Local opinion: Barbarians have arrived, and are pushing us backward

The barbarians are not just at the gate. They’re inside. We are the barbarians who are destroying American culture from the inside. The opposite of being barbarian is to be civilized. To be civilized is to be humane. The cornerstone principle of being humane is to embrace the “common humanity” of all people — the civilizing pillars of which are diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. Humanity is diverse, and all humans seek fairness, inclusion, and access to the benefits of being part of earth’s dominant species.

To be an uncivilized culture is to be a barbarian culture. Barbarians seek domination over others. Their principal weapon to seize and keep control is infusion of fear — through aggression, manipulation, violence, cruelty, cleansing of traditional norms, and a showcase of creative painful punishments (including threats of incarceration, torture, and death).

A barbarian culture seeks to move the culture away from enlightenment and progress toward becoming anti-modern. To become anti-modern is to become anti-progress and innovation — which in turn first produces stagnation and then rot. The barbarians have entered the gate, and now they occupy the compound.

In terms of American culture’s trajectory, to become anti-modern is to become anti-American because the story of America has been its dynamism—its receptivity to change. America’s story has been to continue to define and then redefine what it means to be “modern”. Now, we are hell-bent on ceding the “definition” to others.

We are rejecting science, facts, truth, education, reason, and human growth and progress. We are becoming “anti” the ingredients of an ever-changing dynamic and flexible modernism. Ideological manipulation of those anti-ingredients, including their cultural underpinnings (human rights, rule of law, fair elections, and progress for all) is destructive of the trajectory of America.

America’s dynamic culture can be summed up in a single word. “Immigrants”. Without them, we are nothing special; we are not exceptional. Immigrants are the life’s blood of the country, its past and its future. Immigrants have always kept America fresh and new, energetic, resourceful, and innovative—in a word, “modern”.

“Immigration” is the American brand. It is the American identity. It is the American soul. What is the opposite of a culture based on the diversity of immigration? “Stagnation”—the antithesis of diversity and change. The spiritual foundation of America is its “immigrants”.

So, how about we “scare” the immigrants, those who would be us. Let’s make them afraid to come to America. Let’s build some walls—both interior and exterior. Let’s send our foreign students home—deny them access, inclusion, and fairness. Let’s send a resounding message to our friends and allies by unilaterally canceling our contracts and treaties (the rule of law). Let’s repudiate our diversity and engage in some ethic, racial, gender, and religious cleansing. Let’s inject some “bleach” into our life’s blood and ruthlessly engage in some cultural purification to see if we can purify ourselves a bit.

The purification process is already well underway. The cleansing of our “immigrant” identity is itself the construction of cultural walls and barriers—to create barriers to those who would enter (and the cultural richness, skills, and ideas they would bring), and to brand and expel the fabricated types of “undesirables” who cannot be allowed to scale the walls to return.

Diversity-equity-inclusion-and-access culture is “immigrant culture”. “Immigrants” are, and have always been, our culture. Now, are we not becoming barbarians? Are we not now becoming anti-modern? When Western Civilization’s roots and flowers, the ideas of Ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, were deracinated by the barbarians who entered the gates, Western Civilization descended into a thousand years of darkness and anti-modern stagnation called the “Dark Ages”.

With our cultural wars, and losses, we are entering a new “Dark Age.” The only question is for how “long”, and how dark? Immigrants and DEIA make us civilized. “With liberty and justice for all” makes us civilized.

The barbarians have arrived.