The slow creep

It’s an historical fact: eventually all societies die out or collapse, and they collapse under their own decaying weight.

They are born from struggle and undergirded by virtue. Individual responsibility and personal restraint are its foundation and have proven time and again to lead to happiness and prosperity. But prosperity is a double-edged sword for with it comes the tendency towards complacency and complacency to outright laziness. These in turn lead to the rise of vice and the ever increasing need for self-gratification. Personal restraint and virtue are mocked by the progressives who have a new vision and begin to undo all those things that were requirements for prosperity. Foundational pieces are removed or done away with one by one as gratification becomes the ultimate attainment for the new narcissistic classes. Once a sturdy foundation is removed or altered a house cannot stand, and it collapses and disintegrates under its own weight. And the next generations fail to learn the lessons of those who have failed before them and begin again with a new found zeal to repeat it all over again.

It is almost axiomatic:

Restraint leads to a prosperous society, and prosperity leads to complacency and the rise of a liberal progressivism; and this progressivism leads to disintegration.

This cycle will continue as the very nature of man dictates that it necessarily will.  Very few ever see the walls crumbling around them until they are buried in the rubble.

Thoughts on abortion

During World War II, the Nazis referred to the Jews as “rats.” Amidst the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus called the Tutsis “cockroaches.” Written into the US Constitution during the time of slavery, the Three-Fifths Compromise defined each black slave as three-fifths a human, or put more succinctly, less than fully human. The same thing has occurred in the modern abortion debate: a human life, a baby, is now unaffectionately referred to as a fetus, removing from it the human connotation and making it appear to be less than what it really is. When one defines their opponent in such a way as to make them appear to be an animal or sub-human, their eventual extermination becomes more palatable to the average person. (For more on this phenomenon read Less Than Human: Why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others by David Livingstone Smith).

Both sides struggle to frame the debate in ways that make their own positions appear more acceptable. Is a person pro-choice or pro-abortion? Is another pro-life or anti-choice? No matter how one characterizes themselves or their opponents, we can never lose sight of the fact that at the very heart of it we are talking about life, not just a clump of developing cells. To define a baby in such a way is to make it’s extraction seem far more remedial a procedure and far less distasteful to the average person. We are a culture where our comfort is the “value” we cherish most, while doing what may be difficult (raising a child of an unplanned pregnancy) proves to be too much of an inconvenience for many.

Words have powerful meanings. Those that have sought to exterminate their enemies in times past have known that and have defined them in ways that questioned their humanness. We must be just as strong in exposing this tactic and calling it what it is: wrong. But that assumes one even has the categories of right and wrong, good and evil, in their vocabulary; a point for another day.

There is much more I will say on this subject over time, but for now I leave you with this thought to ponder:

How can we speak of the termination of a pregnancy when what we really mean is the destruction of a human life? How can we talk of therapeutic abortion when pregnancy is not a disease needing therapy and what abortion effects is not a cure but a killing? How can we talk of abortion as a kind of retroactive contraception when what it does is not prevent conception but destroy the conceptus? We need to have the courage to use accurate language. Abortion is feticide: the destruction of an unborn child. It is the shedding of innocent blood, and any society that can tolerate this, let alone legislate for it, has ceased to be civilized. -John Stott

We are all hypocrites

Very few things detest us more than hypocrisy. We are all hypocrites. We all, at many times in our lives, say one thing and yet do another. It certainly is a repulsive trait in others, even more so in ourselves when it goes unrecognized.

With that in mind, there are two instances of public hypocrisy that come to mind that I find particularly offensive.

With a personal net worth north of a billion dollars thanks in large part to an early investment in Facebook, U2 singer Bono, back in 2006 called on the US government to devote more of it’s budget to the poor.

More recently, Pope Francis called on all the world governments to redistribute the wealth of individuals from the rich to the poor. This coming from someone who sits atop an organization with an estimated worth of $10 to $15 billion dollars.

I realize both men mean well. But asking others to be charitable without exhibiting the same with their vast wealth is hypocritical. It is not the governments job to take from some in order to give to others. But we have become a people who call for our government to take care of the less fortunate so we don’t have to. Progressives can appease their consciences by calling for the redistribution of others’ wealth while they remain the stingiest with their own.

If Bono and Pope Francis are really the caring men they purport to be, and I’m not implying they aren’t, they would give sacrificially first, before calling on others who most certainly have less resources than they do, to do likewise. Actions always speaker louder than words.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

In 1919, Rudyard Kipling published his poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings which represented the time-tested and proven wisdom of old pitted against the new ideas and moralities that proved pleasurable and fleeting, yet in the end, destructive.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Kipling seemed prescient in his ability to see where the “new wisdom” would lead, and in fact did lead, and how the principles of old held true time and again in the face of those who denied them. It is far more pronounced today and the progressive experiments we see all around us, that deny that which works and the way things were meant to be, will ultimately fail. But the progressive mind is not one that understands nor learns from history; and becomes evermore puzzled as to why they are doomed to repeat it.

The wayward explorer

“Carry on my wayward son,
There’ll be peace when you are done.
Lay your weary head to rest;
Don’t you cry no more.”

-Kerry Livgren, Kansas, 1977