The battle between conservatives and progressives is, with one layer of the onion peeled, explained as a battle over the desire to empower and liberate man vs. the impulse to regulate man for his own good.
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."
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?
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 mind sees men 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 a firearm 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.
If you're still with me and having been turned off by all this talk of religion, better get yourself a stiff drink and settle down because here comes some more:
A man's politics are ultimately determined by his belief in God or absence of belief in God. If he believes in God he lives in a vertical axis in which he seeks to align himself with his God so that is relationship with his fellows falls into place. If one has an absence of belief in God, one believes that he himself is God, or confuses himself by indulging some other facsimile such as drugs, or booze, gambling, women, or some other manifestation of narcissism. Narcissism, love of the self, is essentially a rebellion against God, a breach of the first and second commandment, a compulsion to play God. Such a man lives out his life, absent an epiphany, on a horizontal axis.
I think the horizontal-vertical matrix is a convenient metaphor for the great divide between us and them.
It is Christian doctrine that submission to God yields freedom and empowerment. It is power and license which the God player above all seeks and never gets in the truest sense. The God player is in eternal bondage and, despite temporal trappings of power enjoyed by narcissists like Bill Clinton, he inevitably descends deeper and deeper into the vortex of his bondage.
Leftists are, by definition, God players. So it is a great irony that they get their satisfaction from submerging themselves into an ideology. It is the submission to the ideology that generates an emotional release, a feeling of well-being which rewards them, making them feel, at least for the moment, integrated, and keeps them loyal to the cause. But for the leftists who submerges himself into the Communist Party or the Democrat party, or the environmental movement, or the civil rights movement, the submission is essentially done along a horizontal axis. The man living on a horizontal axis thinks he is living along a vertical axis. That is, he evaluates himself either higher or lower than those around him. Hence the tendency on the left to denigrate and disparage others. They get a little higher by climbing over the bodies.
This explains why liberals paint all Republicans as stupid. It also explains why it is an article of faith among leftists that conservatives are racists. One can also add: homophobes, greedy, bigots etc., the list varies only with the topic of the day. From this superior perch the God player is only a millimeter away from disregarding entirely the very humanness of others, especially when the others are conservatives.
It is human nature to rationalize our desires and the God player is the ultimate rationalizer and self justifier of all time. In this endeavor he is handed all the tools needed such as relativism, classism, victimization theory, critical theory, feminist theory, in short, the whole bag of psychological and emotional tricks crafted by cultural Marxism. These are the fixes for these horizontal junkies.
These tricks are employed by the narcissistic God player to manipulate his horizontal world. In the event, he succeeds in deluding himself. But the more he does so the more confirmed in his convictions and righteousness he becomes.
A perfect storm of politics and history have combined to hand the left an opportunity for a putsch. They have no institutional opposition either in or out of government apart from talk radio, the Internet and Fox television. They have the support of media. History handed them a financial disruption which swept away all the old rules and permits them to make any claim in support of any outlandish law they pleased. They got a president who, because of his race, was equally above criticism for much of his term so far and who was equally determined to have his way, to play God, to fulfill the group fantasy of the Alinsky school and bring the blessings of Marxism to the unwashed.
This opportunity is not judged by them on a vertical axis of morality but on a horizontal axis of ideology. It is immoral to miss this opportunity. So they do not see the world the way we see the world and they certainly do not see the growing disposition against the government to be the normal yearnings of vertical people for the freedom endued to do them by their Creator and vouchsafed to them by the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. In fact, the left sees these documents as immoral obstacles to the great "transition" which Michelle Obama assured us was coming.
The vertically oriented conservative seeks his salvation retail through his relationship with his Creator. The horizontally aligned leftist conceives of a group salvation and a salvation available only through surrender to and conformity with the group. Striving for liberty for the leftist is not desirable but an interference with group salvation-which he has contrived for all in his offices as a God player. For a conservative, life is a journey begun and ended alone, the purpose of which on earth is to find freedom through a mature relationship with one's Creator and a honest and true relationship with his fellows. His freedom is a gift from God and how he manages his freedom perfects his relationship with his God.
So leftists do not see things the way we see them because they cannot. They think they understand us when they call us "bitter" people "clinging" to our God and our guns, but they only see the reality they create as they play God. They can never understand that they do not understand us. We do not fit their ideology except as their ideology defines us. They see us through a different prism. They use a different template. Whatever analogy best describes the situation, the left and conservatives are living in parallel universes and their strivings against one another are as inevitable and as transcendental as the eternal war between good and evil. It is only an accident of history that makes it so acute today.
