Is A Creed Enough To BEE An American?

Charlemagne (@charlesmayne69) from the Old Glory Club has written another excellent piece that I recommend everyone check out. This time he chronicles both the online saga of Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry impotently whining about the great Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacIntyre) and also the nonsense that is Joel’s beliefs regarding American identity. For a brief summary of Joel’s uncharitable and vicious attacks on Auron, Charlemagne provides screenshots and quotes which provide a good summary of them. One thing I appreciate about this article is that the author is very measured when criticizing Joel and his extremely subversive behavior. Frankly, I am calling for all of us to rip Joel another one and to boycott the Babylon Bee. The worst of Joel’s attacks that were not covered in this article was when he tweeted about Auron: “As for Zionism, if Auron is so butt-hurt about Jews getting to build a nation as a refuge for Abraham’s physical descendants, he should tell his white nationalist and tradcath followers to stop persecuting and murdering them in every country outside Israel where they try to reside and assimilate…” According to Joel’s horrendous tweet, it’s white, Catholic boys reading James Burnham and Sam Francis who are responsible for persecuting and murdering the Jews in Europe, and not Muahammad the Algerian with his other accomplices, all named Muhammad as well, committing these crimes.

Joel surprisingly argues like a leftist for someone who claims to be on the right, but this shouldn’t shock us because despite all the protests to the contrary, he is one who just happens to like Ronald Reagan. In fact, his argument blaming white boys for attacking Jews (when it’s very obviously Muslims doing it) is no different when leftists were pretending that all the Asians getting beat up on the subways were done by whites and not by black criminals. It’s important to air this dirty laundry before examining his arguments because fundamentally Joel is a hack and a liar, so we should be on guard for all his rhetorical tricks and fallacies.

The core thesis of Joel’s impotent rants are that American identity isn’t based on a specific people/ethnicity such as the Anglo-Saxons and Germans who built America, but a creed that is open to everybody. Credal identity is the linchpin or cornerstone that underlays much of the modern left and Con Inc.’s philosophy. Its power resides not in being based in reality, but that it sounds nice and flowery. Guys like Joel will proclaim that “America as a creedal nation is a great idea I truly believe in. The problem is we haven’t taught, passed down, enforced, or required allegiance to the creed—and that needs to change.” Well, what is the creed, anyway? None of these guys can ever tell us what it is or what it consists of. They can never point to an American Apostles’ Creed that we have to recite every morning, or else we lose our American status.

They may offer up as an example of the American creed as believing in “freedom,” but on further inspection it undermines their point since different peoples have conceived of freedom as different things. It gets further complicated when we consider from an American point of view that the way the Founders viewed it is vastly different from today's conception of it. Which version do they mean? To the Ancient Greeks, freedom and liberty meant that their polis was allowed to remain independent. To the Ancient Romans, freedom and liberty meant being judged according to their traditions and customs. The British used to conceive of it as respecting the rights of their countrymen while they upheld their end of the bargain by adhering to the obligations and duties attached to them. The Americans at the founding had essentially the same conception as the British, but today this is alien to the vast majority of Americans who conceive of liberty and freedom as everyone being forced to applaud your degeneracy. Again, which version of freedom do they mean then?

They may say that the American creed is the values and beliefs of the Founders, but Joel and others do not actually mean what they think that means. As many astute observers have observed, none so more than the great Auron, these guys would recoil in horror at the thought of adopting again the beliefs of the Founders especially in regards to race, sexuality, law, voting, and the differences between men and women. In reality, the closest they can come to formulating an American creed is the beliefs of the 1960’s and onwards, which they will vehemently deny but their arguments and presumptions say otherwise, yet even then that raises more problems. Many of them are uncomfortable with the snowball effect of the 1960’s, but instead of realizing the aberration of that era and rejecting it, they wish to draw a line somewhere just after it happened in order to halt the pace of the revolution. Even then, this is not enough since none of them agree where to draw the line and every year they move the line, always lagging behind the descent into madness as the culture continues to degenerate. This is a long-winded way to say they can only offer platitudes and vague answers since they have not actually thought this through.

This is not to say there is no such thing as an American creed, but that Joel and others misunderstand the nature of national beliefs and values. The United States isn’t unique in regards to having a national creed because every nation has one. The Germans perceive the world in a much different way than the Japanese. The Chinese behave and interact with themselves and others in vastly different ways than the English do. The taboos of the Haitians are not the same as ours here in the United States. Joel and guys like him make the mistake of assuming national beliefs and creeds are logical statements, that once they are apprehended in the mind the person who understands it cannot reject it, a statement that is true regardless of the time, place, or people. An example of this is “2 + 2 = 4.” Logical statements such as those are better described as universal statements and not national beliefs because they are not unique to any one group of people.

