for a great article. Thanks, IronJack!
Posted on 02/18/2002 3:38:52 AM PST by IronJack
One of the reasons the Left is more successful than the Right on the rhetorical battlefield is that they've sabotaged the Right's strongest weapon: its morality. The Right argues from a standpoint that Truth will always out, and that Right will always triumph over Wrong. However, the Left has excelled at blurring that clear distinction, and at diluting the definition of Truth until it no longer serves as impermeable armor. It no longer suffices to stand on the high ground and serve as a sterling example; firstly, because, being human, we on the Right aren't necessarily any more sterling that those on the left, at least morally; and secondly, because Leftist ideological leveling has shaved the peaks into the valleys and rendered the landscape a bland plateau of moral equivalency. "High ground" is to low ground what a pitcher's mound is to a baseball diamond.
Morality must be based on some higher ideal, some extrapersonal sense of right and wrong. In most civilizations, it comes from religion. By effectively undercutting religion for 50 years, the Left has strangled the source of our righteous energy. When giving battle, we can't fall back to a religious redoubt without appearing inquisitory, pedantic, or desperate. In short, we can't buy much with the devalued religious currency that passes for specie in our depraved realm.
The short-term solution, then, is to shun the religious argument, since it is ineffective to begin with, and ultimately provides ammunition to our enemies. Constant resort to that bulwark can be cast in the tones the Left has used to erode religious primacy for decades: it is superstitious, it is divisive, it is hypocritical. In the end, our "ultimate weapon" exposes us to a barrage of tested artillery, and we end up on the defensive, our backs to the church wall, and the Saracens massing behind us.
The long-term solution is to restore religion to its rightful place in our cultural discourse, to imbue it again with the honor it has traditionally enjoyed. That endows it with the weight it should carry, and makes it a guiding - if not defining - force in our morality. To oppose it is to storm the very gates of Heaven itself. Against that might, who can prevail? Certainly not the relativist Left, whose agnosticism serves as a flimsy substitute for the moral certainty - or at least reassurance - these times demand.
Only in a culture as surfeited as ours is religion disposable. Insulated from the terrors of random disaster, we stop asking the Big Questions. We focus on nearer pursuits to the detriment of ideas. In the olden days, we would be accused of neglecting our spiritual gardens. But if enough ersatz food is available from the corner grocery, who cares about a garden anyway? Never mind that the stuff being purveyed on the corner is empty, drained of its nutrients by the very processes that make it big and gaudy. Never mind that we've handed our destiny to a merchant who doesn't care one whit about us, one who is, in fact, chasing profit at the cost of our starvation. The only matter of import is that we no longer have to work up a sweat and get dirt under our fingernails.
Sept. 11 set our comfortable, surfeited world on its ear. It forced us to confront Big Questions again, and to wonder about the shadows we'd forgotten belong to Evil. It made us understand that there is no security in complacency, and that smug profligacy was scant protection against an airliner commanded by lunatics. In this shaken world, the eternal puzzles arose again, and our paltry humanity was inadequate to their demands. We turned again to God, our refuge from the unanswerable conundrums we'd pretended away.
In this new, more fragile world, religion becomes a formative agent. We can once again posit the argument that Good and Evil exist, that there are forces at work in this world that defy comprehension, and that to tame those forces, we need a power greater than ourselves. We need a moral component to our every action, a mediator between what's easy and what's right.
We come to understand that the cost of expediency is measured in twisted wreckage, burning bodies, and the stench of death. The miniscule benefit derived from personal irresponsibility is offset in the misery conferred on us by our predators. Our strength determines our ability to fend off such attackers, and that strength isn't confined to the gym or the athletic field. Our morality must be sufficient to the task as well. Certainly we need the strength to wield the blade, but it is morality that provides the steel.
Thus, any force that enervates our morality deprives us of a defensive weapon. Any movement that erodes our unity disrupts our collective vigor, and spreads a pathogen of meekness into our circle that can be exploited by those raptors perched just beyond the firelight. Self-indulgence is no longer just crass and boorish; it is treasonous. It's a lot harder to rob a neighbor if you might need him to drag you out of a demolished building. We cast our lots together, and conclude that we fare better as mutual allies than mutual antagonists. We also learn the high price of immediacy, and the enduring value of vision.
These are not new virtues within the conservative community. In fact, they are the core virtues we've tried to conserve all these decades, those bastions of morality that have been assailed since Duty, Honor, and Country fell to Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'roll. This is our chance to say "I told you so," to drive home the fact that moral bankruptcy begets actual physical damage in addition to its psychic devastation. Besides the 3,500 innocents who died in the cataclysms of Sept. 11, the Left's hollow ethic perished as well. Our opportunity now is to show that God can save this country, as He has done for centuries. And to keep that faith alive, we must ensure that the devil remains buried in the rubble of Manhattan, the Pentagon, and those scarred woods in Pennsylvania.
That means never ceasing to trumpet the failures of the Left. That means an unending glorification of this country and its ideals, ideals whose practice would have prevented the disasters of last September. This means an unflinching denunciation of anti-American obstructionists and half-baked "progressives" whose agenda pollutes our resolve.
And on the constructive side, it means the unapologetic return to God, country, and family, those institutions that have served as our cultural anchors through every vagary of man and nature for a thousand years. We can think of it as a "return to normalcy," an ideological maturing that is long overdue, a putting away of childish things after a glimpse of Hell through a glass darkly. But mostly, it is a covenant with the spirits of the past and the hopes of the future that the great promise of this land will not be squandered.
for a great article. Thanks, IronJack!
