Rightwords... Prudent Conservatism

The Sinner is With Us Still


It is fair to say, I believe, that the key difference between conservatism and liberalism ( or progressivism, if you must use that term) is that conservatives hold the position that man has not progressed in any spiritual or moral way since Adam and Eve, whereas liberals believe in the perfectibility of man if only the proper conditions can prevail. But, of course, these conditions can never be realized. Utopias are a myth.

Certainly, it can be demonstrated that insofar as intellectual power is concerned, the ancients were every bit the equal of today’s thinkers. There has been no substantive intellectual improvement in man in the last 9,000 years, going back to the earliest times of recorded Chinese civilization. It is true that knowledge of the physical universe and the history and biology of man has advanced today far beyond that of Chinese, Biblical, Greek and Roman scholars, but not in mental prowess. As someone said: “ We seem to know more and more about less and less.”

Similarly, one can observe that on the question of morality, we are no further along now than were the ancients, else we surely would have solved the problems of crime, war, hate, poverty, hunger, genocide and all of the other evils that plague us still. We are sinners, we have sinned, and we will sin.

The question of spiritual growth is ephemeral and not capable of objective demonstration. But I submit that if there had been substantial collective spiritual growth in man over the past few millennia, we would know it for a certainty: it would be apparent to the least of us. Nothing of the kind has been shown. It is not a kinder world we live in.

The implication of this lack of progress by man, in fact his persistence in sins of all kinds, is that forces of civilization and government working together must take care to account for the immoral, the criminal, and the depraved, as well as the overly-ambitious rulers, tyrants, and would-be conquerors that we face year to year.

It is true that the tenets of Judeo-Christianity are widespread, but how many people actually follow that prescription? Too few, I think. This is likewise true of most religions – they have a large group of believers on Sunday, or whatever day their religion decrees as holy, and they are laissez faire practitioners of simply getting along expediently for the rest of the week, by and large. Then too, we still have religious wars, not the least of which is the current clash between Christianity and Fundamentalist Islam, which is a dominant issue today.

As a consequence of this perverse drive of man to sin, we have erected a government with many checks and balances to thwart either the cult of the charismatic man, the temporary passions of the mass of the population, or even the differing opinions of compartments of our representative government from irrevocably altering our national scheme of things. We have installed large police forces to mind our land and its laws, a large system of justice and imprisonment, and a large armed forces to defend us from outside threats.

We have a conservatively organized government, as proofed against man the sinner as we know how to create. We must keep it that way and try to improve its conservative workings.

# posted by Mannning @ 11:26 PM