Cultural Submission
For most Americans, to enter a learned profession means that one must change cultural identity—something I have never heard directly acknowledged. Anybody can appreciate the high salaries and prestige of medicine, for example, but too many want it apart from a culture—preeminently a family—that prizes and expects hard work and learning, or are unwilling to bear the disdain and ostracism which one’s family and social group visit on anyone who dares attempt to be “better than us.” Not everyone has Ben Carson’s mother. (This hatred of natural aristocracies is built into the U.S. Constitution and that of every reputed democracy—the country is now suffering from the result of a birth defect which will kill it if allowed to advance: the cure can only begin when real (not false) superiorities are acknowledged and brought to bear on civic life.)
Understanding of the culture of labor and learning is exemplified in the Hippocratic oath, where the taker vows “to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the Healer’s oath, and to no one else.” The knowledge and art follow the familial college, or those who are willing and allowed to take the vows to become part of it, and not those outside. This follows a general racial truth that the son tends to follow the father and the pupil his master, which creates not only a powerful social identity but an “outside,” and its potential for resentment and hatred.
This hatred and resentment is a foundation stone of Woke culture—a socially impoverished group that attempts to elevate itself by debasing its unacknowledged superiors through the instruments of inclusion, which makes the bonds defining the superior culture an affront to the Good of mass identity, diversity—which provides a rationale to discriminate against them as thought-criminals and malefactors—and equity—which forbids amelioration of the inferior by capturing it permanently within the narrow boundaries of itself.
Every Abrahamic religion (this is not just a Christian problem) dies in this miasma, for they all require absolute submission to—worship of—the Superior who raises men above their natural and preferred selvesby demanding re-formation, and thus a new and obedient culture. The self-absorbed can have nothing to do with this, so the houses of worship empty.
S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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