Posted on 11/22/2001 3:10:08 PM PST by Askel5
Thomas MolnarUtopia: The Perennial Heresy(Sheed & Ward, 1967, pp. 132-133)
Mankind's attempts at total, utopian integration will manage to move forward only on that day when artificial sentiments support artificial objectives, when natural sentiments are torn out by the roots and replaced by false feelings and aspirations. The utopian assumes that the vistas he exposes to mankind are so glorious that we can show adequate tribute only in a permanent state of enthusiasm. Although enthusiasm usually manifests itself in loudly voiced approval, it is, basically, a constant affirmation of unity and pledge of participation.16 Yet, as Lord Percy of Newcastle notes in The Heresy of Democracy, the hectic search for unity must entail mob violence and legalized terror; it lies in the more fundamental fact that a people, thus summoned to demonstrate its unity as the precondition of its liberty, much regard enthusiasm as the first duty of citizenship.
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The Incarnation: Why the Church Cannot Disengage from Public Life ( The Latin Mass )
The Transition Period to Utopia (from "Schools Install Unisex Bathrooms")
The Transition Period According to Marx / Welfare State as Transition to Utopia
(from "Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil")
"Utopia. The Perennial Heresy" by Thomas Molnar (Sheed/Ward 1967)
The Liberal Hegemony (posted by Cornelis)Post 1 -- Utopianism, A Permanent Thought-Pattern; Immorality of Utopianism; Nightmarish Re-shaping of Life; Mechanization of Change
Post 2 -- Prediction and Utopia: A Distinction; Constant Elements in Utopian Thought
Post 3 -- Philosophical Motivation; The Historical Motivation; Permanence of the Utopian Temptation
(One of the authors whose FR articles are indexed at Deconstructing the Western Mind: Gramscian-Marxist Subversion of Faith and Education)
True enough, but if and when natural sentiments are wholly uprooted it will be done more by technology than by the sort of ideologies and utopias that were so popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. It won't be because you get people all chanting the same thing, but because you get them moving so quickly at the pace of the machine that the don't have time to think or question. If we all chant the same thing, of course, it certainly could hasten the day.
In any event, fascism was a "hot" ideology that relied on strong passions. You can see why people talk of "Islamofascism" today. It may not be a completely valid concept, but it picks up on the highly emotional and excited quality of both Fascism and today's Islamicist revolutionries. If we adopt tyranny it will be a much "cooler" or "colder" form, built more on the absence of strong passions or feelings. Or perhaps the dedicated few will rule over the passive majority.
Some day tyranny may rule over us. It would be a strange situation because it could fulfill the dreams of revolutionary utopians for social control, but be so technocratic and managed that it would leave the enthusiasts, if there are any left, confused and vaguely dissatisfied. Maybe that's the problem with utopias. People dream up highly rationalized schemes for society to satisfy their passions. If society is ever successfully reconstructed on rationalist lines, it's bye-bye to the passions that created the utopian plan to begin with. And what happens to the utopians who created the scheme? Some will become administrators, and others, outlaws.
That's about the only way you're gonna' get me to do anything after the "heathen fest" I just attended.
"It's a very important issue. He's looking at it from a lot of angles -- there are moral and ethical questions surrounding the issue but there is also a lot of science, and there's a lot of hope for what might, what could happen," she said.Laura Bush Makes Up Her Mind on Stem Cell Issue
The Politics of Stem Cells
Without a doubt, the technology of contraception was crucial to the successful "liberating" of sexual relations which not only upset the natural order and bonds between men and women (and their unborn children and families) but served as catalyst for the Crisis which compelled consideration of Legal Abortion in the courts.
Ostensibly pro-life, the GOP was yet prescient enough in private to make it US policy by 1974 that abortion was vital to the Solution. It turned out to be not so difficult, but the Democrats did convinced their loser constituents (blacks, Jews, women, poor) that indeed they should off their own ... it being better to be dead than Unwanted.
