CONSERVATIVE

at the perfection of Michelangelo’s sculptures without
feeling awe and pride to be the recipient of such a rich
inheritance. Today’s mass culture, however, strives
for vulgarity. When Spanish philosopher José Ortega
y Gasset wrote The Dehumanization of Art in 1925,
he could hardly have predicted that in 1999 New
York’s intellectual elites would venerate, as a symbol
of religious freedom, a painting of the Virgin Mary
covered with photographs of female genitalia from
pornographic magazines and elephant feces.
As mentioned before, the anti-Western
school has instead turned to the Far East, especially
India, for inspiration. While India is a top emerging
economy, its culture makes huge inequalities unlikely
to disappear no matter how robust its GDP growth.
Whereas Christianity teaches that there is “neither
Greek nor Jew”, Hinduism retains a caste system that
consigns millions to destitution and neglect because
of the families into which they were born. The abuse
of women is commonplace in India and widows,
considered “inauspicious”, are ostracized by their
families and villages.
It is traditional Western values—the very ones
that young people are taught to hold in contempt by
academia, the Guardian, and New York Times—that
represent the only hope for the millions of hapless
Indians suffering because of such (anti-progressive)
cultural shackles. Missionaries from Europe and the
Americas (Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity are
the best-known example) continue to rescue countless
Indians from filth, neglect and starvation. The Catholic
Church in India also is a great advocate of widows’
rights. These moves are not motivated by proselytism:
The faithful serve persons of all creeds, and although the
Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in
India, only about 2% of the population are Christian.
Further double standards abound—courtesy of
the proponents of moral equivalence, no less. Western
newspapers revel in stories of sexual misconduct by a
tiny minority of Catholic priests, despite the Vatican’s
adoption of a strict line against deviant clergymen. In
contrast, the late Indian Sathya Sai Baba—a cult leader
who claimed to be a deity and to possess miraculous
powers (such as making Rolex watches ‘materialize’,
a trick debunked by illusionists)—was accused of
molesting dozens of underage boys from various
continents. Indian courts refused to investigate,
because as a ‘holy man’ he enjoyed impunity. Such
license strongly contrasts with the Roman concept of
equality before the law and the separation between
“The Triumph of Death” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), a sprawling, nightmarish oil painting from 1652. The
work is located in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
The European Conservative 5