Conservatism Advances (?) Against Progressives Bent On Resurrecting A Dark And Ancient Past (?)

I really want my readers to take in the title of today's post.  Considering the words and the order in which they fall, it seems like nonsense.  Considering the dictionary definition of 'conservative' one must ask how conservatism can be said to be advancing.  And likewise considering the dictionary definition of' progressive' one must ask how progressives could possibly want to take us back to any dark past, especially an ancient one.

And yet the title does in fact express part of my world-view.  Thus it is logically necessary in my mind that some of these words not actually mean what we so commonly think they do.  I see it as a twisting of the English language even more sinister and nefarious than George Orwell imagined in his work 1984.  For you see academics and journalists have turned words upside down and backwards in their meanings without any need to be coerced by either governments or wealthy private interests.

Those who champion individual liberty are called conservatives, except in cases where it is convenient to the language twisters to call them libertarians.  True conservatives are always called conservatives but the libertarians are either libertarians, conservatives, or extreme conservatives depending on who the twisters are speaking to.  They calculate the reaction they want from a particular audience and pick the term that serves their ends.

And their ends, what are those?  They are self-labeled 'progressives' who's actual ends only relate to progress if one agrees with their ideologically warped vision of a better future.  They want a powerful and very centralized government capable of imposing their vision of a "better" future on entire nations of people.

It's not enough to educate people about environmental issues and then allow people to make up their own minds about what to do.  No, they're goals require unswerving obedience.  Their solutions must be carried out and adhered to by all of us.  And if anyone questions their 'solutions' or their analyses of the problems, that person must be marginalized, their reputation must be diminished, and if necessary their history must be re-written.

This also works in reverse for them chronologically.  What's the latest popular line on ancient Egypt?  The pyramids weren't built by slaves but volunteers?  And I ask, in a nation where the head of state is god everything ultimately either belongs to him or the priests, who is not a slave?

The next time a scholarly person suggests to you that ancient Egypt was not a nation of slaves, try saying this to them.

"So ancient Egypt was one of the first great libertarian societies?"

And then when they explain themselves, press them further on this assertion that the typical ancient Egyptian was not a slave.

"So if the pharaoh ordered the typical ancient Egyptian to do his bidding, that Egyptian was free to refuse without significant consequence?  If not, then how were they not slaves?"

I hope at this point the reason I mention ancient Egypt within an argument against the current expression of 'progressivism' is at least beginning to become clear.  The slave status of the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids has not changed because of advances in archaeological discovery and analyses.  It is our definition of slavery that has changed.

Progressives cannot carry out their plans to move us "forward" if we consider the idea of a powerful central government ordering and planning our lives to be slavery.

So this post's title is perhaps optimistic, "Conservatism Advances Against Progressives Bent On Resurrecting A Dark And Ancient Past".  The "conservatism" I speak of there is actually libertarianism, and I hope for the day to be able to hear pundits speak of that which has come be called conservatism advancing with greater and greater power to make government the people's slave instead of the other way around.  That has been the positive trajectory of history, not the visions of the progressives.

The dark and ancient past is surprisingly obvious for those who know how and where to look.  As Orwellian a twist of language as it is, the people who call themselves progressives seek to return us to the hyper-centralized social structures of dark and ancient empires.  Structure where governments not only rule their people but direct their lives.

It could even be said that the evil empire wasn't the Soviet Union, though saying so was close to the truth.  The evil empire is an ancient entity that has persisted through time in the darkened hearts of anyone who would seek their own visions for our futures and not allow us to opt out. 

Why I Write This Blog

Before I do anything else today I want to apologize for something, but first I must explain to be clear what it is I'm apologizing for.

I write this blog because I'm a repentant former neo-con political activist.  When I left politics and stopped thinking collective goals can be more important than individuals, I redirected my 'having a positive impact on human civilization' energies to writing novels.  And knowing the world of politics as I do, I know just how limiting having one's political views known can be to the size of a fiction writer's audience.

