The inescapable essence of liberal-progressivism is philosophical materialism: the belief that spiritual religion is ignorance and that, as Karl Marx proclaimed, people’s nature is determined (and can be re-shaped) by the physical conditions in which they live and work and by the impact of the political state’s laws and regulations.
A reader posted the following comment regarding The Irresponsible Nanny State.
I missed the part in Heather MacDonald’s critique of Mayor Boomberg’s effort to encourage young men where she said that the program was “Godless.”
While she was caustic, sarcastic and defeatist about making any effort to change the ethos of the inner city situation, I did not see her level the charge that religion was not part of the proposed program.
Help us out here, Tom, and tell us how making an effort to help out young men is anti-Christian.
Responding to the comment, two points should be stated.
First, Heather Mac Donald may have been “caustic, sarcastic and defeatist,” but only in the sense that Mayor Bloomberg is apparently ignorant of the complete failure of identical programs in the past to achieve their intended results. Moreover, as she pointed out, such programs waste large sums of taxpayers money. In effect, the mayor is ripping off the taxpayers to buy support from liberal-progressives who without doubt want good things to happen, but who are lost in a fairy-tale world in which Cinderella marries the prince and lives happily ever after.
Second, every element of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan is materialistic, notably paying hooligans to attend school. As Ms. Mac Donald emphasizes, the key variable in the picture is the absence of the traditional, two-parent family, the first-line agent for imparting morals and civility. Without that, every dollar spent on the mayor’s programs is wasted.
Historian Bernard Bailyn, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote in Education in the Forming of American Society:
The modern conception of public education, the very idea of a clean line of separation between “private” and “public,” was unknown before the end of the eighteenth century.
Speaking of the colonial era, Professor Bailyn wrote,
The most important agency in the transfer of culture was not formal institutions of instruction or public instruments of communication, but the family; and the character of family life in late sixteenth – and early seventeenth-century England is critical for understanding the history of education in colonial America.
…[Families and their communities] were, in the first place, the primary agencies in the socialization of the child. Not only did the family introduce him to the basic forms of civilized living, but it shaped his attitudes, formed his patterns of behavior, endowed him with manners and morals.”
…More explicit in its educational function than either family or community was the church…It furthered the introduction of the child to society by instructing him in the system of thought and imagery which underlay the culture’s values and aims. It provided the highest sanctions for the accepted forms of behavior, and brought the child into close relationship with the intangible loyalties, the ethos and highest principles, of the society in which he lived. In this educational role, organized religion had a powerfully unifying influence.
Liberal-progressives such as Mayor Bloomberg either are ignorant of this historical background, or are deliberately embarked upon an effort to destroy our founding Judeo-Christian constitutional ethic and replace it with the socialistic materialism of Karl Marx.
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