FSTDT

Kind greetings! I was an avid reader of View from the Right and appreciated the many insightful posts and essays by the late Lawrence Auster regarding Western civilization, Christianity, and race. However, the racial issues bothered me so that I occasionally inquired him concerning his ability to reconcile Christianity with race realism (or human biodiversity, as I like to call it). To his credit, Mr. Auster posted some of my questions on VFR and thoughtfully responded to them. Please see the email below for an example of my inquiries.

My regret is that I never identified my race to him as I wanted to keep our exchanges as objective and impersonal as possible. In truth, I am a black man who has avidly studied race realism for at least ten years. The topic daily occupies my mind from the moment I awake until night falls.

Every day for over a decade. No exaggeration.

For instance, in your post entitled “What Destroyed Detroit?,” a reader mentioned that “blacks are not self-conscious at all about the notion of white intellectual superiority. They acknowledge it readily and it doesn’t bother them at all.”

Would that it were so with me! I deem it mightily harrowing and nightmarish that a particular race can be inherently so far behind others in civilizational, organizational, and intellectual matters, especially a race of which I am a member. With the black race, regarding important matters that form functioning societies, the issue cannot be reduced to terms such as “less functioning” and “less capable.” Rather, blacks as a group are largely incapable of the markers of normal civilization and healthy societies, as exemplified by the likes of Haiti, Detroit, East St. Louis, south-side Chicago, and much of the African sub-continent (unless one deems wretched villages and slums teeming with bastardy, absentee fathers, polyandry, crime at peerlessly high levels, disease, and ignorance as functioning). In other words, the black race does not seem to fall within a clear behavioral continuum with the rest of humanity, but inhabit its own unique area that has little overlap with those of other races. For instance, does any other place on Earth, during peacetimes, fall to such ruination and seeming hopelessness as black-occupied lands? One might proffer the Muslim world as an example. Indeed, Islam has corrupted Middle Eastern peoples to staggering obscenities, but their problems are mostly religious. The problems of blacks chiefly lie with themselves. Ask Paul Kersey.

I struggle with the juxtaposition of a just, loving God who holds all men by the same moral standards and the stark reality of a group that, when left to its own devices, appears so dispossessed of (or heavily disinclined towards) normal social conduct. Is not my race generally doomed to failure, immorality, and ignorance? Notice that black areas, especially in America, are replete with steepled and storefront Christian churches, yet to a large degree, exhibit similar dysfunctions as voodoo-believing or animistic West Indians and Africans. Such realizations even make me question the very purpose of my race (and therefore myself). I am haunted by and almost obsessed with these dark, uncomfortable queries. They predominate my daily thoughts.

I write these things not to impute any wrongdoing on God or to question the veracity of Christianity. I am a believer of Jesus Christ, regardless of the general inabilities of my race. As Job declared, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” Believing in God is the easier part. Believing that He would have allowed such a benighted race to be created (or to evolve) and expect it to overcome its entrenched incapacities and live as morally and competently as others (and divinely judge them accordingly) is the more difficult part. I see, God forbid, no bright light at the end of their tunnel. Given this race’s intellectual and behavioral deficiencies, how can I?

Why do you think most Westerners, even Christians, deny or ignore race realism? The acceptance of this reality is simply too hard to swallow and leads to endlessly more perplexing questions.

In summary, I cannot find peace in this area by pretending to make race un-important like today’s liberals, multiculturalists, and globalists. Nor can Ia student of Thomas Sowell, Steve Sailer, and Lawrence Austerexplain away my race’s glaring deficits by deflecting them upon the long exorcised specters of white racism, slavery, and colonialism (like most blacks). My knowledge of history is too deep for me to fall for the sloppy, blatant lies of scholastic Afrocentrism (e.g., that Negroes built ancient Egypt and Carthage and derived geometric equations). I most definitely cannot and shall not become angry with or accusatory towards God.

Therefore, no outlet exists at present that will defuse my deep angst and enable me to cope with the pitiable lot of my race.

