Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Forgetting How To Be A Civilization
The American Conservative ^ | October 5, 2022 | Rod Dreher

Posted on 10/05/2022 3:26:32 PM PDT by who knows what evil?

The political scientist Eric Kaufmann is no bringer of good news for us conservatives. In his latest CSPI research, there's a lot of handwriting on the wall for our kind. I tell you this not to discourage you, but to help you understand the immensity of the task in front of us. I know reading my blog can be awfully discouraging, but I firmly believe that real despair is to turn away from hard truths because they are too discouraging. If we are going to resist this tide, we need to know exactly what we are facing. I'll be taping an episode of The General Eclectic with Kale Zelden later today -- after our long summer hiatus forced by my visa problems (not a good idea to leave your mike in a country you can't enter because you screwed up your visa -- and we'll be discussing this.

(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...


TOPICS: Education; Religion; Science
KEYWORDS: civilization; culture; progressiveagenda
This one comment had me standing and applauding:

"One thing that is very, very hard for conservatives today to understand is that elites matter immensely."

1 posted on 10/05/2022 3:26:32 PM PDT by who knows what evil?
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

The Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman’s excellent postwar study Family And Civilization explains how the collapse of the stable family model is always a sign of civilizational collapse.


2 posted on 10/05/2022 3:37:30 PM PDT by who knows what evil? (Yehovah saved more animals than people on the ark...siameserescue.org)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?
The "elites" are not so much "elite" any more.

In the US, they used to at least be Christian.

Now it is difficult to find a Christian in the "elites".

The vast majority of US citizens are still Christians, at least in name and in cultural values.

The "elites" despise those values. THey started doing so with the rise of Progressivism about a hundred years ago.

3 posted on 10/05/2022 3:41:03 PM PDT by marktwain
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

The elites murdered civilization. We didn’t forget.


4 posted on 10/05/2022 3:41:55 PM PDT by Organic Panic (Democrats. Memories as short as Joe Biden's eyes.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

Bkmk


5 posted on 10/05/2022 3:57:55 PM PDT by sauropod (Unbelief has nothing to say. Chance favors the prepared mind.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

There are two political philosophers who best captured the possible directions a civilization could take. One is Aristotle and the other is Nietzche.

Aristotle’s philosophy was based on natural law and universal goods required by human nature. It was the basis of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica that reconciled Catholic doctrine with philosophical reason. This teaching informed John Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment and formed the foundation of the American Constitution.

Nietzche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” is most famous for it’s despairing remark “God is dead”. What Nietzche meant was that modern civilization had descended into an empty, homoginized, valueless, nihilism that was typified by the life of “the last man”. The last man belives nothing and everything in his pointless pursuit of self satisfaction and avoidance of responsibilty, pain, fear, and sacrifice.

The end of civilization will either be a world of Nietzche’s “last man” or the resurection of Aristotelean ethics in the pursuit of a happy life based in natural law and human nature.


6 posted on 10/05/2022 5:05:44 PM PDT by Dave Wright
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

“But there’s little reason for religious conservatives to take comfort in that. My generation (X) was the one that first extended real tolerance to gays and lesbians.
I supported that then, and support that now.
But as we know, tolerance is not tolerated; you must affirm, and not only affirm, but celebrate; otherwise, you are a bigot. I did not imagine that the humane, liberal ideal of tolerance for sexual difference would quickly morph into this Babylonian decadence we see today.”

Dreher and people like him are part of the reason that conservatism is failing. He didn’t come to “tolerance” by reason or a recognition of reality, he did it because leftist propaganda told him to approve of it. And even though he see’s the severe consequences of a society that agrees with that tolerance (and the ideas behind it), he still “supports” it.

Again there is nothing “humane” about approving of people destroying themselves. There is no “love” that embraces destruction.

I think some of his other points are well made. The so called feral black children are exactly that. Our society has ignored the destruction of the family and that destruction has the same consequences for every race.

Ours is a society lining up for a societal Darwin award.


7 posted on 10/05/2022 5:06:57 PM PDT by Varda
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

bk


8 posted on 10/05/2022 5:15:42 PM PDT by xenia ( “Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

Rod is often right ... and often annoying.


9 posted on 10/05/2022 5:30:30 PM PDT by x
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?
This is a cultural revolution.
Mao turned to the disaffected youth as his army.
Elitist leftists are conducting ours using an army of degenerates and primitives.
10 posted on 10/05/2022 6:06:10 PM PDT by 100%FEDUP (I'm seeing RED!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?

Our biggest problem is we have a hard time comprehending how much they hate us. With disagree with them. They hate us.


11 posted on 10/05/2022 6:16:24 PM PDT by redangus
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: redangus

AMEN...progressives have NO USE for Christians...no use at all.


12 posted on 10/06/2022 1:47:59 AM PDT by who knows what evil? (Yehovah saved more animals than people on the ark...siameserescue.org)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: who knows what evil?
About halfway down, he links to a video interview with a detransitioning woman, who had also written a searing account on Substack of her descision to transition, as well as her realization why she needed to go off testosterone and return to being female. Here is a great quote from that piece about the LGBT tyranny we are now experiencing as a culture:
...in the trans community, people cope with the inherent doubts and cognitive dissonance of pretending to be someone they are not by encouraging others to do the same... An enormous amount of mental energy is devoted to the crowdsourcing of validation and firefighting of anything that triggers internal conflict, which is always nagging in the back of the mind. When a person is at peace with themselves and expressing themselves naturally, they don’t desperately micromanage everything and everyone around them.
It's not hard to see how this mindset starts to block out all free-thinking, the very basis of individual initiative, invention, creativity, innovation and problem-solving—the things that characterized America (and made her great) from the start, and that now are over regulated, denounced as several kinds of "____ist", or outlawed.

We are so done unless dedicated patriots can find a way to explain our way out of this to enough courts of law until this madness is overturned. It's that, or the bloodier way.

13 posted on 10/06/2022 9:04:02 AM PDT by Albion Wilde (Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free... Galatians 5:1 )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Albion Wilde

“When a person is at peace with themselves and expressing themselves naturally, they don’t desperately micromanage everything and everyone around them.”

Great quote that covers a lot more ground than just the LGBT stuff.

It is the “Karen” syndrome we see in every little corner of life.

These people are a menace to themselves and everyone else.


14 posted on 10/06/2022 9:08:34 AM PDT by cgbg (Claiming that laws and regs that limit “hate speech” stop freedom of speech is “hate speech”.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson