Cory Bernardi Vs. Western Civilisation

According to this article,

THE pillars of Western society are under threat, and Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi has a plan to prop them up.   

      
Unfortunately, when Cory Bernardi and people like him talks about "Western society" or "Western Civilisation," they invariably mean white, Christian, straight, and patriarchal. It is an extremely limiting view of a complex historical movement. And Western Civilisation is a movement; it has travelled a long way from what we commonly take is its origins. It is not a static state of affairs, and this is the great mistake made by conservative thinkers and politicians.

When I talk of Western Civilisation I mean the more than 2500 years of intellectual and cultural change; I mean a reverence and re-engagement with what, for pragmatic reasons, we take as the zero-point of Western Civilisation: Classical Greece; I mean the Dark Ages and the closing of the Western mind, the attitudes of which time we still seem to struggle against; I mean the Renaissance; I mean the Enlightenment; I mean the Scientific, Industrial, and Democratic Revolutions. In short, I mean the 2500-plus years of the struggle of reason and the imagination against prejudice and oppression. That is Western Civilisation.

Bernardi-ism, like so much that is inane about conservatism, is grounded upon a misreading of history prompted by personal grievance, the loss of aristocracy. Western Civilisation is about progress and self-criticism; the Bernardian world-view is grounded on the anxiety that self-criticism often threatens us with, and it replaces self-criticism with self-certainty. The "six f-words" at the heart of Bernardi's plan - Faith, Family, Flag, Free enterprise, Federation and Freedom - are emblematic of this self-certainty. What they are also emblematic of is the vague simplifications of an anxious ideology; it is an ideology that requires homogeneity and stasis to survive. Western Civilisation is about change, progress, and adaptation. In short, Western Civilisation evolves, and that is its greatest strength. Conservatism, such as Bernardi's version, in asserting "traditional values," does not take a proper account of Western history.