Source; sent from a friend SNGLR
No truth meets more general acceptance than that the universe is ruled by law. Without law, it is self-evident there would be chaos, and where chaos is, nothing is.”--R.N. Elliott
Freedom can only be understood within the context of constitutional and moral order, which means reasonable limits and cultural bounds. For liberty is the rightful exercise of freedom, the balancing of rights and responsibilities, appropriate for human self-governing. Yet the neo-liberal dreams of a new civilization without hierarchies or restraints and therefore tends to deconstruct authoritative cultural, political, and religious traditions in the name of liberation and autonomy. It brashly dismisses, when not ignoring, the classical and Christian features of western civilization’s liberty. In other words it makes revolution (with a dogmatic insistence that morality and justice have no other supports than the linguistic categories and cultural assumptions of a contingent social order) in the place of a serious effort to bring about needed, if any, reforms.
The paradox of neo-liberalism then is that in the name of its abstract idea of democracy it must encourage the growth of centralized government, the only way to enact the change it demands, at the expensive of “self government” (which on many levels is what freedom is), most commonly through judicial(1) rather than the constitutionally prescribed way of legislative transformation of law and politics, as well as certain kinds of bureaucratic heavy handedness(2). A neo-liberal society, which is in essence a hedonistic society—and by consequence a godless society – demands nothing less then a strong and secure over-reaching government. This new authoritarianism, with it relativism that denies the very idea of universal/religious moral judgments in a universal human nature, is more illiberal than anything found in the old order since it exhibits limitless contempt for the habits, practices, and judgments that have long serve to support civilized human existence.
Liberty, however, depends upon more elevated suppositions about human nature – and more noble and generous tendencies in the human soul. Human beings are capable of imagination, deliberation, judgment, and choice in their actions and so can be held morally accountable. “If men were incapable of any moral restraint, then nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another” as James Madison noted. A free and open society depends upon modesty, a sense of limits, and opposition to any and all efforts to make idols of a class or race, or to imbue neo-liberalism’s ideology with pseudo sacred significance.
Unfortunately, as Daniel J Mahoney points out, neo-liberalism’s inevitable political regime—socialism--entails a totalitarian-like systematic assault on the moral law, the ethical and spiritual traditions derived from biblical religion, and the best heritage of the enlightenment and modern constitutionalism. Charles de Gaulle reminded us years ago that a fundamental crisis for civilization with the rise of mass society is in the erosion of not only traditional moral and political authority but also spiritual authority, because a long look at history suggests that society actually needs to have and believe religious parables for them to have social value.
What happens in a world without the constraints of either true or revealed religion? The only alternative then is private or state coercion. For when you destroy a sound god-based religion you get not a vacuum but the self-deification of the individual. Self-deification, as Solzhenitsyn found, leads to denial of restraints from our passions and responsibilities. To a denial of the existence of intrinsic evil in man and making it easy to succumb to the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Liberals succumb to the totalitarian temptation precisely because they have no principal ground for resisting it and consequently turn a blind eye to it atrocities ostensibly in the service of progressive ends or goals.
The self-deification of man inevitably leads to his self-enslavement because it supports a form of totalitarian collectivism which denies the distinction between good and evil and replaces it with an ungrounded distinction between what it calls progress and reaction, while demanding an agenda of mass equality. An equality that has been radicalized into a "passion for equality" that perceives “every distinction as discriminatory, every difference as in egalitarian, every inequality as in equitable.” Yet Neo-liberalism’s excessive pursuit of equality tends to swallow up genuine human individuality. Egalitarianism points toward a dehumanizing centralization and uniformity.
This new authoritarianism, with it relativism that denies the very idea of universal/religious moral judgments in a universal human nature, is more illiberal than anything found in the old order since it exhibits limitless contempt for the habits, practices, and judgments that have long serve to support civilized human existence. The logical outcome of all that gives rise to a tyranny that makes the tyrannies of old look both benign and self-limiting. For the morality of modern totalitarianism easily becomes inverted and then becomes immanent in brute force. Once it is immanent, moral motives no longer speak in their own voice and are no longer accessible to moral arguments. Only religious conviction provides the strongest and most durable foundation for opposition to totalitarianism, such as in the 20th century, against socialist movements that killed over 150 million, put whole nations into gulags, and destroyed economic prosperity and personal freedom. Vox populi es vox dei es vox diaboli.
Culture, besides being the harmonious development of human nature by the cultivation of the mind, is also very much a way of life, common to a particular people and based on social tradition which is embodied in its institutions, it’s literature, it’s art in addition to it’s religion. Christopher Dawson noted that: “religion reflects the deepest social and economic realities of the culture wherein it was formed.” But culture is not instinctive. It has to be conquered by a continuous moral effort, which involves the repression of natural instinct and the subordination and sacrifice of the individual impulse to the social purposes. It is the fundamental error of the modern liberal to believe that man can abandon moral effort and throw off every repression and spiritual discipline and yet preserve all the achievements of culture. Progress is not a continuous and uniform motion common to the whole. It is rather an exception. As a rule progressive change must come from within. And progress springs very largely from the attempt to bring actual conditions and social habits into harmony with what are conceived as the laws and conditions of real life. It is the lesson of history that the higher the achievement of a culture the greater is the moral effect and the stricter is the social discipline to the morality that it demands.
All society implies a hierarchy and only prospers in the reciprocal respect of rights and duties. Modern democracy as we know it reposes on axioms, conventions, traditions and habits (whether they be expressly held or tacitly respected) which transcends the modern democracy’s framework itself and impose certain material or objective limits on both individual and popular sovereignty, thus helping to maintain a kind of accord among the individuals and state power. Western civilization’s victory over Soviet communism is but one example of proof of the dangerous utopian illusion that human beings could somehow live free and dignified lives without property, religion, nations, or politics.
Tocqueville warned that it is relatively easy to establish an absolute despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, then any other. Which is why Tocqueville also said: “To love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Raymond Aron believed that nihilism and historical pessimism informs the fascist and protofascist thought of the left. That the only way to surmount such nihilism is to reaffirm the spiritual mission of humanity with the full powers and cooperation of man’s faith and reason. Western civilization philosophy and Christian theology have always affirmed man is unrecognizable other than as a being with a conscience and moral responsibility. What’s needed then is a renewed commitment to conscience – not as an abstract imperative, much less a myth or metaphor, but as an existential confirmation of man’s spiritual nature and vocation. It’s a kind of renewal of faith without illusions, informed by a respect for the truth that refuses to accept the totalitarian tendencies of liberalism. Again, the precondition for such self-transcendence is an authentic confidence in the spiritual mission of humanity.
“The history of humanity is affected as much by intellectual forces or ideas as by realities of a more material nature...Ideas do not grow and develop as social forces or exercise their full influence unless they’re supported by a social tradition and possess some vital communion with the life of the particular society they seek to influence...Christianity laid the foundation for Western civilization with a view on life which is both universal and progressive, that embraces the whole of humanity and is a different idea of civilization than others before or concurrent with it.”—John J. Mallory
“We have a choice. We can conceive man is sovereign Lord of existence, the autonomous creator of his own values or; we can see him a being who participates in a natural order that he did not make, and order of things that gives meaning to his freedom and that makes sense of a search for truth... for human beings are truly free only when they know they are not gods.”—Daniel J.Mahoney
1. Today congress passes massive pieces of legislation with little serious deliberation and is increasingly an administrative body poorly overseeing a vast array of bureaucratic policymakers, rule-making bodies and enforcers. The majority of laws are promulgated by administrative agencies in the guise of regulations – a form of rule by bureaucrats who are mostly unaccountable and invisible to the public. Meanwhile courts less and less adjudicate the law, rather, unconstitutionally, they rewrite it, and sometimes make it up, usurping the power of the political branches in ways that expand government power and diminish the authority of popular consent. “If the policy of the Government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”—Abraham Lincoln
2. Throughout most of history, the rules by which life was governed were usually determined by force or fraud. The rule of law--just, formal rules applying fairly to all--therefore may be the most significant accomplishment of Western civilization’s Constitutionalis
My response;
To sum this treatise up in simple words: If we Americans want to maintain all of our freedoms protected by the Constitution, and continue them on into the future, we must reject the recent humanistic extreme ideology and cultural customs. We must "Return to God" in the spiritual guidance sense, and incorporate the traditional religious principles implied in the 10 Commandments in our laws and public standards for society, to maintain a workable and ethical society fair to all. If we do not do that, and proceed with the falicious concepts which misuse our ethical concepts for inimical political purposes, America shall surely fall into anarchy and dissolution.
The Tradesman
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