Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age Quotes

“In Spengler’s language, this Faustian soul was present in ‘the Viking infinity-wistfulness,’ and their colonising activities through the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the Black Sea. It was present in the Portuguese and Spaniards who ‘were possessed by the adventured-craving for uncharted distances and for everything unknown and dangerous.’ It also lay in ‘the emigration to America,’ ‘the Californian gold-rush,’ ‘the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks’ — ‘dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giant-like contempt for all limitations.’ ‘These dramas are Faustian and only Faustian. No other culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“However, one cannot ignore the folklore of the times; the story of the Odyssey and other legends recounting the adventure and dangers of travelling through the Dardanelles and Bosporus, the legends of the Argonauts and Heracles, the nymph of Arethusa, and the goddess of Syracuse.[23] Centuries of overseas ventures undoubtedly produced a pioneering spirit among the Greeks. I am in agreement with A.G. Woodhead’s emphasis on the ‘general spirit of adventure’ that permeated ‘the dawn of classical Hellas’, and his observation that ‘many of the colonies had their origins in purely individual enterprise or extraordinary happenings.’[24] He writes: ‘This personal element, indeed, probably deserves more stress than it has received. It is fashionable to look for great impersonal causes and trends which, singly or in combination, produce a human response, and the economic considerations already discussed fall into that category.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“The Faustian spirit has infused every high cultural achievement of Western life. As John Farrenkopf puts it, ‘the architecture of the Gothic cathedral expresses the Faustian will to conquer the heavens; Western symphonic music conveys the Faustian urge to conjure up a dynamic, transcendent, infinite space of sound; Western perspective painting mirrors the Faustian will to infinite distance; and the Western novel responds to the Faustian imperative to explore the inner depths of the human personality while extending outward with a comprehensive view.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“One argument of Uniqueness is that it is not any particular renaissance, revolution, or liberal institution that marks out the West, but its far higher levels of achievement in all the intellectual and artistic spheres of life. I relied on Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, to make this argument.[1] This book is the first effort to quantify ‘as facts’ the accomplishments of individuals and countries across the world in the arts and sciences, by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries. Murray concludes that ‘whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America’ from 800 BC to 1950.[2]
Murray also notes the far higher accomplishments of Europeans in the arts, particularly after 1400. Although Murray does not compare their achievements but compiles separate lists for each civilisation, he notes that the sheer number of ‘significant figures’ in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilisations.[3] In literature, the number in the West is 835; whereas in India, the Arab World, China, and Japan combined, the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, ‘the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilization means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all’.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“But I believe that the Industrial Revolution, including developments leading to this revolution, barely capture what was unique about Western culture. While other cultures were unique in their own customs, languages, beliefs, and historical experiences, the West was uniquely exceptional in exhibiting in a continuous way the greatest degree of creativity, novelty, and expansionary dynamics. I trace the uniqueness of the West back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers as early as the 4th millennium BC. Their aristocratic libertarian culture was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many military innovations and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of Catholicism (the first rational theology in history), was a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis, in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch-making transformation in Europe is endless: the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution(s), the Military Revolution(s), the Cartographic Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, the Printing Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the German Philosophical Revolutions from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“courses The Western Civ course was a standard curriculum offering 40 years ago, but according to a National Association of Scholars report issued in 2011, ‘The Vanishing West: 1964–2010,’ only 2% of colleges in the United States currently offer Western Civilisation as a course requirement.[1] The teaching of World History survey courses is now the norm across American and Canadian campuses.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“the rise of representative institutions, is wrong on racial grounds.