Posted on 08/04/2015 6:55:27 AM PDT by Salvation
What are we to make of cruelty in our culture? At one level, there is demonstrably less cruelty on a daily basis. Many hundreds of years ago, before the emergence of a common civil law, settled governments, and national boundaries, villages were often overrun by roving bands of plunderers or the armies of nearby towns. Feudal lords or landed families were either venting grievances or seeking to increase their territory. City-states had high walls, moats, and embattlements for a reason. Brutality, rape, torture, banishment, pillaging, and enslavement were common features of the ancient world and continued well into the 16th Century in Europe and even to this very day in some parts of the world.
With the emergence of civil law and more common standards of justice (thanks in part to the Church), along with more settled nation-states and boundaries, order in daily life, of the kind not experienced since the Pax Romana, began to develop.
Few of us today fear to venture outside our cities, which no longer have protective walls, or far from our homes. A drive out in the country is not something we undertake with trepidation, wondering if we will ever return.
And yet from the perspective of a “body count,” we have never lived in bloodier times. Even as we call ourselves “civilized” we kill in numbers unimaginable to the ancient world or feudal Europe. In the 20th century alone, tens of millions were killed in the two world wars. And the dead were not found only on the battlefields, but in fire-bombed and carpet-bombed cities as well. “Civilized” Germany ran death camps that killed millions more. The “Cold War” that followed World War II and atheistic communism killed millions more. Even by conservative estimates, some 200 million people died in the 20th century for ideological reasons: at the hands of Stalin, Mao, and Pohl Pot, and as a result of wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Korea. The 20th century was surely the bloodiest century this world has ever known.
Add to this the cruelest killing of all, in numbers almost unfathomable: abortion. Whatever euphemism we may wish to use (“reproductive choice,” “women’s healthcare,” etc.), the fact remains that abortion is a brutal thing. Infants are scalded to death by saline or dismembered by suction. And regardless of what women are told or what they think going in, no post-abortive woman I have ever spoken with would describe abortion as anything less than an act of terrible violence. They themselves are also the victims of the lies and euphemisms. Reality hits hard.
The recently released undercover Planned Parenthood videos show the brutality and the callous disregard for human life and dignity in some people. The actions of Planned Parenthood are reprehensible, but not surprising. When a person or an organization unrepentantly engages in any objectively sinful practice, the sin has a way of growing, and the darkness and rationalizations get ever deeper. And if this is the case with lesser sins, how much more so with the extremely grave sin of unrepentantly killing infants in the womb.
Planned Parenthood’s organizational response to the videos, while less glib than the “doctors” in the videos, demonstrates a lack of remorse and no desire to end the practice. But what remorse can we expect from Planned Parenthood when it supports and profits from the killing of over 300,000 infants a year?
Yes, in this country the darkness is growing ever deeper in many hearts. And thus we see the most abominable practices celebrated by those who have lost their moorings, who lack even simple human tenderness toward the most innocent among us: our infants. Many even justify selling aborted infants for the sake of “medical research.”
So here is the great paradox of cruelty in our times. At one level we experience less brutal and random violence. Law and order, national boundaries, etc. have reduced the daily violence that most (not all) of us experience. Indeed, we talk endlessly and to a fault about being kind and “nice” and of the obligation not to hurt anyone’s feelings. We lament the killing of whales, the baby seals, and Cecil the lion. And yet, by the numbers, we are more brutal and cruel than ever. While we call ourselves civilized, the numbers show that the modern world is a killing machine the likes of which the world has never known.
In pondering the enormous violence in a culture that talks “nice” and prizes tolerance and kindness, Dr. Peter Kreeft makes a valuable observation:
How [is our civilization] weak? Not technologically … not intellectually … Nor are we morally weaker. I do not think we are necessarily more wicked than our ancestors overall. True, we are less courageous, less honest with ourselves, less self-disciplined, and obviously less chaste than they were. But they were more cruel, intolerant, snobbish, and inhumane than we are. They were better at the hard virtues; we are better at the soft virtues. …
But though we are not weaker in morality, we are weaker in the knowledge of morality … We know more about what is less than ourselves, but less about what is more than ourselves. When we act morally, we are better than our philosophy … Our ancestors were worse than theirs. Their problem was not living up to their principles. Ours is not having any.
We talk a good game of ethics … but it has the effect of an inoculation. [Professing] a little ethics or pseudo ethics we build up an immunity to the real thing. Those who obviously have no ethics … are ripe for conversion. Those who seem to have ethics but actually do not [because they have merely inoculated themselves from true ethics by a little ethics] are comfortably ensconced in illusion (Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue, Ignatius Press, 1992, pp. 23-32).
Kreeft’s basic explanation for our paradoxical “kind, yet brutal” culture comes down to an analogy of immunization. In immunization we “inoculate” ourselves. That is, we take a little portion of a disease in order to avoid the whole disease. Taking this little portion immunizes us and helps us to resist the big portion.
And thus those who use a little ethics, i.e., selective ethics, take it as something relatively harmless and less demanding than the whole of ethics or morality, which they shun like a disease. So, they take a little ethics (and selective ethics at that) and then congratulate themselves for being tolerant, kind, and nice, ignoring the rest of ethics and morality with its more frightening, consistent, and sweeping demands.
