Self-Destruct Buttons

On the otherwise rather repugnant Disney Channel, there's a very clever cartoon series called Phineas and Ferb, probably the most creative and original animated TV show since Rocky and Bullwinkle.  It involves a mad scientist, Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who builds fiendishly malevolent machines, but always equips them with self-destruct buttons, which all too often spoil his evil plans.  This gets me to thinking, in my non-linear way, about Western Civilization.  Does it, too, come with a self-destruct button attached?  Christianity and Western Civilization are practically coterminous, so what you say about one tends to apply to the other.  At base, Christianity is universalist.  It considers itself to apply to all of mankind, like Islam and Buddhism — it explicitly doesn't restrict itself to one nation or race.  That is, anybody can join, and its rules of morality apply to all people and between all people, not just Christians.  Other religions are definitely not universalist.  Shinto is for Japan and Japan alone.  Judaism is for the Jewish people, and is essentially hereditary.  You have to be born into Hinduism.  (Before you e-mail me, yes, I know that there are counterexamples to all of these assertions.  People have converted to those last three, and there are sects of Christianity — I think it's the case with Amishism — that are effectively not universalist. But the generalization is valid.)

Christianity may be universalist, but people aren't.  People are ethnocentric.  Western Civilization, to some extent, is a struggle between the universalist urge of Christianity and our intrinsic ethnocentrism. It confuses us.  We learn that it's a good thing to think of the human species as a single thing, living in kumbaya harmony.  Indeed, it's hammered into us from childhood, by the Christians and the liberals and the communists and the neocons and just about every organized mode of thought available.  Dissenters from this view, who have noticed that, despite the claims, people never do live in harmony unless they're pretty much alike to begin with, are routinely dismissed as racists or bigots or whatever term is popular.  It leads to self-contradictory ideas like open borders, and the thought that anybody on earth can walk in and become American, or French, or Norwegian.  They can't.  They can pretend to, but they essentially remain what they always were, and we end up with "Scots" practicing female genital mutilation and "Americans" worshipping Baron Samedi.

So, is this universalism the self-destruct button on Western Civilization?  Does our thinking that everybody can become a member of Western Civilization lead to the admission of alien elements that will destroy the host?  It seems to be working out that way.  Nietzsche said so some time back, and he used the phrase "slave morality" to describe this tendency of Christianity.  Nietzsche said a lot of things, and I don't have time to figure out how valid they all were, but I think he was definitely on to something with this "slave morality" meme.

Whatever the origin of our self-destruct button, we've got it, and we keep poking at it.  Allen Mendenhall discusses our "Will to Powerlessness" HERE.