Steve (Headnote: H.S. = Cited from Herbert Schlossberg)

Obviously, from my previous blogging and commenting everyone should know that I generally support conservative Republicans. This support, however, remains contingent and seldom fully whole-hearted. I support a lot of what President Bush has done and is trying to do. I fully support his efforts in Iraq, although I am not sure they will be successful. Kerry/Edwards, on the other hand, along with neoliberal Democratic philosophy stray further and further off the radar.

David Davidson, an old friend and an unsuccessful candidate for Texas Lieutenant Governor in 1986 stated well the situation in which we now stand. He said to me that if the Democrats increase in power the culture and country will go downhill quickly; if the Republicans– downhill, but more slowly.

Following is a series of quotes that should illustrate my thoughts:

J.B. Bury– "The process must be the necessary outcome of the psychical and social nature of man; it must not be at the mercy of any external will, otherwise there would be no guarantee of its continuance and its issue, and the idea of Progress would lapse into the idea of Providence."

H.S.– "To reject the idea of (God’s) judgment is to accept a moral void in the universe and to make unintelligible any notion of justice, except in a purely instrumental sense based on convention."

H.S.– "Relativization has its own special hazards, and an important distinction must be preserved. Historicism’s rejection of transcendence subjects it followers to the same dizzying loss of stability that Einsteinian physics created for categories of time and space. The time-space dimensions in modern physics become vertiginous to the observer because nothing has the stability needed to measure the position of other entities. Everything is in flux, and such categories as up and down lose all objective reference. Everything is relativized because there is nothing transcending the flux that could provide the stability needed to position everything else. Historicism analogously relativizes everything in the moral universe and sends history careening over the same rootless, wandering course on which Einstein sent the cosmos. It relativizes everything, that is, except for the idol that the historicist miraculously extracts from the flux with the forceps of mystification– the state, the proletariat, the national honor, the liberal society, the fact or sentiment. Without that mystifying process, historicism has no way to speak of truth beyond the flux and would offer no common ground for discourse. Similarly, it would have no unifying principle to stand against the complete atomization of society; therefore it cannot provide for community except by coercion."

H. S.– "But in the late twentieth century, bereft of the biblical limitations by a generation that has turned away from Christian faith, history pursues it mad career, running amuck with saviors making rules that they crown with divine status. History thus dechristianized has no moral limitations. ‘Right’ is a moving target, propelled by the march of facts and sentiments. Theft, homosexuality, pornography, genocide, and torture were wrong yesterday, but tomorrow who can say? Perhaps we shall find compelling national, social, or economic interests that require us to do things that would not have been contemplated without horror a short time ago, and perhaps we shall find that they are ‘right’. A society that cannot tolerate a judge beyond history will find that it can learn to tolerate anything else."

Bertrand de Jouvenel– ‘...is a bad habit of modernity that uses the term ‘just’ to describe whatever is thought to be emotionally desirable.’

H.S.– "... no complaint when the grossest brutalities are committed in the name of serving the poor, the nation, the purity of the race, the supremacy of a religion, or other values that are deemed to be ‘high’".

H.S.– "Unable to withstand dispassionate analysis, which would reveal its lack of foundation, it stresses feeling rather that thought. That is what makes sentimentality so vicious. People can get good feeling from almost anything; ‘sadism’ refers to a philosophy that elevates feeling into a moral principle."

J. Allen Smith– "The real trouble with us reformers, is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left."

H.S.– "Nobody who rejects the first four commandments’ call to reject idols and worship the true and living God can be expected to recognize any ultimate significance in the last six commandments’ ethical requirements."

Hosea 8:4– "They set up kings without my consent; they chose princes without my approval. With silver and gold they make idols for themselves to their own destruction."