Yes, have a little ethics, get congratulated, and ignore the rest. Tell folks that you love the whales and think the poor should be fed; be polite and kind to most people, and you’re inoculated. Now, never mind that you are unchaste, think abortion should be legal, think that the selling of body parts obtained by killing is OK or even virtuous. No, never mind any of that. You are inoculated and therefore immune from the “disease” of a full moral vision. Indeed, those who do have the full symptoms of the full “disease” of morality and ethics are referred to with the disease-like term, “fanatic.”
Yes, what are we to make of the cruelty in our culture? Why is there such an astonishing death toll in a culture in which kindness and politeness are so prized? What are we to make of a culture that eschews violence and yet finds it even debatably “OK” to crush infants in the womb “carefully” and then harvest their organs? What are we to make of a culture that thinks it’s OK to abort infants at all, while we still talk about justice and fairness out of the other side of our mouth?
I think Dr. Kreeft’s analogy with inoculation helps explain some of the paradox. Our kindness and politeness, our sense of “civil” discourse, and our rejection of localized violence, good in themselves, are taken by many like an inoculation to immunize them from the broader expectations of a fully biblical morality or natural law ethics. Some think and would say, “I’ve done a little. I hold to the minimally correct, publicly approved view. I’m inoculated. So now leave me alone and take your fanatical and diseased extremism out of here.”
Little things may mean a lot, but not if they are used to exclude and excuse one from the greater. In this case, the good is the enemy of the perfect. And hence our politely cruel culture.
Planned Parenthood - the BILLION dollar “for profit” company which pays no taxes.
Because tolerance.
Today we fear to drive INTO our cities, it is a drive we only undertake with trepidation, wondering if we will ever return.
100%
Matthew 10:34-36
All in the name of name of the Great Socialist Climate Hoax.
What make you think this culture prizes kindness?
This nation( which pumps its ‘culture’ to the whole world in the name of counterfeit ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’) is an enemy to the Elohim of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and His beloved Son..
The sooner people realize it,the sooner they can pray for this babylon to end.and for His Kingdom to come...
Monsignor Pope Ping!
Good post Salvation
If every one did to others as they would like for others to do to them it would be a great place to be but we do not do that, why?
1 John 2
16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
We are lining in this world but we are not of this world.
John 15:19.
If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
And PGR88 wrote
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’; and ‘a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.”
Matthew 10:34-36
Matthew 24:14
And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.
If every thing was the way we believe it should be there would be no goats to separate from the sheep and there is going to be a separation at the end of the world and that may be sooner than we think.
The one consolation we have is that God knows what to do with all of the innocent lives that are lost due to the
selfishness, arrogance and greed of the people who preach kindness from one side of their mouth but evil from the other.
I happen to believe those souls are safe with God, but God have mercy on the ones who took their lives.
1 Peter 4
12 Dearly beloved, think not strange the burning heat which is to try you, as if some new thing happened to you;
13 But if you partake of the sufferings of Christ, rejoice that when his glory shall be revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy.
14 If you be reproached for the name of Christ, you shall be blessed: for that which is of the honour, glory, and power of God, and that which is his Spirit, resteth upon you.
15 But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a railer, or a coveter of other men’s things.
16 But if as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.
It appears that it is the murderer who is going to suffer rather than the murdered, obviously in this life and possibly the next one.
What can I do about it? the most I can think to do about it is to quit being part of the problem.
“Love God” “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“Cruelty” is more of a personal thing, individually doing actions intended to cause excessive suffering to others. What we have is “brutality,” institutional and societal indifference to large-scale killing. Most are personally untouched by it, because there are (relatively) only a few individual perpetrators doing the harm to the individual victims.
There is interesting and relevant commentary in Theodore Dalrymple’s essays on “The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality,” which one can purchase via Alibris.
Now there's the divide and conquer strategy. We fight amongst ourselves. Turning the other cheek is being confused with turning one's head away from the problem. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is getting away with murder.
And with divide and conquer comes the blame game. Moral armchair quarterbacking as to who should be doing what to solve the problem, without doing something oneself. It's always someone else's fault/responsibility.
The problem is, it is our problem. The pacifists and those who couldn't fathom such evil, watched the rise of Hitler. Who could have imagined such evil? But it was in Europe... Half a world away. And half a world away, as we discuss the issue, Christians are being slaughtered for their belief in Jesus.
And what of here? PP clinics that would have made Josef Mengele proud are neatly and inconspicuously tucked away in our cities. It is in our own back yard, and what is done? Blame someone else... Find another, safer cause to verbally oppose, then sit back in the armchair and play the blame game.
When we entered WWII, our country was united. There was support, patriotism, grass-roots participation at home- because we recognized evil and were proud to stand up against it.
Where is it now? The enemy is not so visible. There is no unity- America is fighting amongst itself. E Pluribus Unum: from many, one. Careful, my bretheren: we're going in the wrong direction! Men of good will need to unite once more, not divide; be responsible for ourselves, neither casting blame, nor expecting another to solve our nation's problems- nor those of the world.
Well-put, FRiend! Good post...
There is evil in this world. Sometimes it is random and sometimes it is hidden.
Jesus knew there was evil and stated that He was not of this world.
We can follow Him.
He's intentionally closing his eyes to the problem, shoving his fingers into his ears and screaming "na na na I can't hear you" rather than looking straight into the truth
"less courageous" = immoral
"Less honest" = immoral
"Less chaste" = immoral
We turned our back on God and have become vain and brutish in our actions. And who has lead this charge away from morality and into cruelty? Liberals!
They claim there is no god so they don't have to obey what He commands. And we are now reaping they harvest of the rebellious seed the liberals have sown into our culture.
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