Fiction, unlike politics, has the amazing potential to be timeless and transcend cultures.  Politics is much more limited.  Thus I use an image of Homer on my site.  His fellow Hellenist, Alexander the Great conquered half their known world and is renowned even to today as one of the world's most amazing political leaders, but it is the words of Homer that ring still today teaching a much larger world about the importance of balance and humility.  It is Homer and not Alexander who's legacy is truly great today.

Now if I were to allow my novels to be readily identified as the works of some guy who liked or didn't like a certain politician or a certain political cause, that would be like tying an anchor to them.  Besides potentially turning off some potential readers before they even give me a chance, it would be to pin my works to the time and place of very temporal and culturally limited causes.

Things like tax structures, the details of how same-sex couples get their civil unions satisfactorily recognized, and who's president of the United States are very small things in the light of thousands or even just hundreds of years of human history.  And my goal, no matter what the odds may be of me reaching them, is to have my works still read centuries from now.

So I feel I must segregate the more temporal things from the rest of my work.

It is in that effort that I created this blog.  It serves as a place where I can vent, so to speak, my politics.  It has also become a place where I can freely preach in a way that would otherwise ruin a good story.  Readers rightly dislike ax-grinding and preachy moralizing in fiction.  So I find once a week is well enough venting to keep it from invading my novels.

My novels do in fact contain moral and ideological teachings, just done in ways that readers can take it or leave it and not have them distracted from the story.  That they think about it is all the victory I seek there, and that is plenty.

I add that last paragraph only to intercept a misunderstanding.  The parts above are the explanation that I felt I needed to preface my apology with.  Now for that.

Some weeks I actually have no need to vent and my creativity is spent on the bulk of my true work, novel writing.  So it is on such weeks I search my archives a year or more back for something of merit to re-post.  Some times I edit it or alter it so as to make it more current and some times I find it stands well as is.  It's my goal in this to edify as many readers as possible in the absence of something totally original.  Remember It was never my aim to always present something new, just to allow whoever may benefit to do so from what I post.

But I discovered after last week's post that I had re-posted the same old post only about one month prior, and it is for that I feel I must say I'm sorry,  I let myself down and perhaps a few readers.  I am currently working up some methodology by which I can make such overly-quick repetitions less likely in the future.

I would like to add a word of thanks to some anonymous readers who brought this to my attention.  Feedback is a wonderful thing.

The Wisdom Of The Ancients And Our Way Forward

[The internet was about to make it possible for human beings all around the world to communicate pretty much whenever they wanted. Translation programs make spanning the gap between languages almost trivial. Was this the undoing of what God did to the builders of the Tower? If so, what was going to happen when this undoing was done?]

A good friend of mine was one of the pioneers of modern computing. Not one anyone would likely recognize since his role was to computer age pioneering as that of a typical homesteader to pioneering in the old west. While Bill Gates was chasing down the details of dos and Steve Jobs was toiling with his friends in a garage, my friend was literally playing with IBM's prototype personal computer. That was the late 70's. In the early 80's he was very possibly the first psychology major at his college to secure official access to the college's computer lab. There he loved to challenge programmers to write more and more complex programs while hacking into a few himself to see what chimera he could create by cutting out some pieces, modifying others, and combining multiple programs together. Other than a few good careers, nothing huge came of all of that. That is other than one thing I find quite interesting, an insight.

Besides being a psychology major and strong history minor, he is also a masters level biblical scholar, a man after my own heart, which gave him what I'd call a trans-historical perspective on our age. He saw the things that were happening in perspective of the full span of human history much more so than others. So when he saw the internet develop from a Department of Defense data sharing system into a private sector revolution he wondered about something others didn't, though perhaps should. Was the Tower of Babel “curse” about to be lifted?

The Story Of The Tower

For those less familiar with the Biblical story, it basically says that Noah's early descendents came under the leadership of a man named Nimrod, who directed them to build a tower into the heavens. The exact purpose of the tower is debated but it seemed to my friend to be Nimrod's attempt to reach God on his own terms, possibly even to make his own demands of him. In other words, hubris to the nth degree. Nimrod was the ultimate example of a powerful central government without limitations.

