1933?

Between the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 and the dawn hours of September 1,1939, there was time enough to birth a new generation in England and on the continent and to forget every lesson learned in the mud and blood of Flanders and Passchendaele.

And so were the English, French, and we Americans duped in 1933. Or were we all? Did we not seek to be duped? Churchill read Mein Kampf and so did others. Why was he nearly alone in taking a lesson from it? What is it in men that encourages us to rationalize evil? I certainly do not think it is a anything as prosaic as "unwisdom, carelessness or good nature" that ultimately accounts for it. I think there is a more sinister impulse implanted in men.

The signs were all there to see: the cult of personality; the intolerance of contrary opinion; the formation of extra-normal operatives such as political street organizations and youth organizations; playing on victimology; the creation of an us against them mentality; the demonization of opponents; the false sense of urgency; the immunity from the rule of law for the elites; the fawning of the media; the distortion of science; the tinkering with life in the laboratory; the mass psychosis.

I am glad you picked up on the references to evil contained in piece. They were not put there by accident.

The ways of liberals are often mysterious to us and so one can be intrigued, perhaps morbidly so, by trying to understand what makes them tick. If we knew that, we might be able to make ourselves at least understood by them although I entertain little hope that many will be persuaded by reason.

In this endeavor one of the few commentators willing to grapple these issues, (actually one issue) liberals attitude toward good and evil and what makes them tick, is Dennis Prager who has written more than once on the subject.

Here is a reply I posted a couple of years ago in response to a Prager column in which he argues that all politics flows from whether one believes that the nature of man is good or evil (my introductory remarks appear in italics):

Our view of the essential moral nature of man, whether he is good or essentially evil, is profoundly important and indeed constitutes the bed rock upon which all political divisions break apart. The author of this piece is correct in his observation that conservatives have a negative view of the essential nature of man. But he miss -applies it. I invite your attention to a far more thoughtful article-at least as it concerns this subject-which appeared some years ago in free Republic authored by Dennis Prager. The article can be found at:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/814573/posts.

I offer some quotations from the article:

No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.

I realized that perhaps the major reason for political and other disagreements I had with callers was that they believed people are basically good, and I did not.

Why is this issue so important?

First, if you believe people are born good, you will attribute evil to forces outside the individual. That is why, for example, our secular humanistic culture so often attributes evil to poverty. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, former President Jimmy Carter and millions of other Westerners believe that the cause of Islamic terror is poverty. They really believe that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families in pizzerias in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, slit stewardesses' throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do so because they lack sufficient incomes.

Second, if you believe people are born good, you will not stress character development when you raise children. You will have schools teach young people how to use condoms....You will teach them how to struggle against the evils of society – its sexism, its racism, its classism and its homophobia. But you will not teach them that the primary struggle they have to wage to make a better world is against their own nature.

Third, if you believe that people are basically good, God and religion are morally unnecessary, even harmful.

Fourth, if you believe people are basically good, you, of course, believe that you are good – and therefore those who disagree with you must be bad, not merely wrong. You also believe that the more power that you and those you agree with have, the better the society will be. That is why such people are so committed to powerful government and to powerful judges. On the other hand, those of us who believe that people are not basically good do not want power concentrated in any one group, and are therefore profoundly suspicious of big government, big labor, big corporations and even big religious institutions. As Lord Acton said long ago, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton did not believe people are basically good.

………………………

Finally, if you will indulge me at present another reply from 2002 which reacts to a Prager column dealing the recognition of evil:

GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX

Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.

So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required a reading of Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the humsn animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.

The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections)system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:

`" No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not."

This is why liberals loathe believing christians. This is why liberals are collectivists and conservatives are individualists. This is why the Democrat party slices and dices the electorate into groups. This is why Patty Murray said what she said. The old adage that liberals love mankind in the abstract and as a group (read African-Americans) but despise them on an individual level finds its origins here. This is why believing Christians and believing Jews are finding that they hold much in common and have a common philosophical enemy in secular Jews and goyische pagans. The application of this insight is almost endless.

13 posted on Tuesday, December 31, 2002 2:53:31 PM by nathanbedford

Thanks for the kind words!

Simply put, I am quite worried that the US will plunge into an abyss.

If one compares things such as total household debt as a function of household income, or total goverment debt as a function of GPD, or a chart of housing prices NOW to a chart of stock prices before the depression...

The consequences are stark.

And in the 1930's, we were a young nation, with much growth and modernization to do.

Now the boomers are facing retirement, having indulged every fancy and an artificially (debt-based) high lifestyle, accustomed to getting what they want, and a government willing to mortgage the future to pay for short term wants of the indulged *now*.

Other similarities to the 1930's:

We face a rapidly-arming totalitarian state, and pretend that appeasement will work.

Like the 1930's there is a strong racial component to the dreams of our enemies.

And we no longer have the manufacturing base.

The "arsenal of democracy" is now located in our enemy's home country, and they have been supplying *us*.

We are outnumbered 3-1 in population, and no longer have the vast technological lead we once did.

