“Unfortunately, even conservatives are still thinking in a strait jacket. And I don’t anticipate that changing anytime soon”
Spirited: This is not surprising given that evolutionary thinking has been transforming the minds of Westerners and Americans for many long years. From cave-man movies to the GEICO cave-man commercials, to the teaching of Darwinism in universities and grade-schools, to evolution-themed science fiction, the constant implication is that life began at the bottom and has been riding an upward moving escalator from primordial matter to dinosaurs, to cave-man to man to deep space extraterrestrials.
That's all true, spirited, but the evolution business is not at all what I was referring to. I was referring to the entire pagan/secular "western" ideology, including that of the American Founding. I was referring to "freedom of religion" itself (which didn't exist in Biblical Israel). I was referring to the modern schizophrenic western mentality that pays lip service to G-d in private but worships "democracy" or "western tolerance" in public. I'm talking about a world in which people have to stop taking their religious beliefs seriously the moment they step outside their front doors.
The entire "enlightenment" project has been a disaster. There are no "rights" that don't come from G-d, including "freedom of religion." How long has it been since you read the Book of Joshua? No "bill of rights" there!
Most conservatives are simply not capable of discovering the blinders they wear because they are devoted to a false religion in which G-d makes an "offer of salvation" which the individual is free to accept or reject. In fact there is no "offer of salvation." There is only G-d A-mighty, the King of the Kings of the Kings, and His Laws which are mandatory. This worldview is so alien to the modern world that I don't think most people are capable of understanding it. Ironically, the moslems seem to come the closest, and for this reason are hated by "conservatives" who believe in "freedom of religion." In fact the only problem with the moslems is they have the wrong religion.
“I was referring to the entire pagan/secular “western” ideology, including that of the American Founding”
Spirited: Though most if not all of the Founders embraced the so-called “age of reason,” and a handful embraced Deism, most were for the most part Christian, at least in terms of the following: the unique definition of man as the spiritual image-bearer of God from Whom man’s unalienable rights obtain beginning with the right to life; man’s sinful nature necessitating separation of powers; and the absolute need for training all children in the unchanging, higher Truth and Moral Law of God.
But proud men abhor the idea of human equality, even though it does not mean that we are equals here in this world but equals in terms of our souls, our spiritual being.
Pride being what it is, by 1820 America’s ‘educated’ class was challenging the notion of human equality. ‘Science’ made this possible; Darwinism in 1853 popularized and actualized it, as Prof. Angelo Codevilla reports in his profoundly insightful essay, “America’s Ruling Class:”
“The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one’s self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it “the old serpent, you work I’ll eat.” But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.
It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by “science.” By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes’ deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx’s formulation, that ethical thought is “superstructural” to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called “all men are created equal” “a self-evident lie,” much of America’s educated class had already absorbed the “scientific” notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class’s religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.
Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked “can’t you let anything alone?” he answered with, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill.” Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world’s examples and the world’s reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to “teach [them] to elect good men.”
Continue reading: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print