The NPI Conference — After the Fall: The Future of Identity
*The National Policy Institute’s 2013 Leadership Conference will be held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC on October 26th, with related events on Friday 25th and Sunday 27th*. It is still time to register online at our website http://www.npiamerica.org/2013-conference.*http://www.npiamerica.org/2013-conference.*
Though there’s much talk about “identity” in political debates these days, it’s not always clear what we are talking about. Is identity defined by Race? Language? Religion? Ethnicity? Nationhood?
The National Policy’s Institute (NPI)’s coming conference—After the Fall: the Future of Identity—will raise such questions and provide the audience with important perspectives.
While the entire Western world is facing similar and inter-related challenges nowadays—from mass non-European immigration to financial bankruptcy, from cultural debasement to social atomization—the identity of “the West” that is at stake is not clearly understood. Often, what is meant by “the West” is its neoconservative conception: liberal democracy, human rights, and cultural and religious pluralism. (Paul Gottfried has quipped that when neocons say “the West,” they seem to mean the Upper West Side.) Since this “West” doesn’t recognize race, or culture in the full sense of the word, it knows no border. It is all too often conflated with the Occident, which has a history of its own and is embodied by a particular people—the European people.
The “West” as defined by mainstream discourse is challenged by Third World immigrants today. They might be willing to benefit from the delights of a technologically advanced society, but for most of them, they keep seeing themselves as members of distinct cultures, with different and often competing interests. They rarely adhere to the liberal values that, we are supposed to believe, define our identity. Quite often, they can even outright reject them. Read more