[71] It is wrong on high cultural grounds as well: Russia has contributed one of the greatest literary traditions to the West, starting with Alexander Pushkin, the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolay Nekrasov, dramas of Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Anton Chekhov, and the prose of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Goncharov. It is wrong on geopolitical grounds: Russia’s relentless geographical expansion into Siberia, beginning in the late-1500s and reaching the Pacific by 1639, is as deserving of admiration as the achievements of other well-known European explorations. Russia has been a land of numerous great explorers associated with heroic expeditions from Siberia to the Arctic into Space; it launched the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, the first human spaceflight in 1961, the first spacewalk in 1965, the first space exploration rover, on the Moon in 1970, and the first space station in 1971.[72] Guillaume Faye’s vision of a Euro-Siberia federation covering all European lands in between the Atlantic and the Pacific is a salutation to Russia’s geographical achievement and possible impending role in the struggle with the Asian world for the survival of Western civilisation.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“Latin America possesses some Western traits, this cannot be denied. The Spanish legacy, Christianity, and a high number of original writers (e.g. Jorge Luis Borges, known for his invention of the philosophical short story, Rubén Darío and the modernismo poetic movement, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Julio Cortázar, to name but a few).”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“The point here is not that Marco Polo should thus be seen in a good light, according to leftist expectations. It is rather that the ‘Orientalist’ charge is wrong, and that this Italian of the Middle Ages was a typical European in showing greater curiosity about other cultures, while exhibiting a unique European disposition to seek out and learn about the world. By contrast, Larner judges that Ibn Battuta’s tale ‘is not a geography like Marco’s work, but essentially an autobiography.’ Visiting unknown or unfamiliar lands, writing about the ways of others, was not Ibn Battuta’s ‘overriding impulse’; rather, it was to visit ‘illustrious sanctuaries’[40] in the Muslim world. He makes the crucial point that Ibn Battuta ‘is always at home’ in his travels, ‘wherever he goes he is in the House of Islam’.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“The reason Murray’s work is very important is that he found a way to measure intellectual and artistic achievements in a comparative statistical way.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“Meanwhile, ‘ethnomethodology’ afforded a method by which to bring out the voices of the marginalised in society, the ones who had been silenced by the official discourses of ‘Western social scientists’. Students were obligated to hear their folk-ways, their forms of expression, ‘the silences or absences’ of marginalised criminals, drug addicts, black lesbians, the mentally impaired, undocumented immigrants, African migrants, on the grounds that there was as much to be learned from their ‘voices’ than from the now sterile and biased works of the Western Canon.[12] Of course, the ones in charge of hearing these voices have generally been well-off academic whites, and non-whites looking to profit from white-created countries.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“History from Below’ directed attention to the important roles the masses had played politically, in bringing about major revolutions. It argued that history was not an affair of the upper classes only, using the French Revolution as an example of how even its ‘bourgeois’ phase was driven by the actions of peasants and artisans, and how the proletariat was destined to be the main agent of history in ushering Communism.[9] This approach, advanced by Marxist historians, would be extended by feminists and cultural Marxists generally into a call for a new history that would include the ‘indispensable’ roles and achievements of a whole host of ‘minorities’ neglected by traditional academics (i.e. gays, transsexuals, lesbians, blacks etc.), all of which contained a corresponding assault, and inevitable devaluation of the one agent that stood out as unoppressed, as ultimate oppressor: white hetero males, the very beings responsible for almost all the greatest works in Art and Science. The argument by World Systems Theory is that the ‘core’ countries of the West had achieved their status as advanced cultures by exploitation and holding down the ‘periphery’ and that a true historical narrative entailed an appreciation of the morally superior ways of Third World peoples struggling to liberate themselves from a world system controlled by white owned multinationals. This too has had an immensely negative impact on students, leading them to believe that the West only managed to modernise by extracting resources from the Third World and enslaving Africans and Natives.[10] This highly influential school has missed the far more important role of modern science and liberal institutions in the industrialisation of Western European nations.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“Humans do not have an innate urge to explore; only European man has exhibited a keen desire to move beyond the known world into the unknown. Current historians of exploration cannot come to terms with this difference in human psychology. In the egalitarian world of academia the deeds of great European men stand like an irritating thorn. Allowing university students (the majority of whom are now females) to learn that practically every great philosopher, scientist, architect, composer (or, simply put, everyone great), has been a male makes them uncomfortable. The thought of teaching their increasingly multiracial classrooms that these males are overwhelmingly European terrifies them.