Steve Re: Band-Aids vs. Cures

‘Tis another presidential election year and the rhetoric of crisis fills the air like debris in a tornado. There is a good measure of truth in the criticisms leveled. There are valid reasons to question the direction of individual policies as well as the overall status of our nation and its future. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, Greens, et. al., are all putting forth proposals to cure what ails us and lead us onto a successful path.

Many look back to the founding of this country to gain insights into the solid building blocks of wisdom in our history that brought us the strength and progress that we enjoy today but perhaps are losing. (Many also look to the deep intellects of late night talk show hosts, actors, and musicians.) Since these look through the distorted and filtered lenses of modernist/post-modernist philosophies they feel that, as engineers, they can reconstruct a successful culture today by applying techniques and methods used in the past. Some desire tinkering by a scientific/intellectual/political elite to build a womb-to-tomb utopia. Some opt for greater individual freedoms to allow the basic goodness of man to naturally flow toward a better society. However, individual humans and their cultures cannot be used as concrete and steel to be engineered into a sound structure. Neither are they born of high enough character to be allowed total freedom in activity.

Our modernist/post-modernist colored glasses have somehow determined that we live in a closed universe. There can be no input from anything above and beyond the universe. Therefore, man, the measure of all things, the captain of his soul, determines all. The cultural results are tyranny or anarchy quashed by eventual tyranny.

Our nation’s founders were either Christians or operating under Christian auspices and worked under these presuppositions. Any attempts to duplicate or continue their successes without this foundation are futile.

"When the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold of the highest portions of the intellect, and half paralyzes all the rest of its powers. Every man accustoms himself to entertain none but confused and changing notions on the subjects most interesting to his fellow-creatures and himself. His opinions are ill-defended and easily abandoned: and, despairing of ever resolving by himself the hardest problems of the destiny of man, he ignobly submits to think no more about them. Such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude. Nor does it only happen, in such a case, that they allow their freedom to be wrested from them; they frequently themselves surrender it. When there is no longer any principle of authority in religion any more than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. The constant agitation of all surrounding things alarms and exhausts them. As everything is at sea in the sphere of the intellect, they determine at least that the mechanism of society should be firm and fixed; and as they cannot resume their ancient belief, they assume a master." (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 5.)