He notes that the authors of the story came from a culture and time that didn't use the words we translate as “heaven” to mean something as general as we use “heaven” for. For them it meant specifically the space between earth's sky and the stars. Yes, interestingly enough the ancients conceived of space, and this tower then was very possibly intended to grant access into space.  In other ancient writings it was called the sea beyond the sky and they spoke of travelling across it to the stars.

I know some may be thinking this is crazy talk and/or a set up for some New Age nonsense, but don't panic. I'm not going there and nor does my friend ever intend to go there. The fact that the ancients conceived of a sea between our atmosphere and the stars may seem to shake up the typical chronocentric perspective of ancient peoples, but it most certainly does not mean the ancients were space travelers or had contact with such. 

It's just a testament to the power of human deduction, that even without telescopes, rockets, and satellites there are enough facts to be observed with the human eye to figure out there's an altitude beyond which the atmosphere ends and something else begins, and that these stars and planets we observe are in fact both very distant and very large.  "How?" you might ask.  If only we had some of the scholars from around that time to talk to, and of course if only our current scholars were inclined to respect them. 

Now back to the internet and the Tower of Babel.

In the Biblical story God sees what Nimrod's followers are doing as bad. He seems to use the 'absolute power corrupts absolutely' argument and very matter of factly at that. Of course, God is the one sentience in existence that can always safely speak matter of factly. So, citing this argument, He “confuses” their language so they can't understand each other, and they scatter across the Earth.

Now Enter The Internet

Believing this story to be true, my friend watched the development of the internet with great interest. The internet was about to make it possible for human beings all around the world to communicate pretty much whenever they wanted. Translation programs make spanning the gap between languages almost trivial. Was this the undoing of what God did to the builders of the Tower? If so, what was going to happen when this undoing was done?

The answer he says, “we had it wrong”. Once again chronocentrism, our natural predisposition to assume the simplest of meanings in ancient records, led us to an incorrect conclusion. Language is not the only communication barrier between humans. “Come let us go down and confuse their language so they don't understand each other”, is what the most authoritative English translation says. Note the languages are not just made different, but they are “confused”. And, indeed that is what the internet's coming to apparently unite the world in communication has demonstrated. Even when we speak the same language our communications are still confused.

Anyone who uses the internet for research should know by now that many are the people who offer answers to questions, authoritative sources on subjects ranging from science, technical matters, literature, and religion, and many of these people are offering severely biased or just completely inaccurate or even false information. There's no way to control the information offered without giving some group of people undue power to control information, and that would pretty much undo the whole point of it.

Most contributors sincerely believe their offerings are sound, but somewhere along their path of learning they may have been misinformed or mislead. Many of these misinformed or mislead contributors are even highly respected members of the the academic community, so simply checking their credentials doesn't cut it either. It seems the more we gather information, the more we see we don't necessarily even know what we thought we knew. More information and more communication seems to mean just more confusion. The internet has come to shine the proverbial light on our confusion and ignorance and revealed to us that we confuse ourselves.

So where do we go from here? Do we abandon the internet as Nimrod's followers abandoned their Tower? Is human progress impossible? Of course not. Human progress is clearly possible as we can look at history and see examples of it, such as technology and the formal recognition of individual liberty across the ages. The confusion we see on the internet is just a revisiting of an ancient lesson, one that points us to a way forward.

Whether one believes the story of the Tower actually happened or not, it's existence tells us the ancients knew something many of us only recently re-discovered. Collectives, whatever they may be, unlimited democracies, religious organizations, political factions, corporations, or Nimrod and his followers after their language was confused, eventually and inevitably fail due to an inefficiency that grows as their numbers grow. 

The only ultimate solution to any problem can be achieved through individuals. Thus the way forward is through maximizing individual liberty within the framework of the absolute minimal amount of government as to facilitate it.

Individuals free to make their own decisions drive progress, not governments or any other collective. So as you see, once again, it all comes back to that, the individual.

An Angry God In An Age Of Compassion

On July 8th, 1741, Johnathan Edwards presented his most famous sermon Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, and the rest is history as they say.  A revival that spanned the Atlantic Ocean ensued, and it held great significance to millions of many faiths or lack there of ever since.  The fruits of that revival include the abolition of slavery in the Western world and the birth of the United States of America.  One could even argue that the spread of modern democracy owes itself to it.  It certainly spurred on the advance of individualism and Libertarian-ism into the present.