I trust, from your writings, that you are a God-fearing, charitable, and highly intelligent lady. Can you please offer me some advice regarding how I, as a black American, can better deal with the aforesaid issues and have peace? Were you black, how would you feel about the situation and what would your coping mechanisms be?

I disagree. Pizza as we know it represents the death of civilization. Fast food is spiritual starvation.

In modern times, the end of civilization is not chaotic, but orderly and convenient. On the surface, it is smoothly functioning and even appealing. But the sky might as well be falling and barbarians might as well be rushing into our homes. So serious is the loss of civility, beauty, courtesy, wonder, and love - all the things that distinguish human beings from animals and civilization from mere survival.

Pizza is just bread with tomatoes and cheese, and I agree with you that there is nothing objectionable about that in itself. As an occasional treat, especially when it is homemade, it is not bad at all. But in its pervasive, modern, industrial foamboard incarnation, pizza is animal feed. It is so radically inferior to the simple boiled cabbage and potatoes of your parents’ childhood that it’s impossible to consider them in the same category. One is denatured factory fare. The other is field and sun. One is a cash transaction. The other is mutual aid. One is sloth. The other is labor. One is commerce. The other is love.

Your grandmothers took cabbage and potatoes, cut them up and then made them into food for their families. They might even have grown these foods in their own gardens. (Regardless, the cabbage and potatoes they used would have been much higher in nutrients than the cabbage and potatoes found in most stores today.) Your grandmothers were not paid workers when they did this work. They were not making food for strangers. Even if they made these things poorly, there was something personal about their neglect. Your parents sat around family tables to consume their cabbage and potatoes. Their small portion of beef on Sunday was part of a time-honored ritual, part of a day devoted to leisure even for the poorest man. And when people feuded at the table or disagreed with one another, even when children misbehaved, there was something personal about their interactions. They talked and cooperated. They did more than grab slices from a greasy box and eat them with their hands. They didn’t sit in a communal dining hall sipping soda with strangers. They didn’t watch television with the cardboard boxes splayed before them. The shared cabbage was more than food. It was the rhythm of nature, the struggle for existence and human order. It was a meal with form and structure. Food has an ethical dimension and simple food is not necessarily coarse when part of a shared ritual.

At the end of the meal, that greasy box sits on the table. Does anyone think fondly of it? Will anyone wistfully recall the greasy pizza boxes of their childhood the way they might recall their grandmother’s simple noodles or the roast beef that infused the house with its smell? I remember once showing up at my grandmother’s house when I was a child and she made me a simple ham sandwich with ham she had roasted the day before. It was one of the best meals I have ever had in my whole life. There was something mysteriously good about it.

Fast food and convenience wraps, paninis, nachos and McMeals have dumbed down food preparation so much that many people have no cultural memory of dishes like cabbage and potatoes, meals that are cheap, satisfying and extremely easy to make. It takes about 20 minutes and $5 to make a meal of cabbage and potatoes, not counting the time spent shopping. It’s an excellent meal, as long as the cabbage is not overcooked. I could easily eat it five nights a week.

The English-speaking world does indeed have a history of good food and fast food is a radical break with this history, as different from the food of the past as Soviet architecture is from a gabled and turreted Victorian building or a small thatched cottage. The French and Italians are more sensual and intelligent with food, but the English-speaking world historically fed itself well, with the different ethnic groups expressing their ties to the past and their connection to land and sea in their own ways. Meat pies, biscuits, fresh cheeses, simple vegetables, homemade breads with fresh butter, broiled fish, roast potatoes - these are all traditional British and American soul food. In Victorian times, even a humble, middle class family might put a white tablecloth on the table for a weeknight dinner of any of these simple things.

One in three Americans is now obese and the country’s disastrous weight gain parallels the growth in convenience foods. I disagree with those who think large numbers of people can stay in good health on fast food that is lower in carbohydrates or healthier in other ways. There can be better fast food and it doesn’t need to be as devastating as it is, but fast food will always be incapacitating. People forget how to fend for themselves and lose a sense of their own physical environment, even their own bodies.

“Animals eat; only man dines,” said the cooknook author Isabella Beeton. What we eat makes us who we are:

The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence; and wherever that will and skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble.