Socrates’ greatest admonition to his contemporaries was “Know yourself.” When asked why the Oracle of Delphi had pronounced him the wisest living human of his time, he replied that the only thing that he knew for sure was that he knew almost nothing for sure, and, because he realized his own ignorance, he was free to inquire and discover truth inasmuch it could be found, because his mind was free from the slavery to preconceived dogma. If, during his inquiry, he discovered that some dogmas were true, he was free to affirm them for their truth, but he was not free to compel others to accept them. In the end, only God can judge how truthfully a man (person) lives his life and only God is fit to judge.
Category Archives: Progressivism
The Uses of History, 15 – Utopian Interlude
Every time we have witnessed one of these socio-political-economic tsunamis attempting to create the latest and greatest plan for Utopia, we have seen a hecatomb of mayhem and slaughter in its wake. The body counts belie every claim that humans can create the Promised Land; the ensuing multi-generational devastation denies every claim of every Utopian vision, whether Marxist, Maoist, Fascist, Nazi, Capitalist, whatever-ist.
The Uses of History, 13 – Christmas, 2
When you study at a university or any institution of higher learning, you study at an institution which was born in and emerged out of the Christian culture of medieval and early modern Europe. When you enjoy the benefits of universal public education, you are reaping the benefits of the foundational work of many generations of churchmen and churchwomen who believed in the right of ordinary people to know how to read, write, and do basic mathematics – then extended that to the right of all who could and would seek it to pursue the knowledge and skills God had created them to understand and be able to develop.
When you go to a hospital and receive medical care dedicated to “doing no harm” and treating you with the respect you deserve whether young or old, rich or poor, male or female, of any religion or ethnicity, you are benefitting from the Christian view of human beings as being made in God’s image and worthy of all care and consideration because all lives are of equal and infinite value in God’s eyes. That is the whole basis of universal public health care, of universal public education, of universal human rights.
The Uses of History, 6 – From France 1812 to Russia, 1917, 3
In the long run, the most influential of all the “Big Three” thinkers of the French Enlightenment was Rousseau. Rousseau stands apart. As a brilliant thinker and writer in his own right, he shocked even the trendy, progressive “salon set” with his radicalism between 1754 and his death in 1778. He further scandalized the elite social set by deliberately affronting the ethical and moral standards of the day. He was an iconoclast par excellence.
The Uses of History, 4 – From France to Russia, 1812-1917, 1
These were the seeds that were paid forward into the next hundred plus years (and right to our time) along with the hope awakened among ordinary folks and citizens for better days and more equal distribution of resources and opportunities. The shoots which sprouted would feed forward both openly where they could, and under the surface in states which maintained repressive, anti-democratic governments. These were the streams that would run forward to Karl Marx, Bukharin, and a host of others to engender the Socialist International, the trade unions movement, the powerful thrust by the bourgeoisie (middle class) to win its way to power and open the doors for all to be free and to fairly try their chance.
Cold Love, 5 – Ideology
We can intellectualize love, conceptualize love, analyze love, psychologize love, but we cannot create it by any exercise which originates primarily in the intellect. The heart may remain untouched despite all the most careful thought. The one emotion that ideology seems all too readily and too often to generate in abundance is hate. It may, however, also generate a pseudo-love, a counterfeit to stand in the place of what love, by its nature, is meant to be. Ideologically bred “love” is obsession, fanaticism, a sort of veneration of national, class, social, or economic identity. This pseudo-love is usually an amalgam of more than one of the above, and it absorbs the “lover’s” sense of self in the process.
Freedom, 7 – The Ongoing Quest
The illusion is that by human-engendered wisdom we can create Utopia. It is an illusion because there is no final peace unless we are reconciled to the Creator, who made us with a hole in our soul that only He/She can fill. Peace within is reconciliation with the Supreme Person who alone can erase our brokenness which drives us to wage continual war upon one another and upon the creation itself. That primal reconciliation dispels the Big Lie that only I, or at most I and my special group, deserve to be really free. That primal reconciliation leads us to be reconciled to the Creation itself so that we can respect the rights and freedoms of all created things in their own nature and place within the Cosmos.
Bullies, 2 – The Jesus Treatment
Contrary to those “bad old days” of the early and mid-sixties, it is not only bullying which is now frowned upon, but, in our inimitable ultra-progressive fashion, anyone who resorts to violence for any reason, even self-defense, must become a project for reform, a misguided soul. Thus, self-defense is just another form of violence to be lumped in with the bully aggressor’s.
Bullies, 1
… there is no doubt that true bullying should not be tolerated and everyone must be recognized as equally human and worthy of respect and equal treatment under the law. As long as the law is not – as Clarence Darrow so eloquently put it a century ago “an ass”.
Faith and Hope, Assurance and Conviction, 8 – Hope and Assurance, 1
Despite the self-flagellating oddity of the West’s admission of guilt, it is paradoxically out of the much-maligned West that all these much needed calls for reform and equalization of injustices and rights have come.
World.V.You 