The Great Wobbling Blancmange that is Modern Culture
Mark Steyn perfectly describes Europe’s Islam problem. He quotes Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick as saying that 9/11 “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other,” and he points out that the suspects in the latest terrorist plot in Germany were named Daniel and Fritz. And Fritz, at least, is ethnic German, converted to Islam in Germany at a multicultural center.
Then he gets to the heart of the problem:
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.
The good news is that the United States doesn’t have Europe’s demographic problems, so we have some time to close that hole and build a culture worth believing in. The bad news is that this change of culture will probably take 20 years or so, until most of the fanatic baby boomers are packed away safely in nursing homes. Then maybe we can get a more responsible generation in power, and they can push the culture toward something more sustainable.