A national creed, instead of being a set of logical statements, are the values of a people, their beliefs about themselves and the outside world, their identities, their taboos, their traditions and rituals, their laws and the spirit of the law, the rules that govern their society, their rules of civility, and so much more. If man is meant to live in a society, he has a need for rules and beliefs to unify the people and to run their society. However, let’s not be mistaken and think these are all crafted by a committee of social planners and engineers. No, these are the product of what sometimes amounts to thousands of years of being passed down from one generation to the other amongst a people, that slowly changes and comes into form as each generation is allowed to tinker with it and leave their mark.

With all this in mind, we begin to see that accepting a national creed is not actually as easy or straightforward as proponents of the American credal identity would like to propose. People come to believe their heritage’s national creed because it's a form of inheritance that they are raised in and handed down. It’s nowhere as simple as evaluating the truth or falsity of a series of statements because national beliefs are not strictly logical. Instead, they are akin to family heirlooms where their value to a family member resides in it being passed down continuously. For example, someone’s great-grandmother’s wedding ring has a sentimental value only to them besides it’s melt value that someone like a pawnbroker would only care about. My one article for the Old Glory Club on traditions and the nature of them covered this in more depth before.

One way you can see this best illustrated is in regards to taboos. Taboos tend to be pretty illogical much of the time, but a society regards them as sacred and a horrible offense if broken. In the United States and the rest of the West, probably one of our oddest taboos is a prohibition on eating cats and dogs. From a survival or economic standpoint, it makes no sense to exclude cats and dogs from being eaten while we have no issue eating cows, pigs, or chickens. This is mostly because from our history, we have had a unique relationship with them versus other cultures, and we have elevated them to a unique status amongst animals as more like friends. The Haitians in the Ohioan town of Springfield are very recent examples of this where they were seen eating stray cats and dogs off the streets, offending much of the sensibilities of Americans across the country. This is one of the easiest taboos to pick up upon in the United States if you had just entered, but they chose not to respect our customs and beliefs simply because they adhere to their Haitian beliefs and cannot understand ours.

We must remember man is the product of many factors, not solely his ability to reason. Man has many identities that define him, and it’s an error to assume we can tell him to turn off significant parts of his identity such as his race and inheritance. It’s no easier to tell a man to ignore his heritage than it is to tell a man or woman to stop being men or women. These are fundamental identities, and something that only liberals and ideologues have problems with. We are body and soul composites, and our bodies are dependent on our genetics and other material factors, though of course these aren’t necessarily set in stone as many on the Dissident Right like to think, but we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that group identity is very important to individual identity. Just as individuals will group with and feel more comfortable with their family members, so do people group with and feel more comfortable with people similar to them. In turn, this is why they prefer to work with people like them for their benefit and the benefit of the group they belong to. Because their people and their culture is more familiar to them, they will be more inclined to choose that over foreign cultures and people. From here, it’s easy to see that if people prefer to be around people like them, they will prefer and adhere to the rules and beliefs of the people they live with and were raised with.

These national beliefs and values are very powerful motivators in human affairs, so much so that they are much harder to change in a people than Joel and proponents of American creedal identity would like to think. Sam Francis in his interesting article entitled “The Roots Of The White Man” illustrates this very succinctly. In his article, he traces the traits and characteristics of whites to their ancestors the Indo-Europeans, and he shows the remarkable stability of these values and traits in the Europeans from roughly 2000 BC to today. It’s worth reflecting on this because it should at least give pause to Joel and others about the idea that it is easy to change one’s national creed at a whim and maybe there’s something more to being a part of a specific people than just saying you believe what they believe.

All of this isn’t meant to be an all comprehensive treatment of what it means to be a people, but to show that only belief in a credal identity as Joel conceived of it is not a sufficient basis for defining membership in a nation. They neither can tell us what the American creed is nor realize that national creeds are not logical statements, but a form of inheritance. National beliefs are important to the identity of a people, but we must realize they are generally accepted based on one’s heritage. Of course, these do not explain all of the outliers and valid objections we can raise in regards to this thesis. For example, we see many examples of non-heritage Americans readily accepting the beliefs and culture of America quite well, sometimes more than many heritage Americans today. I think it’s rarer than Joel and his buddies would like to think for the reasons stated above, but I won’t deny it happens. It’s probably best to look for a solution with objections like this in mind to treat membership in a group as a spectrum, allowing for their participation in the United States, but I am getting ahead of myself. It indicates that in the future it’ll be worth investigating how some people are able to shed national beliefs at an individual level and accept others and also how nations can accept others into their folds to a certain extent. There are probably many solutions to this current problem, and I am willing to hear them out. Unfortunately the subject matter and the time allotment doesn’t allow for us to be as precise as we’d like or to answer all the questions we can raise, so we must settle with what has been said so far and examine objections and solutions some other time. Let me know down below any objections and constructive criticisms towards this since I view it as more of a Socratic dialogue than as my final thoughts on a subject. In the end, it is enough to say the America as a propositional nation is a flawed and ill defined idea; one especially not suited for modern American politics.