I regard these things as ominous: Depressions and World Wars (like most calamities) remind me of ditzy teenagers in slasher flicks. You're watching (from decades' distance, or from your movie seat), seeing the fatal mistakes made which were in retrospect Oh-So-Obvious ("DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR! THE BAD GUY IS IN THERE. DON'T YOU HEAR THE SOUNDTRACK?!!") or ("Don't borrow to speculate in stocks! Appeasement of dictators doesn't work!"), and you wince. But to the people who lived through them, the mistakes weren't obvious until it was too late. Depressions and wars destroy entire generations' lives -- not just the standard of living, but deep psychical scars which last for decades. Two world wars and a depression in successive generations turned the Europeons into the eternal Diplomatists that they now are, and have set them up for usurpation by bloodless demographic conquest by Islam. (The US only lost 250,000 in World War II, not millions.)

That would be bad enough, but the reason for the "NO CHEERS" is that during these perilous times, the US seems to be fulfilling the Biblical phrase, "And a little child shall lead them." Everything mistakenly said about Palin being a lightweight fluff with no character, appears to be actually true of the sitting President.

Kyrie Eleison!

/rant finished>

...if you believe that people are basically good, God and religion are morally unnecessary, even harmful.

Here, and elsewhere, you've put your finger on one really crucial thing: the secularization--or better, "de-Christianization"--of our society is starting to have its effects on a mass scale. This de-Christianization, which is a phenomenon throughout the West, has now reached epidemic proportions in America. I think we can still fight it, but it's more of an uphill battle than it used to be.

For example, conservatives could always count on the default support of the "evangelicals." This group of Americans always held to the Bible-based, Protestant Christianity that set the moral tone of our cultural consensus. There were certain things that were right and certain others that were wrong. Pretty much everybody agreed with that consensus, whether they were Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or some other faith. Even the seculars tended to give it lip service.

Now however, the "evangelicals" are led not by the likes of the late Jerry Falwell or Oral Roberts, but by Rick Warren, Joel Osteen and their like. The former haven't disappeared completely, but the latter now set the tone. Now, Warren, Osteen, et al aren't necessarily bad people, but they are much more under the influence of the new "get-along" ethos, rather than the "Old Time Religion" of Falwell, Robertson, et al. There is a distict possibility that over time, the current crop of evangelicals voters will simply give in to a creeping secularism. How to fight this? The attenuation of simple, Protestant Christianity may be reversible, but I'm now wondering if anything like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition is possible again. Just a thought.

The political calamities you've alluded to (the Nazi-Zeit, etc) all were proceeded by wide-spread secularization among the tone-setters of the societies affected. This process played out over centuries in Europe. We can go back to the French Revolution, the Reformation, or even the late Middle Ages. One of America's unique traits in the modern age was to preserve at least an effective core of Christian faith, while other societies were dissolving theirs. I wonder now if we aren't being caught up in the same tide of secularism as Europe was.

I'm curious: you now live in Germany. I lived there in the '90's (Nurnberg 90-92 in the Army and in Dresden from '96-99 as an English teacher and translator). One of the things that most impressed me was how secular those places were, even though they had all the monuments to their Christian past surrounding them (more so in Nurnburg, less so in post DDR Dresden). The contrast was even more striking in Prague, which is dense with monuments to Europe's Christian past, but even sparser in living faith in God. Do a thought experiment: Could a legistlature in any of these countries open its proceedings with a prayer, or could the highest court could be opened with the phrase, "God save this honorable court"? In my view it is unthinkable. I wonder if any of this comes up in conversation with your German neighbors?

The three post WW II leaders of Italy, Germany, and France (di Gasperi, Adenauer, and de Gaulle) were brilliant at overcoming the physical depredations of the war and setting up political institutions. But a third goal that each had hoped to acheive--the reinvigoration of Christianity--proved beyond them. That was probably inevitable and necessary. It's beyond the power of politics to bring about. Yet I think the sweeping secularization--better, de-Christianization--of the West is one of the central issues of the time, maybe the central issue.

Anyway, thanks for another thought-provoking post. I think we're all in some perplexity about what to think these days. At least we can all be perplexed together!

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

My observations here in Bavaria parallel your observations in northern Germany. I think you are right, America is about a couple of years ahead of Germany in Pop culture and 10 years behind on religious trends. I think that the visceral and almost involuntary negative reaction to George Bush had to do with his open profession of faith. Of course Clinton had ostentatiously done the same thing but everyone knew that he was lying about it so there was no need to react.

Obamas religiosity, I think, is a different matter. He paid no forfeit not only because people did not believe that he would be affected by serious commitment of faith, but mainly because he was immune from all criticism so long as he was able to portray himself as a white man campaigning in dark skin. As long as he remained non threatening, (i.e. he did not act like Jesse Jackson or Reverend Sharpton) then America was not inclined to ask hard questions. America marched to the polls as though overmedicated.

The Liberals have managed to stand the truth about faith on its head. The truth is that faith in a greater being is liberating but liberals have convinced the secular world that it is smothering. Since I believe the theme conservatives should strike in fighting the tsunami Obama represents is to emphasize liberty, the freedom of the individual, I think that the great liberating power of faith can actually be expressed in public without embarrassment. Conservatives of faith should confront liberals without embarrassment on these issues. Every time bondage of the self results in the destruction of some one like the governor of New York, spiritual hubris can and should be indicted. If preachiness is avoided and a vocabulary free of tainted religious terms is employed by way of euphemism for words like sin, repentance and redemption, some souls might be persuaded in some votes might be changed.

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