Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who authored many books and articles, said what has been echoed by many people, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
I am convinced that we are about to repeat the mistake.
The text below was pulled from a post by Mark Wauk of Meaning in History. It’s the first item of three in the post, each containing specific instances of this sickness to which he refers. But this one I found to be the most profound. He quotes others, and I have had to change the formatting a bit, but here is what he wrote.
The sickness of the Left1 is becoming ever more evident and ever more ominous. What does one say when a mentally ill person kills 6 innocent people, including three 9 year old children, and the leader of the Zhou regime2 sees this as an occasion to crack “jokes”? And the mainstream Left media refuses to report on the most obvious aspects of the story—and even portrays the murderer as a victim, while the “mentally ill community” storms state legislatures that seek to protect children from sex perverts? And, of course, there is also the Get Trump movement that has made a mockery of the America constitutional order and legal system.
That we are witnessing a sickness of the American soul is clear from statements by prominent Leftist politicians. For example, American Greatness quotes Ayanna Pressley’s (two years ago) remarkably programmatic statement:
For conservatives or reactionaries, revolution remains a last resort. For Marxists, it is always and everywhere the only solution—one to be hastened and encouraged at every turn. “There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives,” said Representative Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) during the summer of 2020. Marxism’s guiding idea is that the whole cultural, economic, and political system, root and branch, must be revolutionized until private property is abolished and inequality eradicated for good.
But we know from experience that, for the Left, unlike the case with normal people, unrest in their lives is a lifelong state of being—it’s what they eat, drink, breathe. How long can normal people tolerate such unrest in their lives? In fact, the actual imposition of unrest by the ruling class on normal people begins to look more and more part of a comprehensive, mad Rube Goldberg political program, as the same author (Spencer Klavan) writes:
Digital technology, which holds out such promise and potential to decentralize power, has in effect often worked to consolidate power among a very few. The upshot is that the republic has begun to look more like a corrupt oligarchy, run by those who may be good at getting wealthy or climbing bureaucratic ladders, but who have little respect for, or even knowledge of, republican ideals. The unprecedented COVID lockdowns imposed in 2020 made it hard to think of ourselves anymore as Madison’s locally governed nation of free men and women with irrevocable, God-given rights. The national lockdown, imposed on the advice of an unelected medical expert (and the highest paid member of a federal administrative perma-state), gave leeway for state and local leaders to invoke “emergency” powers of their own that treated “unalienable rights” as very alien indeed.
The lockdowns, mask mandates, and the tolerance in many locales for 2020’s Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests—which resulted in $2 billion dollars’ worth of property damage, 700 injured law enforcement officers, and as many as 19 deaths—led some to wonder whether their fundamental right to property or even life was simply forfeit when the ruling class deemed it so. It came to seem as if major decisions about Americans’ personal and civic lives were no longer in the hands of Americans themselves.
Klavan raises a fundamental issue of the American political order, which we have also raised from time to time. Whatever the Founding Fathers may have intended, even the non-Left political class—except, perhaps, during election campaigns—have no fundamental convictions concerning the pursuit of human well being and happiness that run beyond the most minimalist and even materialist ambitions—a default libertarianism that pins its hopes for community on the economic impulse of self interest, barely above the level of the beasts:
We tend to assume that citizens of fractious, pluralistic, multiethnic republics cannot hope to share a common vision of higher truth. Instead, we imagine, they must get by on the minimal grounds of working together in mutual (largely economic) self-interest. Leo Strauss called this the “low but solid ground” of modern political philosophy: rather than joining together in shared faith, work, and love, citizens in the modern state seem to be little more than self-centered consumers who share nothing other than space.
Klavan quotes a political philosopher whose ideas I’ve discussed previously at considerable length, who criticizes this state of affairs as ultimately unsustainable:
It seems to have worked up to a point—but only up to a point, and its limitations as a political system have become more apparent as our own republic appears to degenerate. That is why “classical liberalism” has come under fire from critics, like political philosopher Patrick Deneen, who see within it seeds of our present spiritual emptiness, isolation, cultural uniformity, and loss of freedom.
This is certainly not the vision of the Founding Fathers (drawn from the Ancients, especially Aristotle), but it is who we are now—at least to a great extent and for purposes of the public square of political discourse—as Americans. The Way We Live Now. Klavan, calling to mind the thought of American statesment—we don’t seem to have those anymore—calls for a recovery of what they held as the ideal: a common sense of “friendship” among Americans. Not a mere sense of “unrest”.
Klavan goes on to discuss ways of recovering that sense of mutual “friendship”. Ultimately, however, he is forced to recognize a dilemma. Friendship is not achievable without shared beliefs and convictions, which would overcome “unrest”:
I have stressed throughout this book [How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises] that all the good and noble things we want to fight for cannot exist unless God does. And there will be no “saving the republic,” no “escaping the cycle of regimes,” without God. The reason we all feel so anxious to save the world is because we don’t trust that He is there to do that job. And so we take upon ourselves world-saving responsibilities for which we are quite laughably unequipped. But it will be He who determines whether our republic stands or falls, and whether this nation tomorrow goes the way that all nations must one day go. And if it does, then only He will endure and only our investment in Him will have turned out not to have been in vain.
Because the West, which is God’s, does not depend on the survival of America. The truth, which is His, has endured the rising and falling of many nations, the coming and going of the cities …
I have one more thing I want to post on this topic, but I’m saving it for another time. It’s long and profound, so I don’t want to lose anyone’s attention before they’re done reading it. But do set aside the time to give it your full attention.
“The left” refers to those who favor big government over small, centralized control over individual rights and freedoms, and more power for the government than the people.
Mark Wauck’s term for ‘China Joe Biden’.