Now i'm not writing today to explain the relationship between events in Christian history and the advent of liberal democracy in the modern world.  Fine discourses on that are readily available to be found.

What I'm doing today is attempting to capture lightning in a bottle, as the saying goes.  This one sermon ultimately helped stir more hearts to individual transformation than most evangelists could dream of for their entire careers.  And I'm ashamed to admit it took me until just recently to have finally sat down and read it, but when I did something came to me.

Through much effort I have become well practiced at seeing through the chronocentrism that so often prevents us from benefiting from the wisdom of the past, and in reading Edwards's sermon it took me little time to see what he was saying in modern terms.

We really tend to hate "Hell-fire and damnation" style preaching  these days.  It strikes us as unproductive communication at best, and intolerantly judgmental at worst.  But in Edwards's time, seeing oneself as a wicked worm was as popular then as seeing ourselves as parasites upon the planet is today.  And as I'll point out in my analysis today, berating people wasn't his primary goal.  

He was more interested in our having a positive relationship with God, and as such his sermon can speak just as powerfully today as it did in his time.  That is what I chose to touch on here, an effort to bring it's message into modern relevance.  Now note that I am not directly paraphrasing it.  Instead I'm analyzing it with intent to find and bring out it's message in terms of our own times.  I'll leave it to any actual preachers (I'm not one) to see if they care to present that message as a modern sermon.

My Analysis

Copies of the sermon are readily available for reading online from various sources that will pop up in a typical search for "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God".  It's only a few pages.

The sermon's primary scriptural text is Deuteronomy 32:35.

The context of this verse is that it rests within the Song of Moses, which begins at Deuteronomy 31:30.  In the run up to 32:35 the people of Israel have, in spite of clearly being the beneficiaries of God's intervention, turned to worshiping "gods" and idols.  I put "gods" in quotes here because the choice of words there* implies these "gods" were in fact entities of some potency, and thus the sin here is not a failure to adhere strictly to monotheism but to put other things at too high a level as compared to God.  That's very important because it makes it very relevant to our own times.

It is way too easy for 21st century Christians to look back at the sin of idolatry and think they are insulated from what they see as primitive nonsense; superstition as it were.  But just like the things that distract us today from our proper priorities, these "gods" are given by implication, real powers and benefits.  Today's isms are just different actors in the same roles. 

i.e. In this far too often repeated performance the role of pagan deity #3 will be played by the Green movement, and pagan deity #2 by Neo-conservatism, and another by Progressivism, and let's not forget Social Justice doing a bang up job in the role made legendary by Tiamat's earlier portrayal, the god of gods who demand human sacrifice.

It is upon this lead up that Deuteronomy 32:35 comes and says, "In due time their foot will slip", and it is on those words that Edwards chose to preach.  It is interesting that even those words are not the entire verse.  The entire verse reads, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay.  In due time their foot shall slip;  their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them."

I strongly suspect the reason for omission of the rest of the verse was emphasis, as Edwards makes the meaning of the rest of it as clear as he could be expected to in his sermon, even without directly noting it up front.

In the first part of his sermon he makes it abundantly clear about this section of scripture that God is angry with the people of Israel and the due consequences of their behavior is said to be imminent.  But like most good preachers to this day, his goal is not to point at sinners of the past but to speak to the people in front of him on the day he is preaching.

He explains how it is that if God's own chosen people could attract so much imminent destruction, then certainly no one today has any sound reason to think themselves better off in God's sight.  He leaves out the great caveat that is salvation through Christ, but not because he doesn't believe in it, but because of the ultimate point of his sermon that day.  Too many people who think themselves Christians misunderstand the relationship between God, ourselves, and sin.  And because they do, they're in great danger.

Edwards spoke of sin as being like fuel that draws the fires of Hell to us and causes it to consume us.  An 18th century attempt to describe a tough concept.  More recent attempts include phrases like , "we make our own Hell", and "people go to Hell precisely because they want to".

