations (since the baby boom generation of the 60’s) embrace Zen-Buddhism and Hinduism (amongst their New Age beliefs). But these “alternate” religions are themselves empty at the core, having principles that are too abstract and unhistorical. This is where a totalitarian religion—aggressive and self-confident—operating within a historical context can infiltrate an empty mind.

Liberalism operates much like a brush-fire that empties out a forest to make way for new growth. With the West on the defensive and Christianity recoiling (through efforts of organizations such as the ACLU), the emptied land will make way for an aggressive religion such as Islam. The tragedy is that the US may grow an American variant of the Muslim religion. Much like liberalism ultimately made way for Marxism (eg. the USSR), liberalism may do the same here…except that it may be a stepping stone for something like Islam.

The next generation is being badly served by liberalism and like the AIDS virus which destroys a human’s immune system, what internal defenses will the next few generations (the American body) have in order to withstand religions such as Islam? The population extension and growth of Muslims everywhere will ensure that the Muslim culture and religion will spill over into any voids a society has.

The crucial question is WHEN can Western civilization re-assert itself and Christianity once again adopt an outward look with the purpose of spreading its outreach?

I’ve previously discussed how leftists are lacking a father figure in some way, and so gravitate toward substitute father figures, particularly those representing alien ideologies and cultures. Oliver Stone, the America-hater who has found a father figure in Fidel Castro, is an example of this syndrome. But what the reader is suggesting here is worse. As the West becomes progressively emptied of content, its citizens will become such dry, barren, deculturated souls, like underclass people in prison, that they could be drawn entirely away from what remains of their own tradition and toward the stark simplicities of Islam. Didn’t Islam begin in the desert?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 15, 2005 04:12 PM | Send