H.L. Mencken is famously quoted as having said, "The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it." I'm lousy at reading persons' motives, actually. What I am dependable about, however, is a hobbit-like love for all things small, human proportioned, and non-centralized.
Nearly every Enlightenment-driven project to "save humanity" in the violent, old twentieth century - from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Hitler to Pol Pot - all functioned with an ostensible motive of wanting to "save humanity." Each and every one of them ended not only badly, but disastrously in terms of loss of human life. Particularly in one stood in the way of such mere human efforts to "save humanity."
Note well: when the Second Great Commandment of Our Lord (..."and [love] your neighbor as yourself") is sundered from the First Great Commandment ("You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength"), things end badly.
Again, I do not pretend to understand or fathom his motives, but our Last Self-Help Administration president has noticeable, ostensible distaste for all things Judeo-Christian, which is to say, the ancestral voice of the West.
But it is here and only here that the continuity of keeping together those Two Great Commandments (Mk 12,30-31) is to be found in world history. And an United States without this spiritual continuity has no guarantee - absolutely none - that the perpetrators of heinous atrocities listed above will not again rise. Only this time with the finest motives, say, to provide health care for all; unless you aren't born yet, then you have no rights whatsoever. Not even to be born.
Finally, again I do not question I Wun's motives; they may be completely sincere. I question what has always happened when done the way he he is trying to do it and sans outward honoring Our Lord and the biblical Tradition that alone keeps together the revealed Mandate:
"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be yours as well."
- Mtt 6,33
1 comment:
Good point about the two Great Commandments being united in the founding creed of the U.S., the Declaration of Independence.
C.S. Lewis said,
"Aim for heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither."
And your post also reminded me of this from Chesterton;
"The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful."
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