The Anglobitch Debate III

It is interesting to see that several Blogs have been debating the Anglobitch Thesis. As well as being intellectually flattering, this demonstrates the importance of our values and concepts. I truly believe the Anglobitch Thesis explains most of the problems in Pan-Anglosphere gender relations as no other theoretical model – but then, I am somewhat biased. Someone called ‘Roissy in DC’ keeps a Blog ‘where pretty lies perish’ and a discussion about the recently deceased Michael Jackson somehow transformed into a fascinating debate on the problem of Anglo-American women, which incorporated much discussion of the Anglobitch Thesis. I include some of the best posts for your interest and edification, with commentary from myself. More of this material will be forthcoming.

1.on June 28, 2009 at 4:58 pm Joe T.
doug1
I completely agree with you, especially your last paragraph. But I see the phenomenon you describe as originating, at least in part, in Anglo-Saxon prudishness. In other words, you had to first have the Anglo-Saxon substrate of prudishness, before the feminist “dignity” argument could take hold.

I think this feminist “dignity” argument, and everything that flows from it — that the “personal is the political” — is the single most pernicious mindset that feminism has engendered, because it give feminists license to constrain what is a biological urge — the male libido — under the false banner of “gender equality”. Mind you, when I choose to be in a relationship, I tend to be very faithful. But I do not preach the moral fallacy that infidelity or cheating (whether in the context of marriage or a “committed” male-female relationship) is somehow a slap in the face to feminism, women’s rights, or women’s dignity.

The core travesty of US society is that we preach that male infidelity is a universal affront to women’s soical equality, rather than what it really is, which is a response to a natural urge which can be either forbidden or forgiven by the individual woman.

Rookh Kshatriya Writes: But WHY is ‘dignity’ preached in the Angloculture, and why does it have such social currency?

2.on June 28, 2009 at 5:41 pm novaseeker
I think that the divorce rate here is high because the culture here both values marriage more than in other Western countries (meaning more people marry) *and* views marriage rather differently than in many Western countries as well — as being primarily about personal happiness and fulfillment, rather than being a partnership centered around children and financial stability and growth.

In northern and most of western Europe, many/most people have long term cohabitation relationships. The ones who marry are typically quite well suited for each other and have been cohabiting for a long time. But there are many cohabitation relationships that do not work, as well. In the US both the cohabiting and marital relationships, based on the stats I have seen, are less stable than in Europe. We could change that by tinkering with family law a bit (most continental european countries have a family law that is very different from the anglosphere).

Rookh Kshatriya Writes: Very interesting, sir. But if true, that difference is merely an expression of cultural difference, which is the backbone of the Anglobitch Thesis.

3.on June 28, 2009 at 6:39 pm novaseeker

@ Joe T. — Yep, I have lived in Europe quite a bit over the years. I prefer America, but that’s me.

@doug1 — Child support payments are, on the continent, much lower than in the Anglosphere. They resemble what used to be “child support” in the US before the CS amounts were upped in the 1980s to replace the decline of alimony which happened as a result of women entering the work force. It varies by country, but in many European countries, alimony is also much rarer.

Another thing is that in much of continental western europe, pre-nuptial agreements are ubiquitous and completely enforceable. I was talking to a colleague of mine from Belgium (who lives in Germany) about this a few months ago when we were together for some meetings in Dubai. He smiled at me and said “I know American women get all crazy about these agreements, but they are perfectly common and normal in Europe, because we also know that marriage is a business and financial arrangement as well as a romantic involvement” (paraphrasing). He was describing to me how he needed to revise his “marriage contract” (what they are called) to reflect his recent promotion and so on.

So the approach to marriage, in general, is much less Disney.

Rookh Kshatriya Writes: Exactly. But Anglo Saxons have a 'Disney' approach to relationships because Disney is the supreme expression of Anglo Puritanism (Anglo-Saxon literary culture has a long standing obsession with children, because children are SEXLESS. Think of Peter Pan, the Water Babies or the Secret Garden – it isn’t just Disney, friend. Check out British MP George Waldon's book on the failings of Anglo-Saxon 'child-centered' education, 'We Should Know Better' - he lays the blame squarely on this Anglo-cult of 'child-veneration'). Perhaps the fragility of Anglo-American Marriage as an institution relates to this 'fairy tale' expectation of what is in truth a sexual/reproductive relationship - something rather 'gritty'.

