The View From 1776

Paradigm is a word that got lots of play a few years ago.  A paradigm is a model; it’s an image in your mind that has a lot to do with how you understand yourself and how you relate to other people.  Very importantly, a paradigm is the pervasive influence in determining the political, economic, social, and spiritual nature of a nation.  It’s what may be called the unwritten constitution of a nation. 

A vulnerability of our own written Constitution is its brevity and generality.  As we have seen, activist judges can interpret the Constitution to find almost anything that accords with their ideas of what the law ought to be.

The only real limit on arbitrary and tyrannical exercise of power - by a king, a President, or a court - is the paradigm, the model, the unwritten constitution held in the hearts and minds of a nation’s citizens.

That’s one reason why democratic self-government is a hard thing to make work in the Middle East.  Those peoples have never, in thousands of years, experienced anything other than arbitrary rule by despots, from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to Saddam Hussein in modern times.

If we allow the paradigm of 1776, the belief in personal responsibility and individual morality, to fade away, our nation will become nothing more than a junior version of the Soviet Union, a transplanted, secular and socialistic France in the new world.

The Jews have survived, scattered around the world for the last half of that period, for more than 4,000 years only by keeping alive a paradigm of the Jewish people and the teachings of the Law handed down to Moses by God.

In Deuteronomy 4:9, Moses tells the Israelites:

Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.

Psalms 78:5-7 tells us:

He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our forefathers to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.

In the Old Testament period, survival of the Israelites in the Promised Land depended entirely upon the extent to which they kept to the spirit of God’s laws and passed along that spirit to their children. 

It is just as true for us today.  The United States was founded upon a definite paradigm, one very different from the paradigm now featured in our educational system and in the mainstream media.  Our national survival is endangered by that new, liberal-progressive-socialist paradigm.

What, then, was the paradigm held in the hearts and minds of the colonists who fought in 1776 for our independence and for the historical rights of Englishmen?

John Adams summarized it neatly in a 1798 address to officers of the Massachusetts Militia:

We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

What Adams meant was that a Constitutional government of limited powers can’t survive if it is not counterbalanced by individual moral conduct of its citizens.  If the government is to allow maximum possible individual political liberty, citizens have to be law-abiding and have to be guided individually by moral principles.  Hearts must be softened, and people must be self-motivated to do the right thing.

In dismaying contrast, after the 1930s under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal people began to look to the socialized political state as the source of their salvation.  Since 1932, this new paradigm has come to dominate our political and educational landscape.  Fewer people any longer teach their children personal responsibility for self-help and for doing the right thing to help others suffering hard times.  We pay very high taxes and feel justified in leaving charitable duties to the government.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America illustrates the vast change in the ethos of American society since the colonists fought for independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787.  Tocqueville came to the United States from France in 1830 and travelled from New England to New Orleans, observing the attitudes and institutions of the American people. 

Tocqueville would have said that present-day American liberals’ advocacy of libertine license represents all the worst elements of French political life, the very sources of France’s social and political instability. French revolutionaries had destroyed the monarchy and the Catholic Church, making the nation a secular and socialist republic. It was the absence of religious moral restraint that had permitted the Reign of Terror in which more than 70,000 French citizens were slaughtered on the guillotine in the name of perfecting humanity.

The French Reign of Terror was history’s first instance of terror as a tool to impose political regulation.  When intellectuals believe that they alone comprehend the process of perfecting human nature and creating a perfect human society, no atrocity seems to them too horrific to endure.

This same secular irreligion was to murder more than one hundred million people in Soviet Russia, Hitler’s National Socialist Germany, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Cambodia, and other socialistic countries.  As Stalin reportedly said, “One death is a tragedy.  A million deaths is just a statistic.”

In the 1830s, assessing conditions in the United States from his vantage point of forty years of French experience under socialism, Tocqueville saw Christianity as a crucial bulwark preserving American democratic institutions. In France, which was officially secular, people became entirely selfish and self-centered, prepared to endure any form of political despotism in the name of equality. The French, he said, cared nothing for national concerns. They were indifferent toward their neighbors and wanted only their personal entitlements.

In contrast, religion in America drew the people together in common cause and made them concerned about their neighbors and the general well-being of society.

The great danger of socialism is its inherent tendency toward totalitarian despotism. This is true in all its forms: American liberalism, French socialism, Soviet Communism, Mussolini’s Fascism, Hitler’s National Socialism, and so on.

Liberal-progressive-socialists want to play God and regulate all aspects of personal conduct. To do that, they have to get rid of the spiritual aspects of Christianity, which teaches people to be personally responsible for moral conduct and to look upward to God for guidance. Liberals prefer to look no higher than the collectivized National State for guidance from intellectual planners and bureaucratic social engineers.

Quoting directly from Tocqueville:

On my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things.  In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions.  But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.

In the United States religion exercises but little influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the customs of the community, and, by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state…. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash and unjust.  Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.

This paradigm is one suffused with the spirit of Christianity.  There was separation of church and state only in the sense that there was to be no single, officially established church as there was in the case of the Church of England.  The political state was not to play favorites with any denomination, nor was there to be any religious test demanded of public office holders.  Today, liberal-progressive-socialists in Congress do their best to prevent the appointment of any judicial nominee who is unwilling to confess to the secular religious doctrine of abortion.

