[ProgressingAmerica]

If anybody wants on/off the revolutionary progressivism ping list, send me a message

Progressives do not want to discuss their own history. I want to discuss their history.

[ecomcon]

Well then, John Dewey can KMA.

[plsjr]

Bump for later.

[newheart]

In the first place, such liberalism knows that an individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made. It is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical: including in “cultural,” economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and art.

Pretty much Dewey's way of saying, "You didn't build that."

Excellent essay.

If an individual is "nothing fixed, given ready-made," then and individual is nothing. Life only has value as an instrument of utility, a means useful for achieving some other end. Of course the dirty little secret of politics built on Utilitarian, Progressivist principles, is that the choice of ends are made by those in power, who, succumbing to the eternal temptation of people who hold power, believe themselves capable of discerning and implementing what is "good' for the people.

As Pope John Paul II put it, "Utilitarianism is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of things and not of persons, a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used."

That more than adequately explains why individual human life is of little consequence in our culture. And it also explains why Obama's cynical use of children as props in presenting his gun control agenda is itself evidence that his agenda is NOT about protecting children, but empowering the State and the withering away of the individual (to turn Lenin's phrase on its head.).