Where the religious mind feels the importance of honoring eternal values, the progressive mind is only concerned with “enlightened expediency” Get what you want and worry about the consequences later. The progressive mind seeks to destroy a free society from within for the sake of self serving expediency.“One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency.” ~ Malcolm Muggeridge Through the Microphone (1969)
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague." ~ Cicero
I agree with Simone Weil that even though a free society will be crushed from within as described above, we can at least learn why it is inevitable."So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct." ― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society.
"Our weakness may indeed prevent us from winning but not from comprehending the force by which we are crushed." Simone Weil.
Perhaps Malcolm Muggeridge is right to refer to the depravity of Man as one reason we will be crushed.
It seems to me that the denial of human depravity is the main reason for the attraction to progressive philosophy. It speaks glowingly of what is impossible for us due to the human condition. Left to our own devices a free society is impossible. Human nature will never allow it leading to at best secular statist slavery and at worst a tyrant. But since the concept is too insulting to consider, society prefers a feel good approach which is doomed to failure."The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact." Malcolm Muggeridge
Do you think a free society is possible through enlightened expediency as opposed to honoring eternal values and inviting the experience of grace necessary to do so as its goal?
There is certainly no acccounting for taste.