But Technology was not satisfied.
With the help of the eugenicist "Healthy Babies Only" March of Dimes, it perfected and popularized amniocentesis so that EVERY mother might have the opportunity to weigh the life of her unborn child strictly in terms of its Economic Burden and whether or not it was "a life worth living". (A most fantastic example of the norming of "situational ethics" to supplant the old model of self-evident truths!)
And, at the risk of cutting into the profits of Planned Parenthood, Technology popularized home pregnancy tests in the hopes savvy women -- upon the inevitable introduction of RU-486 -- would be ready, willing and able to off the "mass of cells" before the hormones kicked in (or the baby moved) and made prospect of surgical abortion too messy psychologically.
Technology was not without its quirky side, though.
In the midst of banging the drum always for death of new life, Technology announced unprecedented assists to infertile couples with plenty of money but poor procreation ability. The bringing forth of new life became a matter of Profit and Pinpoint Unnatural Selection by economically stable Purchaser(s)-as-Parents. As a bonus, the Utopian model of human relationships was now in firmly in place. Just as Uncle Sam had encouraged single mothers and children to enfold themselves in his strong arms in lieu of a husband, the laboratory had forever transformed human sexual reproduction into an impersonal, non-sexual transaction among as few as three or as many as 8 parties.
The fact that the children manufactured thus might never know their real parents or have both mother and father was not even a consideration. The essential message of the initial sexual revolution -- SELF-gratification and the body as property -- extended to the production of children as if they still had some connection with human sexuality or the womb of their own mother.
In the space of two generations, we have conditioned and produced a truly homogenous Person conditioned from receipt of his first prophylactics in school to gratify himself (man and woman, man and man, woman and woman), and encouraged -- by fear of Unknown Disease and Economic Risk and enticement of the Gay Pride that is a marriage certificate -- to a certain serial monogamy. Any Person, if economically stable, may purchase or procure a child to spec ... which child will be reared largely by the collective since the mother and/or father parent(s) have every possible Choice these days save that of staying home with their child.
So, having utterly destroyed the natural bonds between men and women, having obliterated both patriarchal defense of the unborn (without eschewing financial obligation for the Born) and all matriarchal forming of born through childhood and, lastly, having conditioned folks to view truth as relative and understand, by logical extension, not only the right to die but the obligation not to be a burden ... I think it's safe to say you are absolutely correct and that Utopians have embraced Technology as the Trojan Horse by which to destroy us from the inside out.
And destroyed we are.
Else how to explain the cheering of Bush's Clintonesque ability to keep his campaign promise by using only "already been killed" human lives in the government's program to attract the best and the brightest to ESCR and perpetuate the research until it hit paydirt.
I guess it was the way he mentioned his Favorite Philosopher in prime time and "informed consciences" by pointing out that some embryos get implanted and become children and others are just "excess" which we'd just waste if we didn't do the right thing and use them for "hopeful" humanitarian research to benefit the Living.
An offer of Technological Advance we couldn't refuse.
In 1977 Robert McNamara, as head of the World Bank, saw in population growth the "gravest issue" short of nuclear war and in a particularly prophetic statement lamented that the decisions that had led to this growth were "not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the literally hundreds of millions of individual parents who will determine the outcome."Of course, the World Bank is not technically a US government office. But before joining the World Bank, this fellow was none other than Robert S. MacNamara, US Secretary of Defense.Evaluations of McNamara's long career as secretary of defense vary from glowing to negative and sometimes scathing. One journalist reported criticism of McNamara as a "'human IBM machine' who cares more for computerized statistical logic than for human judgments."
Isn't he saying, "Let's not roll?" Did I refuse your irony, or . . .
Did you see us discussing a "Talk is Cheap" Catholic Action Salon & Soiree for St. Pat's 2000 in New Orleans? In a perfect world, the patent family would attend.
Regards, Laz.
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