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Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Society as Clay in Liberals' Hands
An enduring society is not a random assemblage of people drawn together, like pigs around the feed trough, waiting for welfare-state handouts.
The liberal paradigm recognizes no spiritual dimension to human nature or to human society. In the liberals’ atheistic and materialistic world, humans are merely animals a notch along the evolutionary scale from the apes and, like them, motivated only by material factors: water, food, sex, and shelter.
Societies, in that paradigm, are held together by whatever may be the currently reigning regulations governing those material wants. A political society theoretically is a lump of clay that intellectuals are capable of shaping anyway they wish.
In contrast, Cicero, the great Roman orator and admirer of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic philosophers, observed in the Republic:
…The commonwealth, then, is the people’s affair; and the people is not every group of men, associated in any manner, but is the coming together of a considerable number of men who are united by a common agreement about law and rights and by the desire to participate in mutual advantages.…
Aristotle, in the Politics, wrote, Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; …… the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.
For Aristotle, the highest good was a political state that structured its laws, customs, and religion with the aim of promoting moral conduct.
Many earlier postings on this website have emphasized that point. Among the most recent:
Cultural Momentum and 1960s Freedom as Life-Enslavement in which I wrote:
When the Bill of Rights was written in the first session of Congress, liberty meant freedom from arbitrary government action that abrogated individual rights, particularly private property rights. ....
Student activists in the 1960s and 1970s redefined freedom. In the socialistic and anarchistic doctrine characterizing that movement, private property was a dirty concept associated with the power of the “establishment.”
What took the place of those rights was individual licentiousness and hedonism. The radical new-leftists wanted to knock down everything that was a product of people over the age of 30. ...
As with almost every liberal-progressive-socialist policy, the real-life result has been disastrous to all concerned. The historically unprecedented explosion of sexual promiscuity spread HIV and destroyed the prospects for millions of children reared in single-parent homes, in addition to rearing several generations of irresponsible, hedonistic, and self-centered young men.
In a February 14, 2007, op-ed piece in the Washington Times, Paul Belien, the editor of the Brussels Journal, laments the crumbling of European culture. He sees the announced aims of our new Congress, dominated by liberal-progressive-socialists, as modeling the United States on that European pattern.
In his op-ed piece, Mr. Belien writes:
Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and the liberal special-interest groups that currently dominate Congress want to reshape America in Europe’s image: socialist, secularist and multicultural.
[In Europe], one can see what the undermining of Judeo-Christian values, higher taxes, onerous regulations and big, intrusive government will lead to: the collapse of a civilization.
First there was the rise of the welfare state, which led to the steady emergence of highly taxed, slow-moving and maladaptive economies that must support growing and eventually unsupportable demands by the citizens.
Second, there was secularism. People who have the state taking care of them from the cradle to the grave no longer need God. The welfare state also intentionally undermined religion to crush the spirit of freedom among its subjects. And it undermined demographics, because people who do not believe in God do not believe in the future and see children as a burden.
Third, a wholly new danger emerged, namely that of welfare immigration—the immigration of people, increasingly from cultures which have not been shaped by the basic forces of European civilization, who come purely for the purpose of claiming benefits....
The native Dutch are moving out. Since 2004, more indigenous Dutchmen have emigrated each year than immigrants have moved in. People who have lost faith in God do not fight. They run. Since they do not believe in life after death, this life is the only thing they have to lose. One emigrant Dutchman, a homosexual author who lives in Brussels, writes: “I am not a warrior. I do not fight for freedom. I am only good at enjoying it.”
......Europe has chosen the path of submission. Islamization is not the cause but the consequence of the collapse of Europe. The very word Islam means “submission.” Many Europeans have submitted already. In that sense, they have already become Muslims.
Europe’s contemporary culture is one of “repudiation,” a culture based on negatives for every aspect of the traditional European heritage (Christianity, monogamous marriage, national loyalty, monocultural identity and so on). This is the culture that Mrs. Pelosi wants to introduce in America.
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