An excerpt from the article of the same title--Covid and the God-Sized Hole in the Heart of the West. Ultimately, only a great re-awakening to our spiritual heritage will deliver us from the Great Reset:
The pandemic has exposed a deeper sickness in secular-humanist society.
Covid has exposed a crack, with the potential to become a catastrophic floodgate failure, in the dam that materialism and secular humanism has built around man’s search for the eternal. What held the water back until now was a simple premise: Progress, technology and material comfort will sate your needs and provide all the answers. Death can be pushed to the margins of consciousness by various forms of self-care and chalked off to the random machinations of the universe when the Grim Reaper prevails over the former. You are both the source of and the solution to any problem you may encounter in the search for meaning you may embark upon. Any attempt to justify your existence likewise starts and ends with you. You are the measure of all things.
All of these anthropological claims about the nature of existence, as Anthony Pagden points out in The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters (2013), are not in fact timeless truths, but inventions of 18th Century philosophes. The Enlightenment philosophers took Thomas Aquinas’s Christianized natural law, rebranded it as natural rights, and made off like a thief in the night with new presumptions about human nature. Gone was the idea that all humans were by nature relational beings who sought out the community of others; gone was the notion that man had imprinted on his soul the desire to search for and know God. In their stead was Locke’s “blank slate” of a potentially perfectible mankind shaped by his environment and the freely assumed obligations of the self-interested individual. Even things as fundamental as ties to family and nation, as Yoram Hazony points out, were construed as somehow “chosen” by the individual as he emerged from the pre-hisotrical “state of nature.” As Hazony surmises:
“In reducing political life to the individual’s pursuit of life and property, Locke did not merely offer an impoverished and unsuccessful account of human motivation and action. His political theory summoned into being a dream-world, a utopian vision, in which the political institutions of the Jewish and Christian world–the national state, community, family, and religious tradition–appear to have no reason to exist.”
Voilà--the philosophical underpinnings of Classical Liberalism and ... of our Globalist elite. If we wish to escape the toils of Globalism, we must also break out of the intellectual dead end box of Classical Liberalism. The way forward is the way back--back to our spiritual and philosophical roots. From this standpoint, strange as this may seem when considering the man, I see Trump's appeal to that heritage as the major source of the elite's extreme hatred for him.
This is interesting, I have always thought and argued, not here, that a return to classical liberalism would help get us past this socialist desire for utopia on Earth.
ReplyDeleteMore of a Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things type of view.
I've told my family--in these times--that 'no good Catholic fears death.' I could expand that to "Christian" with the usual Catholic reservations.
ReplyDeleteThe Deep State is playing, successfully, on the fear of death which is directly related to the demolition of Christian fundamentals.
One other thing: we are not in a struggle against men. We are in a struggle against principalities and powers from Hell. Their BEST WEAPON is to convince us that we are defeated.
Don't be defeated!
"there is a deeper spiritual
ReplyDeletecontrol at stake.." -Dannion Brinkley
https://youtu.be/DUn7LRxT7bk?t=7950
David Wilcock and Dannion Brinkley: Hidden History of Elections
Problem is that, in my view, without the Enlightenment the United States would not exist.
ReplyDeleteThe Catholic Church, of which I am a apart of (Pre Cana speaker, sponsor couple), in many ways begat the Enlightenment. From Martin Luther to Galileo to Copernicus onwards, the power structure of the Church was assaulted on all sides. It is extremely reasonable to assert we have long swayed on the pendulum to the point of anti-religion, but to assert the Enlightenment is wrong is, in my view, ... well ... wrong.
It’s more about power than anything else.
What I find is that we, as humans, go to great lengths to contort ourselves in rhetoric that employs logic to justify whatever we want.
Some very good thoughts in this post.
Without the Enlightenment the US as we know it would not exist. That doesn't mean the Enlightenment or Classical Liberalism are 'right'. They're not. Equally, without the Enlightenment we wouldn't be in the societal fix we're currently in. Read Deneen on these topics.
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