Some years ago in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, Dennis Prager published a fascinating opinion piece in which he asserted that all politics are dominated by the question whether one regards man as essentially good or as evil. Indeed, Prager asserted that this division dictates whether one becomes liberal or conservative.
I added some of my own thoughts (at great length, no one will be surprised to read) to Dennis Prager's original ideas which I think cast some light on the gun control demands which are sure to be heard now in the wake of the Aurora tragedy:
The point is this is not to proselytize for Christianity, I leave that to a Higher Power, but to explore how our fundamental eschatology dictates our politics, and in this instance, our views on the second amendment:
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I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do-this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:18-19)
Man in an unredeemed state is powerless over evil. This is a deal breaker for many non-Christians who believe that by maintaining a belief in the sovereignty of their own will they retain their personhood. The mystery of Christianity is to assert that precisely the opposite is the case and that it is only through surrendering the "will" -which is illusory anyway- that true freedom is attained and, even more counterintuitively and mystically, that true "free will" is to be acquired only through the operation of this paradox.
That is not for us to debate. That is a question of faith. For the non-Christian this analogy gets worse and, because this is where Calvinism comes in, it gets worse for many Christians as well. Calvin says that man does not even have free will to choose his own redemption and that in turn raises the question, why strive for good? Starkly put, the Christian confession synthesized here by Paul in his own experience means that there are only two alternatives: One is free because he is in submission to God or one is in bondage because he is in opposition to God, because he is playing God. The latter is in a dreadful state of self deception and self destruction.
As Dennis Prager wrote: "Without God, humanist hubris is almost inevitable. If there is nothing higher than man, no Supreme Being, man becomes the supreme being."
The miseries which mankind inflicts upon itself outlined by Prager in the remaining 13 propositions are but symptoms of this first and most damning declension of all.
Do you want to know why Obama is an elitist? Do you want to know why the Democrats cannot restrain from indulging themselves in the nanny state? Are you confused about why environmentalism is a religion for Democrats and why they are impervious to arguments of logic about it? Do we need to ask why the Constitution, as a Constitution, is anathema to Democrats?
All of these questions, indeed every thing that separates us from the left, is directly traceable to man's proclivity to violate the first and second Commandments.
Why should this be so? Let me have a resort in old vanity of mine:
GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX
Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.
So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required us to read Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the human animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.
The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections) system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:
No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.
Let us say that you do not accept the dichotomy outlined by Paul or the injunction granted to Nicodemus by Jesus (you must be born again-as opposed to try harder to avoid evil and do good), perhaps you will consider that the liberal sees man as a TABULA RASA upon which the liberal can write his lessons or, more likely, his own legislation. If the liberal does not see men as good, he sees him at least as being teachable. The Christian does not see him as teachable. That is to say he is not in need of education but of redemption.
The political application of this view can be seen in the cry by liberals for sex education. They think that teenage kids do not know that if you insert tab A into slot B, pregnancy might result. How naïve! These kids know damn well what they are flirting with. It is not a question of ignorance but of willfulness.
The corollary to this is that the liberal sees man as free of responsibility. He is not evil, he is simply uneducated. He has not received the proper stimulus, to put it in Skinner's terms. The mysticism of the Christian is that he sees man as responsible for his evil condition and for his inability to choose good even though the Calvinist in him says that man has no power, so long as he is unredeemed (and even then not always) to choose good over evil. This is why I say that the reality of these opposing conceptions of man is counterintuitive.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings it does not take a clairvoyant to predict that America is in for another round of patronizing lectures about our primitive gun laws. In condescending tones and with clucking noises The Left in Europe will express their exasperation if not their indignation at our reluctance to ban the possession of firearms.
Why don't we see this their way?
Because our position on this issue comes as the inevitable syllogism of our original assumptions about government, just as the leftists' assumptions take them the other way. Our fundamental assumption about government has been best expressed in the Declaration of Independence: every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because God has so ordained it. Government is established among men (not over men) by men to facilitate those entitlements. Since by definition government always makes war on liberty, we see government as an enemy which must be restrained if God's ordinance is to be fulfilled. So the legitimacy of government derives from God working through men and not from government itself working against men.
If legitimate government's function is to create a space in which the individual is at liberty to protect his life and pursue his happiness, we must concede that liberty is not license lest the whole arrangement come apart in anarchy. In other words, the arrangement postulates responsibility from the individual. Our assumption is that, in ordaining the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, God was wise enough to take into account the human condition which, of course, includes our imperfections.
But it is these imperfections which preoccupy the mind of the leftists and the Europeans. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is the imperfections themselves which define the natural condition of man to the leftists and to the European. There is a grave danger, says the European and the American leftists, from the un-bridled natural instincts of our neighbors. These must be curbed or they will do us mischief. It is the job of government to curb them (read, "socialize") and protect us from our fellow man.
At this point the reader should naturally assume that the American conservative mind sees man as, if not perfect, at least rational enough to be trusted. And the Europeans see man as imperfect and untrustworthy. But this is the tricky part. It is tricky because it superficially runs counter to what we seem to know about Christianity and what we seem to know about secularism. If Christianity stands for anything, it stands for the proposition that man is a sinner, he is born that way, he is destined for an eternity in hell and he deserves every minute of it. He is helpless, hopeless, hapless, and undone. So desperate is his condition that he has no hope apart from a supernatural intervention. But he himself cannot summon that intervention (depending on how Calvinistic you want to be), he cannot earn it, in fact, there is nothing he can do to get it. He can only receive it as it is given to him as an act of grace and not because he has or could do anything to earn it. Why on earth would a Christian want to turn over a lethal weapon to such creature? Yet the Christian will trust the creature with firearms but the leftist will not.
The leftist believes that men can be educated, if not to perfection at the least to a level at which you can participate in society. That is the goal. And it is society's obligation to educate that man to that level. So there is no sinner, because there is no sin but there is ignorance which leads to estrangement from society. To a Christian estrangement from God is death but to a liberal, estrangement from the group is death because the group represents paradise. And it is from the group that the individual finds his merit, it is in the context of the group that he finds his worth. It is in acceptance by the group that he finds salvation.
So it's all gets turned upside down. The liberal who sees man as perfectible through education holds him to no responsibility for his actions, blaming instead the absence of condoms or the presence of guns. The Christian conservative, who sees man as impotent in a fallen state, nevertheless accords him the dignity of citizenship because he is a child of God as well as the dignity of the responsibility (and culpability) for his actions.
One philosophy places man in a horizontal matrix and the other puts him in a vertical matrix. The first sees "sin" as a failure properly to interact with the group or for the group properly to educate the individual. The second sees sin as an estrangement from God manifesting itself in his relationship with his peers. That is why each philosophy seeks to redress problems by taking man in a different direction.
