Dear Friends,
It seems to me… the West is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. No one argues that Western culture is perfect, only that it is the best we have come up with yet. Some however only see flaws. Flaws predating the West, and indeed are only sins based on Christian morals, so they want to abolish Christian values, to be replaced with anti-Christian ones. Meanwhile, conservatives, republicans, libertarians and constitutionalists, recognize the Enlightenment was not the end of human philosophical advancement, but that some very important strides were made, retreating from those advancements, opens humanity to evils that were eradicated by the Enlightenment. Sadly, some see those Enlightenment and Christian values as an impediment to building utopia… from the ashes of the West.
The West is not the acme of all possible human philosophy, simply the epitome of human philosophy to date. Only under the Christian value system and the Greek idea of rational discourse and inquiry, that led to the Enlightenment, has humanity advanced so much in economics, science and human heartedness. Human heartedness in both the Confucian and classic sense of the idea. Only under a Christian human hearted value system… has empathy become a primary duty, the theory of the cyclical nature of the universe rejected, slavery shunned, equal justice elevated, debate as the arbiter of truth and individualism embraced. Returning to the rights of kings, appeal to authority and adopting social justice rather than equal justice, will lead to a return to the very evils progressives claim they hate.
Innovation is a good thing, when it is built upon the advances of the past, but when the advances of the past are rejected, and innovation is for it’s own sake, such innovation inevitably leads to disaster. If a builder rejected levels, chalk lines, floor loading schedules, squares and measures, it cannot be argued, the quality of his construction would be an improvement over those who used such instruments of precision. This is because, tools allow the amateur to do reasonable quality work, while even the most expert cannot do without them. Yet that is exactly what is being done, as we reject all the advancements of the Enlightenment, for some utopian pipe dream. We are burning the levels, squares, building codes, tape measures and trusting someone’s gut feelings… to build the future.
The problem with Enlightenment and Christian values, for progressives, is that those, “patriarchal, hegemonic and bigoted” values, place the ultimate power in the individual, while progressive ideas require social power, to coerce the individual. The wants and needs of the individual be damned. The two ideas for mankind are fundamentally at odds. Equal justice is the opposite of social justice, the socialist is the opposite of the individualist, appeal to authority is the opposite of truth by discourse, and to implement their ideas progressives must eschew the Golden Rule. This is why progressives reject the Christian and Enlightenment value system, theirs is both an heir and is antithetical to their own value structure, and is in opposition to their ideas for the future of humanity.
Building Utopia from the ashes of Eden. The Utopian value system is a descendant of Western values, a perversion of them to be sure, but an heir nonetheless. Progressives gin up outrage at sins of the West, based on the Christian idea of Right and Wrong, then exploit that outrage to justify throwing out all western philosophy! They seek to build for us a new system, one that rejects the levels, physics and material science, developed under Christianity and the Enlightenment. The irony is thick as pea soup… based on Christian values, we are destroying Christianity and indeed Western civilization itself. Returning us to the rights of kings, the power of “Great Men,” appeal to authority and subjective power, as the West shrivels and dies. Throwing the baby out with the bath water… how progressive.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
