The View From 1776

The urgent readiness of the majority of voters to pull out of Iraq, regardless of the consequences, is the expression of a nation that no longer has core beliefs and faith in itself.  We refuse to fight for our national rights and our survival, preferring groveling, making-nice to other nations, to get their approval.

Liberal-progressive spokesmen like Senators Kennedy and Kerry declare that gaining the approval of other nations via the UN should be the objective of our foreign policy.  Supreme Court Justices declare that we must turn away from the Constitution to laws of other nations for guidance in deciding cases before the Court.  Laws to make English the nation’s official language are denounced by liberals as racism.  Politicians on both sides of the political aisle perceive no danger to our survival in the overrunning of the Southwest and the West Coast by Hispanic illegals who have no intention of Americanizing themselves, and by immigrants who openly declare their intention to become the majority and vote to secede from the United States.

This sort of craven surrender of national tradition and pride is not unprecedented.  It started in Europe in the 19th century.

There is very little of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought that can be taken seriously.  But his appraisal of the jellification of European culture in the late 19th century is an exception.

In “Beyond Good and Evil” (1885), speaking of the ethos prevailing in Western Europe (what we witness today in the United States as a cultural war between Judeo-Christian traditionalists and liberal-progressive, atheistic materialists), he wrote:

There is a point of pathological hollowness and over-indulgence in the history of social groups where they even side with those who harm them, with their criminals – and they feel this way seriously and honestly.  Punishment seems somehow unfair; at any rate it is certain that the idea of punishment, of having to punish, hurts the group.  It creates fear in them.  “Isn’t it enough to render them harmless?  Why punish on top of that?  Punishment is frightful!” .....Anyone who tests the conscience of today’s Europeans, will pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hiding places, the imperative of herd-timidity: “We desire that someday there shall be nothing more to fear.” Some Day – the will and way to that some-day is everywhere in Europe today called “progress."

In this one can recognize today’s liberal-progressive preoccupation with “sensitive” foreign policy.  Common sense in the past informed us that it is better to be respected, or even feared, than to be held in contempt.  Liberal-progressives move in the opposite direction.  The object of liberal foreign policy is not protection of our vital national interests, including survival itself, but being liked by socialist governments around the world.  That necessarily means that we cannot make our own foreign policy; the UN, led by thugs like Hugo Chavez, will do that for us.

In Nietzsche’s description of the 1885 climate of opinion in Europe, we also can see foreshadowing of the pathetic myth that a world government by socialist intellectuals and technicians, the UN, will remove all reasons to fear aggression by other nations and other cultures.  Liberal-progressives remain steadfast in their faith, in the face of repeated disappointment, that socialism is the gnostic path of progress to perfection of humanity.  At the end of that gnostic path government will wither away, and we will find ourselves in the Garden of Eden.

Nietzsche continues: Anarchists in 1885 were savagely antagonistic to this liberal faith in “progress”

.....and even more to the bungling philosophasters and brotherhood-visionaries who call themselves Socialists and desire a “free society” – but in actuality the anarchists are of the same breed, of the same thorough and instinctive hostility against any social structure other than that of the “autonomous” herd (they go so far as to reject the concepts of “master” and “servant” – [Neither God nor Master] is one of the Socialist slogans)......

......they are one in their faith in the morality of commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself, as though it were the summit, the attained summit of mankind, the only hope for the future, the consolation of the living, the great deliverance from all the guilt of yore – they are all one in their faith in fellowship as that which will deliver them, their faith in the herd, in other words, in “themselves”....

Nietzsche could easily have been describing today’s “educated” young people coming out of our colleges and universities, having been thoroughly inculcated with the anti-American, atheistic, and philosophically materialistic religious views of the Vietnam War Baby-Boomers who infest academia’s professoriats.

As many other observers have noted, our short-changed young graduates have been led to believe that universal indulgence in narcotics, sexual promiscuity, and rebellion against the nation’s founding traditions constitutes individuality – Nietzsche’s herd-mentality.  Conformity to the latest media-communicated fad in dress, entertainment, and social justice ideas is “individuality.” Worse, the media bombard us with images of youth, turning society into an immature juvenocracy that worships only that which is novel and consciously rejects the wisdom of experience in past ages.

Nietzsche’s “commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself” is the doctrine enunciated by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. – truth is whatever wins out in the public market, whatever viewpoint the media can create in the minds of the majority of citizens. 

In this scene there is no place for Judeo-Christian morality and principles of self-reliance, hard work, and saving for the future.  There is no basis for, or even thought given to, the Constitution’s Preamble: 

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In a youth-oriented society, there is no tomorrow; just the Epicurean “eat, drink, and be merry.” In an atheistic and philosophically materialist society, living a righteous life is a quaint relic of a discredited past; one must focus on personal consumption, financed by credit cards, confident that the Federal government must and will take care of us no matter how profligate or debauched we may be.

Thousands of years in the Jewish people’s history described in the Bible’s Old Testament tell us, to the contrary, that whenever society strays from God’s will and worships wealth, personal power, and sensual gratification, disaster is not far away.

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