The Fragility of Political Sanity

American Thinker ^ | 2 Oct, 2021 | W.R. Wordsworth

[MtnClimber]

It is high time we recover the true value of limited government and stand against the vigilantes who behave as though their superior virtue entitles them to wield the state as a weapon of group revenge.

SNIP

This earlier Enlightenment fostered a secular political culture that disavowed the enforcement of religious uniformity as an object of political endeavor. Under the guidance of the Enlighteners the fanatics were disempowered and the West abandoned theocracy as a governing ideal. Western societies grew to accommodate religious variety without sacrificing social harmony. We are heirs to this tradition, and we would do well to reflect upon it, especially since human nature itself would seem to make the ascendancy of political fanaticism a permanent threat.

One might like to assume that people are basically reasonable and that episodes of brutal domination are historical aberrations, but such practices as the burning of heretics and the slaughter en masse of errant co-religionists did not simply end on their own -- people didn't just come to their senses one day. Political sanity is not as self-recommending as one might like to assume; arguments for toleration had to be made, and they had to gain general acceptance, supplying new norms. These norms had to be codified into laws and these laws safeguarded by institutions designed to uphold them. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was among the earliest authors of these new norms, norms which would eventually inform the American founding. These norms have held for centuries. Not so long ago the consensus supporting them was so solid there was little need to consciously invoke them; they are now buckling under the relentless attacks of a morally bigoted, hateful, authoritarian Left.

[MtnClimber]

If there is not a government food chewer, how will people eat properly?