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“But Murray pays no attention to accomplishments in other human endeavours such as warfare, voyages of discovery, and heroic leadership. His achievements come only in the form of ‘great books’ and ‘great ideas.’ Europeans were also exceptional in their contentious and expansionist behaviours. Their scholarly achievements, including their liberal values, were inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism. There is no need to concede to multicultural critics, as Norman Davies believes, ‘the sorry catalogue of wars, conflict, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the [Western] tale.’[5] The intellectual and artistic achievements of Europeans, seemingly peaceful as they may seem, are part of the same expansionist and disputatious psychological make-up Spengler designated as ‘Faustian’.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“critical principles inherent in the Enlightenment. Robert Louden’s The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the Enlightenment Still Eludes Us (2007),”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“Stephen Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“The intention of this chapter is to exhibit the extent to which multicultural world historians have been willing to violate two basic principles of the historical profession — respect for the scholarly sources and reliability in the evaluation of the evidence — in order to downplay Western uniqueness, equalise the achievements of all races in world history, blame Europeans for the backwardness of other civilisations, while emphasising the connections of the West with the rest of the world in order to make non-European immigrants feel that they have contributed as much to the making of the West as Europeans. In this way, they wish to create a historical account that is suitable to a heterogeneous race-mixed Western culture consistent with the protocols of diversity enrichment.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“Uruguay, with about 88% of its population white and descended from Europeans, and only 4% black and 8% mestizo, is more European than the present United States.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“In contrast, China has been a relatively isolated civilisation, both geographically and historically. On the eastern side stands the vast Pacific Ocean; to the south and the west, the impassable gorges of the Burma border and the inhospitable plateau of the Tibetan Himalayas, and to the northwest and north, the sparsely populated grasslands of Central Asia and the Gobi desert, the fifth largest desert in the world. Contact with other regions did occur, with India through the northwest corridor, with the Arab world by sea, and through the Silk Road along the steppes. But the salient point is that China has developed her own culture in a far less connected way than Europe. Black African kingdoms have been very isolated: sub-Saharan Africa is surrounded by the Sahara Desert in the north, which hindered contact with the Mediterranean, and by the Kalahari Desert in the south, which partially disconnected the southern plateau and coastal regions from central Africa. On the western side, Africa is faced by the vast Atlantic Ocean that Portuguese navigators only managed to navigate southwards in the 16th century. To the north and south of the equator, Black Africa had to contest with dense rainforests which occupy a west-east band of territory from the southern coast of West Africa across to the Congo basin and all the way to the Kenya highlands. Moreover, with an average elevation of 660 meters, African cultures were limited by the presence of few natural harbours where ships can dock, and few navigable rivers. Of the Niger, the Congo, the Nile, the Zambezi, and the Orange Rivers, only the Nile has relatively long navigable areas.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“From a strictly geographical point, irrespective of historical connections, Europe is the most connected region of the planet. It is not even a clear continent on its own but a peninsula on the western end of Asia. With its deeply convoluted coasts and its scattered island fragments, the sheer length of Europe’s interface between land and sea has been estimated to be 37,000 km, which is equivalent to the circumference of the earth. Europe is connected to more seas than any other place or civilisation, accessing the Black Sea, the North sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, which is itself a collection of many conjoined ‘sub-seas’.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“All in all, the West has displayed far more territorial movements, cultural novelties, and revolutions in the sciences and arts. For this reason, answering ‘where is the West?’ requires one to ask ‘what is the West?’ with an awareness of the fact that both the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ have changed over time.[40] This civilisation, for example, is not simply ‘Christian’ in the way others are ‘Confucian’ or ‘Hindu’ in a more stable, less varying way. Its Christian character alone has been infused with a theological and institutional dynamic (flowing from its synthesis with Classical reason and Indo-European aristocratic expansionism) stimulating a multiplicity of monastic movements (i.e. Cluniacs, Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans etc.) and heterodox movements (Pelagians, Waldensians, Cathars etc.), not to mention Crusades and numerous Protestant denominations lacking elsewhere.