It’s important to understand that the opposing paradigm increasingly in ascendance here in the United States is also a religious paradigm.  Liberal-progressivism is a socialist, statist paradigm, and socialism is a secular, materialistic religion. Because liberal-progressivism is a secular religion, there is about as much hope of reasoning with liberals as there is in converting Osama Bin Ladin to Christianity.

Our only hope is education.  We must teach the old paradigm to our children to shield them from the secular religion that will be taught to them in public schools and our colleges and universities.  And we must reclaim the educational system to prevent liberal-progressives from using our schools as seminaries of socialism.

What is the religious paradigm of liberal-progressivism?

Christians believe that humans are cursed by Original Sin, that only through Jesus can we be justified and saved.

Liberal-progressives believe that humans are inherently good, that original sin was the advent of private property, which unleashed greed, crime, and warfare.  That’s why liberals see criminals as victims of capitalism, why they believe in judicial leniency for miscreants, why they oppose the death penalty for murder.  That’s why liberals define social justice as high taxes to redistribute income as eqally as possible, why they see affirmative action as more important than individual merit.

Christians recognize that there can never be perfection here on earth, that we must look to Heaven as our true home.

Liberal-progressives place their faith in the social sciences invented by secular French revolutionaries in the 18th century, believing that science has discovered hitherto secret laws governing political society, laws which intellectuals can employ to reshape human nature and to create a political state that will become heaven on earth.

Christians believe in the eternal soul as the ultimately real part of human existence.

Liberal-progressives dismiss the eternal soul and belief in God as ignorant superstition, which the educational system must root out.

Christians believe that the spiritual dimension of human existence is more important than money, power, or sensual satisfactions.

Liberal-progressives dismiss the spiritual dimension, believing that only material things matter.  That is why liberal-progressives focus their energies upon providing welfare-state handouts of money, housing, medical care, and free education.

Christians believe that man was made in the image of God, which means that the highest aspect of humanity, the eternal soul, is most nearly God-like.

Liberal-progressives believe that human nature, as Darwin propounded, is steadily evolving, hence their heavy emphasis on social progress.  Moreover, they believe, as Karl Marx wrote, that human nature is entirely the product of the physical environment in which people work and of the laws and regulations imposed by political state planners.

The bottom line is that liberal-progressives see concentration of ever more political power in the national state as the road to humanity’s salvation, the path to paradise here on earth.

Christianity focuses on God’s children one at a time, recognizing free will and the need for each individual to accept Jesus, repent, and endeavor to follow Him.

Liberal-progressives see the unit of social action as groups based on race, sex, economic status, and ethnic character.

Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1944 State of the Union message, said that the American people had found the original Bill of Rights inadequate, focused as it was on individual rights against the political state.  The people, he said, had adopted a second bill of rights guaranteeing rights to material comforts delivered by the government.  Roosevelt described this as security.

In reality it is tyranny of the political state.  It’s what Friedrich von Hayek described in his celebrated book, The Road to Serfdom. He wrote the book in 1944 to predict, with striking accuracy, the social and economic collapse of British society under the new, post-war socialist Labour governments that ruled until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent them packing in the 1980s.

If our nation continues to slip toward liberal-progressive-socialism, it will not survive.  We already are in a cultural civil war.  As Abraham Lincoln told us when confronted with the moral evil of slavery, a house divided cannot stand.

The most important battlefield in our cultural civil war is education.  That’s why imparting God’s truth and the paradigm of our original Constitution to our children in the home is so crucial to the survival of our nation.

Liberal-progressive-socialists long ago recognized education’s long-range importance.  As 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.”

That is precisely what public education and especially our colleges and universities do today.  Students are taught that spiritual religion is ignorant superstition, that Darwinian evolution and the myth of man-made global warming are scientific truth. 

Children are taught in sex education that they can ignore what their parents teach them; that it’s OK to do what their peers are doing, to engage in pre-marital sex.  If pregnancy results, there’s always abortion.

History is wildly distorted, or neglected altogether.  They are taught, under the rubric of diversity, that there is nothing special about the our colonial society that fostered the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  They are told that the United States was not a Christian nation at its founding, but a product of the secular Enlightenment that led to the French Revolution.  Jefferson’s reference in the Declaration to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is dismissed as hypocritical rant, because slavery still existed in the colonies.

Worst of all is the propagation of moral relativism, of the philosophy of pragmatism expounded by John Dewey in the first half of the 20th century.  Dewey was the most influential of the liberal-progressive-socialist theoreticians in that period and a guiding light in Columbia University Teachers College, which then and now exerts a disproportionate nationwide influence over curriculum content and teaching methodology.  It is that influence, to a major extent, that accounts for the abysmal performance of American students in academic comparison with other students worldwide.

Dewey’s conception was that Darwin had proved all things to be continually in evolutionary flux.  If so, he opined, there can be no such thing as timeless moral principles.  Morality in his view is no more than changing public opinion, which is another way of describing moral relativism.

Therefore, in pragmatism, or situational ethics, as it is sometimes called, there can be no conduct that independently is either right or wrong.  If your actions get you money, power, or sensual pleasure, and you can get away with it, it’s OK.  The only test of conduct is, not God-given morality, but whether it works to your material benefit.

This plays well with inexperienced young students in their teens and early twenties, when their natural phase of rebellion against parental authority makes them vulnerable to presentation of liberal-progressivism as scientific truth.

If we are to survive, we have our work cut out for us.