Liberal universalists similarly tell an upside-down story about Israel, trashing it as a rogue state breaking international law and willfully killing the innocent in a spirit of revenge. In fact, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, deeply committed to protecting life and liberty and upholding international law, and motivated in war only to defend the innocent against evil and the nation against annihilation. Melanie Phillips
The essential fuel for all this cultural energy is that Israel has a sense of purpose. Its people understand why the state exists and why it needs to exist—that it is the indispensable homeland of the Jewish people. It survives and thrives for one overwhelming reason: because it wants to. Melanie Phillips
Accordingly, instead of holding the line for objectivity and reason, the church allowed itself to be drawn ever deeper into moral and cultural relativism, leading to such absurdities as the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, apologizing to the developing world for the spread of Christianity. Melanie Phillips
Religion provides the instruction manual for society. Constructing a moral framework for how individuals live, it establishes the principles that govern political choices. Its moral laws lay down the benchmarks for the temporal laws passed by parliaments. Since religion is timeless, its teachings are treated as sources of wisdom and ethical guidelines about how to act. It promotes civic values, builds social capital, and creates national character. Its normative influence binds people together. It is society’s cultural glue. Melanie Phillips
Human rights culture is steadily replacing the biblical codes that uphold reverence for human life, justice, and community obligations by a set of secular values tailored for a narcissistic and godless age. The result is a culture of human wrongs. Melanie Phillips
Anyone who identifies as part of a designated victim group is deemed to be beyond reproach. The only people who can ever be guilty are those deemed to be in power over such “victim” groups—men, the middle classes, white people, the sexually “hetero-normative.” In other words, mainstream society, whose principal crime is that it is mainstream and is therefore innately elitist, racist, exist, and oppressive towards any group considering itself to be disadvantaged by anything. Melanie Phillips
It’s as if people no longer see life as something that should be organized around a specific vocation, a calling that is their own way of doing good in the world. Everything feels personalized and miniaturized. The upper registers of moral life—fighting for freedom, struggling to end poverty—have been amputated for many. The awfulness of the larger society is a given. The best you can do is find a small haven in a heartless world. Melanie Phillips
The fragmentation of family life damages personal identity and can lead to a catastrophic loss of self-worth. This promotes promiscuity and the inability to form meaningful relationships. Melanie Phillips
These characteristics of irrationality and mind control made Eastern religious manifestations particularly attractive both to totalitarian movements of the Left and of the Right. Which is why the embrace of meditation, mindfulness, and other such practices reflecting “spiritual narcissism” isn’t just a harmless absurdity but part of the West’s ongoing cultural tragedy. Melanie Phillips
According to a study by Dutch researchers, practices such as mindfulness and meditation that are supposed to make people less judgmental and egotistical actually make them more self-centered and narcissistic. Melanie Phillips
