The Good Intentions of Utopians Will Not Avert Fatal Consequences

Imagine a world without war—a world with only one government, a post-national world where one nation’s declaring war on another would no longer be possible.

Imagine a world with one currency and one economic system—a world where no region or sector would be left behind as certain others prospered, since all consumers on the planet would employ a single monetary standard and all monstrous profits would be scraped off and siphoned back to the needy.

Imagine a world with a single language and culture—a world where everyone could understand everyone else and where all would join in celebrating the same holidays and festivals rather than squabbling over superficial differences.

Many believe that this world would be heaven on earth. Racism would disappear incidentally, since racial prejudice is no more (according to this persuasion) than the vilifying of a different culture whose members have distinctive physical features. Remove the cultural difference, and you remove the racism.

Competitiveness would disappear, since the rewards of squelching a rival would be redistributed—to that rival and to others who have lost in the fray. Critics argue that innovation would also dry up; but proponents of this New Age view counter that “innovation” has poisoned our air and water, and that the single-world government will be quite well enough endowed to underwrite whatever special projects it deems worthy of development. Meanwhile, a lot of heart disease, emotional trauma, and violent crime would be reduced or expunged as everybody slowed down and became more civil.

Nuclear arsenals could be permanently destroyed, and we would never again have to worry about a “Dr. Strangelove” scenario where some maverick runs berserk or some clumsy flunkey brushes against a red button. Life would become such a low-pressure delight that our drug problem, even, would largely vanish.

Such, I most sincerely believe, is the most high-minded version, seen from best advantage, of the creed which moves the most idealistic of the Obama/Pellosi phalanx. There are two shortcomings in this vision, both of them fatal.

First is the category of items about which one may say, “Would that it were so… but human nature is not thus made.” War, for instance—in my reading of history—is never the first effect of violent impulses. People do not just rush to war with their pitchforks (or their AK-47’s) because the Japanese on the tour bus denounce Aunt Molly’s homemade spaghetti and somebody rings the village church bell. Usually, war is a long-delayed consequence of abused power. Ordinary citizens endure taxation, confiscation, and arbitrary imprisonment until death no longer frightens them more than life. Then they lie down in front of trains and tanks… and then they start throwing Molotov cocktails, and the rest. Not only will the motives for such a scenario NOT disappear if we centralize the world’s government and remove all weapons of mass-destruction: since centralization always multiplies the power wielded by a few, and since power never willingly diminishes itself, incitements to rebellion will proliferate in the Brave New World. That the common people need not be repressed with nukes will be good for the planet (or would be, if one could conceive of the planet as having a consciousness); it will be a matter of indifference to the common people, on whom a cop’s bullet in the chest will confer death just as terminally.

Then there is the category of items about which one must say, “But this isn’t what they promised us—it’s the very opposite! It’s a lie! They’re already jerking us around!” The Left has invested thirty years of air-time and incalculable volumes of ink creating the wedge of multiculturalism, specially designed to rive the coherence of Western societies. We are told that minority cultures have every bit as much right to survive as the mainstream. The global society which Leftist luminaries envision, however, will be drably mono-cultural—or, more accurately, post-cultural. Everyone will speak and think the same tepid soup of clichés. Amerenglish is already becoming an inarticulate paste of hip-hop claptrap, border Spanish, talk-show formula, and mutilated e-parlance (“lol”); while the Spanish, for that matter, employed by our immigrant population is completely inadequate for navigating a page of Unamuno or Ortega y Gasset (and probably for reading the editorial section of a Mexican newspaper). We are being deliberately lied to by those with the wits to do it (i.e., excuse Pellosi) on such issues, which has already drained the public’s faith in its democratic institutions to bone-dry. “Giving the underdog a break” has a potent appeal in America… but to awaken to the fact that one has been completely duped leaves one craving revenge and little inclined to extend a helping hand. Make no mistake: the ultimate objective of such lies is not “rich cultural diversity”—where do you see ANY sign of such riches? The hundred yards along the highway where Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and the Jade Palace crowd each other? No, the objective is to create an electorate of mutually unintelligible communities—different languages, different religions, different dress, different holidays—and then play them off against each other until one’s power base is permanently secure (that is, until elections become a mere sham).

Many of us rue the day that the atom was split. Most of us would agree that unbridled capitalism is a cultural slaughterhouse, ever replacing the familiar with the newfangled and devaluing tradition for thrill. A lot of us just don’t like hearing the roar of heavy traffic one block away every time we try to take a quiet stroll through our neighborhood. Barack Obama does not represent a remedy to this anguishing decline in the quality of our lives, however. His vision is panoramically utopian, and he and his elite of enlightened spirits occupy the Throne of Change at every stage of the transformation. This is the same old Caesarism that has made our species miserable throughout its history. Have we not auditioned enough Duces, Führers, and First Citizens in recent decades to know that a secular Moses will not find us a shortcut to the changes of personal lifestyle we need to make?