The View From 1776

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Political societies that endure for long times – from city states to national states – are never multi-cultural, random collections of people, each of whom views himself as a lone wolf pursuing his own personal satisfactions.  People in an enduring political society must be united by commonly-held beliefs about the source of order and legitimacy in that society.  Only voluntary assent to a common ethos can maintain law and order within the society and forge the patriotic strength necessary to defend the society against foreign aggressors.

Sexual promiscuity, scatological language, and drug abuse – today thought to be the essential “freedoms” that make the American “democracy” – are not a firm foundation for an enduring political society.  Nor is multi-cultural education, which teaches that our founders’ Judeo-Christian ethos was just one among many, all equally acceptable. 

Multi-culturalism and hedonistic license amount to every-man-for-himself.  They neither unite society, nor foster patriotic willingness to defend it.  Today’s rabid anti-Americanism among college faculties and students makes this clear.

Charles Darwin may have been primarily interested in pursuing scientific knowledge, but his hypothesis of evolution served his followers well as a tool to attack and ultimately dismantle the Judeo-Christian structure of Western civilization.  Education of the young determines their paradigm of society.  If their education can be forcibly made entirely secular, and if doctrines like Darwinism can teach them that God and morality play no role in that paradigm, then society will have been transformed into today’s cultural civil war that leaves the United States vulnerable to internal disintegration and to conquest by enemies like Al Queda.

Since the ill-named 18th century Age of Enlightenment, the common ethos of Western civilization – Judeo-Christian morality – has been under increasingly savage attack.  The assault troops in the attack have been philosophical intellectuals mis-employing the physical sciences, aiming to teach the people that:

1) There is no God, that belief in religion is ignorance.

2) Therefore, Judeo-Christian morality cannot be the unifying basis for political society.

3) That Judeo-Christian morality has in fact been a criminal factor that, by supporting the rights of private property, has oppressed the masses and unjustly enriched the elite.

4) That social-justice, in effect earthly salvation and return to the Garden of Eden, is possible when the power elite of Judeo-Christianity are banished from public authority and their places are taken by intellectuals, who are the only ones who understand all of this. (Check out Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity, which was the doctrine that animated John Stuart Mill’s social views and his advocacy of socialism).

5) Intellectuals, properly impressed by the enormous strides in the physical sciences and mathematics during the 17th and 18th centuries, made the assumption that they could use the same purely rational techniques of the physical sciences to discover “laws” of human behavior that would control the populace in the same way that Newton’s mathematics described and predicted the movements of the planets.  They expected to reduce the extraordinary complexity of human relations in political society to a few simple rules that intellectual councils could employ to re-structure and regulate political society in ways that would achieve social justice. 

6) The hallmark of social justice is nearly equal distribution of property, which necessitates “socializing” it, that is making all property uses and all economic processes subject to regulation by intellectual councils.  In that vision, all of society’s goods and services really belong to “the people” whose physical labor has produced everything, so all of society’s goods and services ought to be freely available to anyone who needs them.

BUT:

7) As the world’s first socialists in post-Revolutionary France discovered, people’s “needs” immediately become their desires, which are impossible to satiate.  The intellectual “laws” of social control are powerless to deal effectively with this universally repeated phenomenon.  For example, when the Socialist Party (aka Labour) in England instituted the National Health Service after World War II, the expectation was that medical costs would decline, because preventive medicine would forestall serious illness.  In fact, National Health was overrun by demand.  The government was compelled to ration health services, just as it still does today, by capping the national budget for medical expenditures.  That’s why, today in Canada and England, patients in many cases must wait for weeks or months for medical treatment.

8) Moreover, the vast majority of people who have worked to make or earn what they have are quite possessive about it.  They can see no reason why it should be taken from them by the government and given to other people whom they don’t even know.  Judeo-Christian morality commands each individual to soften his heart and to do the right thing, voluntarily and joyfully, to help others in their needs, one-on-one.  The collectivized, amoral, intellectual state cannot appeal to this unifying ethos, because it has declared that God doesn’t exist and that morality is simply Darwinian survival of the fittest. 

Inevitably, the secular state, ruled only by whatever fads of the moment capture the interest of the intellectuals, must employ some degree of political force, moving down the slippery slope toward Soviet-style totalitarianism.  It was against precisely such arbitrary government exercise of power that our English political forebears rebelled, first with Magna Carta in 1215, then the 1628 Petition of Right and the 1689 English Bill of Rights.  It was exactly this motivation that led to our own Declaration of Independence in 1776.

THE INTELLECTUAL SOLUTION:

9) Education must inculcate the socialist paradigm to teach students that Judeo-Christian morality and personal responsibility are selfish greed in the service of “the rich.” As V.I. Lenin told the Soviet Commissars of Education in 1923:  “We must hate – hatred is the basis of Communism.  Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not Communists.” Like the Soviet Communists (see Milan Kundera, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being"), Professor John Dewey, in his progressive education for socialism, wished to obliterate the inconvenient, two-hundred-eighty-year-old traditions of American political society.  (In that regard, read “Left Back: a Century of Failed School Reforms,” by self-described liberal Diane Ravitch, who was a prominent faculty member in the fountainhead of American socialist education, the Columbia University Teachers College).

The main foundation stone in Professor Dewey’s socialist, progressive education was his interpretation of Darwinism.  In his Columbia University lectures early in the 20th century, Dewey told his students that Darwin had proved that everything is continually in flux, therefore the idea of the timeless principles of Judeo-Christian morality and personal responsibility was nonsense.  Charles Darwin would probably have been astounded to hear Dewey’s contention that human morality is continually evolving to encompass every new “experience,” in particular socialism’s views of social justice.  With or without Darwin’s imprimatur, this idea of evolving standards of social conduct has become the official doctrine of liberal-socialism, championed in the classroom and, via judicial activism, in the Federal courts.

The misapplication of Darwinian evolutionary theory to social issues presents an ineluctable political problem.  How can it be squared with such ideas as human rights and the rule of law, based on moral principle?  If truth and morality are constantly shifting things, then the Declaration of Independence is nonsensical in proclaiming that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…….” The Declaration’s reference to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” becomes meaningless. 

Maggie’s Farm, in a re-posted article from its July 14, 2005, issue, cogently states what results from liberal-socialism’s espousal of value-free, amoral Darwinian evolution.

Read “Denial of Evil, Nihilism, and the Left, Part 1.” The following is a representative excerpt:

“So we quickly arrive at the religious core of morals and ethics, from whence they derive. The Jihadist believes that war on the West is demanded of him by God. I refuse to get morally relativistic and multicultural about that - leave that to the anthropologists. To me that is evil. Why does the Western Left like to ally themselves with this? One might imagine that woman-hating, fascistic, anti-human rights, primitively-capitalistic, oil and opium-dependent, hyper-religious movements would be anathema to them.

“But no. They are apologists. And I do not think it is as simple as the anti-Semitism of the Left, although that does exist, I believe.

“My take on it all is that the Left longs for chaos, for trouble, for failure and failure of confidence, for cultural breakdown, to undermine the fabric of our culture. Thus the Left has a reflex to be contrary to all tradition, including moral, religious and patriotic traditions - and including the tradition of self-defense. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  I suspect that they imagine that with adequate turmoil, they will prevail and create our socialist heaven on earth with them, of course, in control. However, they would create a nightmare – whether their own statist vision, or the Jihadist theocracy, where their women would be the first to be stoned to death in the stadium, and the men would be next in line. Jihad does not tolerate free-thinkers.

“Thus hatred of their own civilization, and contempt for its defenders, seems to have become the hallmark of the Left. I view it as a cultural death-wish.”

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