The Song of Moses contains another way of putting it, in a sense.  In verse 32:29 we can find these words, "If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!"

And yes, I am saying all these statements speak of the same thing.  It is a hard concept that many Christians only end up understanding in our hearts, but it is not so hard that it must evade all of our minds.  Allow me a very short and true story.

Once at a Florida amusement park an ice cart full of ice the volume of about three large trash cans escaped the grasps of the park employees atop a hill and began racing down it under the force of gravity and with the benefit of wheels.  I mention the gravity and wheels because it's important to note the physics involved.
  
There were four small groups of tourists along this cart's path.  The cart first came near a Japanese trio of adults who rushed out of it's way.  A group of four Germans and a British couple were already to the side of its path but at the bottom of the hill stood a South American family.  The park employees couldn't speak Spanish but hoped between their yelling and waving along with the sight of the onrushing cart the family would get the message and get out of the way.  But instead the family looked at the cart and began screaming and yelling, as if their feet had been frozen to the ground.  Their faces were filled with fear at their impending doom at the receiving end of a runaway ice cart.

The park employees helplessly ran after the cart but it was already moving too fast for them to catch up with.  A horrible incident was about to happen and it seemed a miracle was needed.  At least one of those park employees was praying  as he's the one who told this to me.  And then suddenly imminent tragedy turned into something very different.  Two of the Germans were big enough men to try what they could.  They grabbed the cart as it went by them and began to slow it, at least a little.  The carts momentum was still too much for them to stop, but then both of the British couple stepped into the path of the cart and between those four, the cart was finally brought to a safe stop.

The South American family was saved, but if they had been crushed by that cart it would not have been anyone's fault but their own.  It was not park employees plotting against them.  It was only physics working against that family's irrational desire to stand in the path of an immensely heavy object rolling down hill at them.

That for me describes our relationship to sin and God.  When we see ourselves as some how being able to be good enough, or we see God as the maker of unreasonable laws who smites those who break them, we are like that family at the bottom of the hill yelling and screaming at the approach of imminent doom.  Their salvation is ultimately and only to found through recognizing the need for it.  Until then they defy physics or as it says in the scripture,  "If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!"

That family like many of us yet alive, have survived that defiance.  But Edwards in his sermon points out how we should not mistake grace for providence.  

The relationship between ourselves, God, and sin is like a higher physics.  Like the physical laws that would have made that family in the story's fate most dire, the higher physics involved in how a perfect God goes about saving souls in a universe corrupted by sin describes forces we cannot rationally expect to persuade or defy.  As much as we may want the ground where we currently stand to always be safe, that is not how the universe works.  

If we don't recognize how it is that the one in who the ultimate meaning of the universe resides cannot be expected to go on indefinitely holding back the consequences of our own actions from us, then we can never move.  His perfection means not only that He is worthy of our worship and devotion, but it also means we are condemned.  Not because He is unreasonably harsh but because we are unreasonably stubborn and prideful.  He has provided a way for us to be reconciled with His perfection, that is Jesus Christ, and the fact that any of us are still alive to read this means we have received grace we don't deserve so as to give us our chance to accept that gift.  Believe in Jesus Christ, that He died as a substitute for us, and that by accepting that, which means repentance from our sinful ways and submission to sanctification, and you will be saved.
To do otherwise is to stand and scream at our impending doom as if we can talk down the laws of physics.  Some of Edwards closing words almost need no contemporary paraphrase.

"and that it will be as it was on the great out-pouring of the Spirit upon the Jews in the apostles’ days; the election will obtain, and the rest will be blinded."

Yes, the knowing ones of my readers will no doubt see the influence of Edwards belief in predestination in this, but I think we make a distraction of it.  Whatever we wish to call it or don't wish to call it, God calls all of us to a choice and there is no fairness in how long each of us has to make it.  The only predestination in it is that we must choose.  believe in Jesus Christ for your salvation and enthrone Him in your heart, as such a belief must logically require, or choose not to.  Either way the universe will do what it does and to either blame God for our damnation or deny that we need Jesus Christ is horrifying folly.