4.on June 28, 2009 at 6:48 pm David Alexander
because we also know that marriage is a business and financial arrangement as well as a romantic involvement

The question one should ask is why do Europeans have such a jaundiced view of marriages compared to Americans? Child support payments are, on the continent, much lower than in the Anglosphere. I suspect that the generous social welfare state in Europe ensures that child support payments are lower in general.

Rookh Kshatriya Writes: Not 'jaundiced'… realistic.


5.on June 29, 2009 at 2:02 am Vladimir
PA:
In my view, the Left, as slippery and hard it is do define, is something real, something most people instinctively know when they see. It could be that the Left (whatever it is) recalibrated its goals to suit its modern, prosperous, post-industrial context and kept on marching.

In my opinion, Marxism-Leninism and the Anglo-Saxon Left are best viewed as two historically distinct traditions that sprang from different sources, although of course there has been some mutual influence. When it comes to the Anglo-Left, I think the Unqualified Reservations view is broadly correct — it can be identified with the ever evolving and leftward-shifting ideology of the Anglo-Protestantism’s left wing. (The rest, of course, soon follows — the rightmost fringe that is still generally considered sane is typically falling behind by a few decades.) Some paleocon authors have referred to this phenomenon as the “Protestant Deformation,” although I think Mencius of UR is more perceptive when he sees it as a continuous natural evolution with relatively minor side-influences, rather than a “deformation” due to external factors that happened at some particular point in history.

Today’s multiculti/feminist/diversity battlecries are still the same international revolution, but by different and less crude means.

I believe that their advances outside the bounds of the Anglosphere have been so successful and seemingly unstoppable for two reasons. First, their ideology is almost perfectly tailored to appeal to the young and fashionable. Second and more important, it’s important to understand that it’s spreading into a vacuum. The cataclysms of the 20th century — and in some cases, even earlier events starting around the time of the French Revolution — have destroyed all other independent political and ideological traditions within the Western world.

Take Poland as an example. Today’s Poland may call itself Rzeczpospolita, but the real Rzeczpospolita with its authentic institutions and traditions — the Golden Liberty, and nihil novi, and magnates, and szlachta… — was obliterated in 1795, and will never come back. It is no more possible to revive it today than it would be possible to resurrect the Akkadian Empire. So, modern post-WW2 Poland could be rebuilt only according to the models of Soviet Marxism or the American New Deal liberalism, these being the only two surviving political traditions at the time. Because Poland was occupied by the USSR, it followed the former model, but now that the USSR has disappeared, the options have been reduced to only the latter — and pretty much all the open ideological issues boil down to whether and to what extent the country should keep up with the most recent postmodern developments in Anglo-liberalism relayed via Brussels. Like elsewhere, the conservative elements are merely trying to freeze the situation roughly at where the previous generation of Anglo-liberals stood, just before the multiculti/feminist/diversity innovations became the orders of the day. A similar story could be told about pretty much any other European country, of course.

In any case, this is the real problem with the ideology of the postmodern left — unlike Soviet Communism, it’s spreading all around the world, or at least all around the Western world, truly voluntarily and spontaneously. Rulers like Lukashenko or Putin have to resort to pretty harsh repression and censorship to prevent it from spreading into their domains, which makes it seem like it really has no civilized alternative. I am sounding horribly pessimistic now, but I think we need to honestly assess the situation before we can even imagine any real alternative, rather than just cheering for the loser team.

Rookh Kshatriya Writes: This writer makes some fine and interesting points. The Anglo-Saxon left (especially in Britain, where it remains a strong political force) tends to take its ideas from Victorian Protestant Christianity, and can rightly be called a secular Neo-Christian movement. This is why the British left is obsessively Puritanical, in that the repressive Christian meme survives in a new, ‘revolutionary’ guise (Harriet Harman, fanatical enemy of porn and prostitution, hater of sexual freedom, is after all a socialist). The non-Anglo left derived from Marxist-Leninist principles (and various distinct national traditions) is implicitly and militantly atheist (perhaps why it has been more dynamic and effective than the rather twee Anglo-Saxon left, which remains safely incorporated within bourgeois culture and is at best a toothless, compromised force).

As to ideological vacuums, any culture severed from Tradition (as the West now is) is a culture adrift in a fog of nihilism. What do you expect? All ideologies in the Kali Yuga are interchangeable delusions designed to stave off the Day of Doom.