[KC Burke]

Though I have read this a number of times in the past, One part hit me today:
And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

I recall, William, our discussions about Kirk's first principle and how it was worded as more open to all sorts of conservatives in this later phrasing:
Belief in an enduring moral order.
Now what strikes me is the underlying point apparently made in the above address, how all people of the cultural age of our founding documents, with their wording, would have allowed for the limitations of the God of Western Christiandom and Judeaic faith and culture.

I remember Franklin's warning to Thomas Paine over his Rights of Man and Paine's reassurance with words to the effect that despite his "free thinking" he still held with the broad "enduring moral order" of his time.

That commonality accross the broad plain of thought is what the Rationalists of totalitarian democracy can't give us in our current time.

[William McKinley]

Absolutely. And as with Paine, so with Jefferson.

[cornelis]

Good stuff. Both Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel recognized the contigency of law on an extra-legal foundation. Actually Strauss (and I believe Hayek, certainly Kendall) argued the same for the Constitution. This foundation he calls a moral order which is not a function of human whims. I read this piece last night and the part that hit me was his observation on legality.

[happygrl]

totalitarian democracy

What an apt phrase ! Yes, that's it exactly ! And those who have made man the measure of all worth, believe that whatever comes out of their own head has just as much cache as any other idle thought on the block.

We have entered new territory, not seen since the time of the Judges "when everyone did what was right in their own eyes."

[Aquinasfan]

Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

I wonder if this outcome is the necessary, logical outcome of our system of government, particularly the idea of a religiously indifferent government. It seems to me that nations with established churches (like England), but which tolerate other religions, are more intellectually coherent regimes.