The Left Rejects Painful Truths: Left-Right Differences, Part IV

Here's a difference between Left and Right that is rarely noted despite the fact that it is at least as important as any other and even explains many of the other differences.

At the core of left-wing thought is a rejection of painful realities, the rejection of what the French call les faits de la vie: the facts of life. Conservatives, on the other hand, are all too aware of these painful realities of life and base many of their positions on them.

One such example was the subject of my first column on Left-Right differences: whether people are basically good. When liberals blame violent crime in America on poverty, one reason they do is that liberal beliefs since the Enlightenment have posited that human nature is good. Therefore, when people do truly bad things to other people, liberals believe that some outside force -- usually poverty, racism and/or unemployment -- must be responsible, not human nature.

Liberals find it too painful to look reality in the eye and acknowledge that human nature is deeply flawed. This is especially so because left-wing thought is rooted in secularism, and if you don't believe in God, you had better believe in humanity -- or you will despair.

Another fact of life that the Left finds too painful to acknowledge is the existence of profound differences between men and women. There is no other explanation for the rejection of what has been obvious to essentially every man and woman in history. It is certainly not the result of scientific inquiry. The more science knows about the male and female brain, not to mention male and female hormones, the more it confirms important built-in differences between the sexes.

Why then would people actually believe that girls are as happy to play with trucks as are boys, and boys are as happy to play with dolls and tea sets as are girls?

Because acknowledging many of those differences is painful. For example, feminists and others on the Left do not want to acknowledge that sex between two people who are not committed to each other usually means much more to women than to men. It is too painful to acknowledge that men are far more capable of having anonymous, emotionally meaningless sex than women. Therefore, feminism has now taught two generations of women that they are just as capable of enjoying emotionless sex with many partners as are men.

That the great majority of women yearn to bond with a man -- more than they yearn for professional success -- is another fact of life that the Left wishes not to acknowledge. Thus, feminism posited the silly false motto, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" -- because the reality is that most women without a man feel a deep hole in their soul. And that is too painful to acknowledge. (This hole also exists in men, but most men have no trouble acknowledging it.)

The entire concept of "political correctness" emanates from the Left's incapacity to acknowledge painful truths. The very definition of "politically incorrect" is an idea or truth that people on the Left find too painful to acknowledge and therefore do not want expressed.

Why are so many young black males in prison? The reason is politically incorrect, meaning too painful for the Left to acknowledge: Black males commit a highly disproportionate amount of violent crime.

Why are there speech codes on virtually all college campuses? Because Leftists -- who control most campuses -- do not wish to hear discomforting facts or opinions with which they differ. That causes them pain.

That is the Left's own language. Leftists constantly speak about people being made "uncomfortable" and about feeling "offended" (conservatives almost never react to an idea with which they differ by saying, "I'm offended"). If a man has a "cheesecake" calendar hanging in his car repair shop, the Left regards him as having created a "hostile work environment" -- meaning some women might find it painful to see a woman presented as a sexual object.

Avoiding pain at almost all costs is at the heart of left-wing ideas and policies. That's why kids can no longer run around during recess at so many American schools. They may get hurt. That's why child protective services take children away from parents who allow their children to walk home alone or even play alone in the family backyard for 90 minutes without a parent at home.

Or take the left-wing bumper sticker idea: "War Is Not the Answer." Of course, war is often the answer to great evil. Nazi death camps were liberated by soldiers fighting a war, not peace activists. But having to acknowledge the moral necessity of war is too painful a truth for many on the Left.

One might say Leftism appeals to those who wish to remain innocent children. Growing up and facing the fact that life is messy, difficult and painful is increasingly a conservative point of view.

"Liberals find it too painful to look reality in the eye and acknowledge that human nature is deeply flawed. This is especially so because left-wing thought is rooted in secularism, and if you don't believe in God, you had better believe in humanity -- or you will despair. "

America's Founders, unlike the products of "progressive" educational propaganda of the past several decades, had studied the history of nations, and ancient wisdom writings, and they understood that ideologies which relied on allowing some imperfect human beings to use coercive power over other likewise imperfect individuals in the society would lead to totalitarian rule. Their Constitution for a free society denied such power to a political, ideological class in order to protect the liberty of individuals.

"'Ideas have consequences'" (Weaver). America became the place where the oppressed of the world fled for freedom and opportunity. As Americans have neglected the Founders' ideas of liberty, and have allowed government to grow, they have seen their freedom and opportunity disappearing. The consequences of the acceleration of the pace of approaching tyranny by this Administration and Congress are tyranny and oppression. There is no other possibility!

"'The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God." --Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 1826. ME 16:182

Natural Law - The Ultimate Source of Constitutional Law

"Man ... must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator.. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature.... This law of nature...is of course superior to any other.... No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this: and such of them as are valid derive all their force...from this original." - Sir William Blackstone (Eminent English Jurist)

The Founders DID NOT establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person's Creator endowed rights to life, liberty, and property.
Only in America, did a nation's founders recognize that rights, though endowed by the Creator as unalienable prerogatives, would not be sustained in society unless they were protected under a code of law which was itself in harmony with a higher law. They called it "natural law," or "Nature's law." Such law is the ultimate source and established limit for all of man's laws and is intended to protect each of these natural rights for all of mankind. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 established the premise that in America a people might assume the station "to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them.."
Herein lay the security for men's individual rights - an immutable code of law, sanctioned by the Creator of man's rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being understood by both the ploughman and the professor. Sir William Blackstone, whose writings trained American's lawyers for its first century, capsulized such reasoning:

"For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the...direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws."

What are those natural laws? Blackstone continued:

"Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due.."

The Founders saw these as moral duties between individuals. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him .... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation."

Americas leaders of 1787 had studied Cicero, Polybius, Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, among others, as well as the history of the rise and fall of governments, and they recognized these underlying principles of law as those of the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, and the deepest thought of the ages.
An example of the harmony of natural law and natural rights is Blackstone's "that we should live honestly" - otherwise known as "thou shalt not steal" - whose corresponding natural right is that of individual freedom to acquire and own, through honest initiative, private property. In the Founders' view, this law and this right were inalterable and of a higher order than any written law of man. Thus, the Constitution confirmed the law and secured the right and bound both individuals and their representatives in government to a moral code which did not permit either to take the earnings of another without his consent. Under this code, individuals could not band together and do, through government's coercive power, that which was not lawful between individuals.
America's Constitution is the culmination of the best reasoning of men of all time and is based on the most profound and beneficial values mankind has been able to fathom. It is, as William E. Gladstone observed, "The Most Wonderful Work Ever Struck Off At A Given Time By he Brain And Purpose Of Man."
We should dedicate ourselves to rediscovering and preserving an understanding of our Constitution's basis in natural law for the protection of natural rights - principles which have provided American citizens with more protection for individual rights, while guaranteeing more freedom, than any people on earth.

"The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom." -John Locke

Footnote: Our Ageless Constitution, W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part III: ISBN 0-937047-01-5
here

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