[41] The West — depending on locality, time, and groups — has been Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean, Stoic, Cynic, Augustinian, Monarchist, Newtonian, Gothic, Anglican, Humanist, Republican, Machiavellian, Hegelian, Fascist, Marxist, Darwinian, Surrealist, Cubist, Romantic, Socialist, Liberal, and much more. By contrast, the intellectual traditions set down in ancient/medieval times in China, the Near East, India, and Japan would persist in their essentials until the impact of the West brought some novelties.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“India is touted today as the most multicultural, ethnically diverse country in the world. This country is home to four major racial groups, which overlap due to racial admixture: Caucasoids, Australoids, Mongoloids and Negritos. With over two thousand ethnic groups, four major families of languages, and multiple religions (Hindus do comprise the vast majority at 80.5% with Islam at 13.4%), India, in the words of Coon, is ‘the most complicated geographically, racially, and culturally’.[38] Yet all these racial groups are descendants of waves of invaders centuries ago; immigration is practically non-existent today, apart from a trickling of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Burmese migrants. With its endogamous rules, India has remained racially stable for centuries; its caste divisions have been historically deep, with limited gene flows across racial boundaries. The racial differences that exist can still be traced back to the migrations into India before Christ. The Indian racial populations can be well demarcated as separate from most of the other Asian populations, from the Persian Gulf, Arabia, Burma, China, Vietnamese and Malayan lands. It is not a complicated land to locate on a map; historically the country has always been located more or less in the same place.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“I would argue that just as we can speak of a new Caucasoid race evolving outside of Africa in general, we can speak of a ‘European’ subrace. This subrace evolved with its own anatomical, behavioural and IQ traits due to breeding within a relatively isolated geographical unit; Europe itself.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings (2013) by Jean Manco.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“With these ideas in mind, I decided to create a blog, Council of European Canadians, early in the summer of 2014 ‘dedicated to the promotion and defence of the ethnic interests of European Canadians.’ I called for a strategy in which European Canadians would make use of the current policy of multiculturalism in Canada, using this policy for their own ends by asking for a seat at the table as a people concerned for the preservation of Canada’s European heritage. As part of the ‘beliefs and goals’ of the Council, I stated: We believe Canada is a nation founded by Anglo and French Europeans. In 1971, over 100 years after Confederation, the Anglo and French composition of the Canadian population stood at 44.6 percent and 28.7 percent respectively. All in all, over 96 percent of the population was European in origin. We therefore oppose all efforts to deny or weaken the European character of Canada. We believe that the pioneers and settlers who built the Canadian nation are part of the European people. Therefore we believe that Canada derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and that Canada should remain majority European in its ethnic composition and cultural character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into Canada that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority within our lifetime. In subsequent months I posted articles on a whole range of subjects. From the beginning the blog became a subject of controversy with numerous complaints filed against me to the president of the university where I was working, The University of New Brunswick, and to other members of the administration, followed by TV interviews, many articles in the mainstream media, student university papers, and radio debates. It was obvious I had hit a nerve in the Western establishment. You must not question mass immigration in the name of the ethnic interests of Europeans.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“The best strategy for the preservation and advancement of the genetic interests of an ethny is a well-defined territorial state. History is witness to ongoing wars between ethnic groups expanding against other groups or being conquered by armies and displaced by migrants. A ‘central feature of ethnic competition’ in the past was ‘genocide and ethnic cleansing’.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age

“Early in 2014, I read On Genetic Interests, Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration, by Frank Salter. Reading this book, in combination with books and articles on the history of Canadian multiculturalism, I realised that multiculturalism was an asymmetrical system in which Europeans, and only Europeans, were expected to celebrate other cultures, feel guilty about their own ethnic identity, and behave as universal altruists; while at the same time non-Europeans inside the European homelands were being encouraged to practice their in-group ethnic interests. It became obvious that multiculturalism was not simply about ‘understanding’ different cultures but about accepting mass immigration into European lands. The dissemination of multiculturalism in academia was an effort, as Salter saw it, ‘to break down or neutralise ethnocentric responses to diversity’ among Europeans through ‘diversity education’ and ‘by breaking down the correspondence between national and ethnic identity.’[1] The more this correspondence was diluted, both through the ideology of cultural Marxism and the actual effectuation of racial interbreeding in the West, the more difficult it would be to identify Western civilisation.”
― Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age