Well, isn't that sweet? If the Right's position is always for the Truth (with a capital T), then that pretty much leaves the Left with ... something else.
How about how the Right rallied around Nixon and all his stonewalling, and the way the Right rallied around Reagan and his secret dealings with terrorists? And rightwing Congressman John Schmitz and his secret second family? Roy Cohn and his secret sex life? Oh yeah, the Reichtwing has a monopoly on the Truth!
That endows it with the weight it should carry, and makes it a guiding - if not defining - force in our morality.
To oppose it -
is to storm the very gates of Heaven itself.
Against that might, who can prevail? Certainly not the relativist Left, whose agnosticism serves as a flimsy substitute for the moral certainty - or at least reassurance - these times demand. As a nation composed of family oriented virtues,
[whose core values we've tried to conserve over the decades,
but have families and public schools been successful in imparting simple core values and traditions over succeeding generations ?]
The traditional bastions of morality , home and the church ,have been assailed to such an extent that Duty, Honor, and Country has fallen to Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'roll.
But , since 9/11--
could that void lead to an unapologetic fulfillment to God, country, and family?
For what other institutions have served as our cultural anchors through every vagary of man and nature for a thousand years?
Think of it as a "return to normalcy," an ideological maturing that is long overdue, a putting away of childish things after a glimpse of Hell through a glass darkly.
Mostly, it is a covenant with the spirits of the past and the hopes of the future that the great promise of this land will not be squandered.
Yep.
How about how the Right rallied around Nixon and all his stonewalling,
The Right -- in the form of conservative congressional leadership -- told Nixon that if he didn't do the right thing, they would leave him hanging in the breeze. Shortly afterward, Nixon resigned. So much for that theory.
... and the way the Right rallied around Reagan and his secret dealings with terrorists?
Yeah. That nasty Reagan and the fact that he bargained away junk technology to rescue 50 American embassy workers who had been held prisoner for months, and whose lives were forfeit to the lunatics in Iran on a whim. Certainly a case of lesser evils there, I would say.
And rightwing Congressman John Schmitz and his secret second family?
Don't know anything about this.
Roy Cohn and his secret sex life?
Can't be too secret if some hate-spewing Lefty like you knows about it. And if you want to talk about sex lives, let's talk about Slick's. Or Ted Kennedy's. Or Barney Frank's. Or Marion Barry's. Or Martin Luther King's. Shall I go on?
Oh yeah, the Reichtwing has a monopoly on the Truth!
First of all, that isn't even the point I'm trying to make, so you wasted a lot of good umbrage. I'm saying that the Right is convinced that all it needs to do is take a moral stance and the world will beat a path to its door. But where morality has been crippled by relativists like yourself, it is no longer the armor it once was. In fact, I used that same metaphor throughout. But I suppose that was a little esoteric for someone raised on DC comics and Al Gore lectures.
Secondly, since the Left is sworn to Relativism, it doesn't even pretend to Truth. So why would you take offense? It is your cause that has forsaken absolutes -- including truth. That my cause embraces something more enduring than emphemera makes it more of a reassurance in times of uncerainty than yours, which promotes that very uncertainty.
Your philosophy is not only ineffectual and moribund, it is treasonous. Your weaknesses feed our enemies. Our strengths starve them. Sept. 11 proved it.
No. And to the degree they've failed, our culture has become weak and susceptible to the acts we saw on Sept. 11. Our strength lies in restoring the morality that made us strong to begin with.
As an engineer and an atheist and a former liberal, and well read in the sciences, I read the above from a strange perspective. Even though I am certain that there is no God, I am increasingly certain that there is a Moral Order to the Universe that is inescapable and beyond our ordinary understanding.
I see in this post a conflict between two religions, one of which pretends not to be a religion.
Yet the liberalism or socialism of the Left is a form of religion. I've taken to using the word Secularism to name this religion. Here I use the word "religion" in an unconventional sense: religions embody our understanding of the order of the universe, of matters too awesome to understand by normal means.
But secularists claim their beliefs are the antithesis of religion, that secularism is the one true anti-religion. Perhaps the original thinkers who are the creators of Secularism thought that Science had progressed so far that there was little left in the Universe that we didn't understand, so far that we could Scientifically engineer Heaven on Earth (a book by Joshua Muravchik).
By protraying Secularism as the modern scientific antidote to religion, as anything but a religion, Secularists can then twist the freedom of religion clause in the Constitution into requiring us to ban all religions except theirs from public discourse, institutions and schools. The Constitutional ban on laws partial to any particular religion is turned into a mandate for Secularism as the one and only true state religion.
Read the above link to the Prologue of Muravchik's book, and notice how he compares the rise of Socialism to the rise of other religions, of which Socialism is one such.
Posts like the one that started this thread start to make much more sense to me when I reread them from the perspective that the Left is just another organized religion, with a couple of twists:
Science (as popularly misunderstood) has blinded many to the Moral Order of the Universe (commonly called "God") for the last couple of centuries.
Perhaps the greatest struggle in which we are now engaged is not the War on Terrorism, but rather the War on Secularism.
BUMP!! Excellent article. Thank you for posting it
Excellent essay, IronJack. Fat, lazy, and licentious societies are always easy prey for the leaner, more disciplined ones.
Spoken as a left-wing moral-terrorist. We'll be keeping an eye on you henceforth, if you don't get banned for advocating such nihilistic and cruel violence.
What a weird person you are.
If you can get the moderators to ban me for speaking out against your religion, that's cool....
but you will never be the theocratic leader of this country...don't that hurt 'ya???
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