A Family is Any Two or More People Who Love the Government

HvB emphasizes the point that, while we can talk about abstract and concrete, we can't actually separate them. In fact, it's pure abstraction to think that we ever could. In other words, it's not only a pure abstraction to think that there are only universals, but equally abstract to think that there are nothing but concrete instances.

As it pertains to man, "he realizes his entire, one-of-a-kind uniqueness exclusively within the universal possibility of which he is a single instance." And yet, "the concept of man cannot be abstracted in such a way as to leave the individual person's being outside its conceptual content."

This is a truly strange but unavoidable paradox, and as we have previously discussed in the context of Letter IX of MOTT, it is only definitively resolved in the Incarnation. As a matter of fact, it was in reading that particular chapter that I was finally struck by the intellectual heft of Christianity. I saw in an instant how it doesn't just reconcile our spiritual and existential dilemmas, but resolves our cognitive ones in the bargain.

You could say that in man, abstract and concrete are separate and distinct, and yet, "not-two," neither to be confused nor radically separated. Therefore, no man is an a posteriori "synthesis of universal human nature and individual personality" (HvB). Rather, it is in the nature of humanness "to be realized from instance to instance only as an individual person."

Looked at in this manner, there is no such thing as human nature, only instances of it. But there can be no individual unless it is an instance of the universal. Here again, this is a critical point to bear in mind, because there can be no person except in light of the Person. You could say that mere "subjectivities" are transformed into persons insofar as they participate in the Incarnation.

This has obvious political implications, and, depending upon how you come down on this issue, it will determine your allegiance. Suffice it so say that an ontology of persons is absolutely incompatible with leftist statism or collectivism. This is why we can call the latter "ontological heresies," since they undermine the foundation of human possibility, and human possibility is the very bridge between appearance and reality, absolute and relative, time and eternity, Creator and creation.

In short, if you get your anthropology wrong, then everything else follows, from cosmology to politics. It is the error from which your system cannot recover, no matter how much "truth" you pile on top of it.

O my leftist friends, hear me now, believe me later!

It is more than a mere cliché to point out that leftists love mankind, while conservative liberals love people. I know that mankind stinks. What could be more obvious? Haven't they ever read a history book? And yet, I know equally well that people are beautiful. This is one of the reasons why I am hopeless about the world, and yet, not at all pessimistic. You will note that the leftist is the opposite: full of childish hopeychangefullness, and yet, as cynical, dour, jaded, and pessimistic as can be. This attitude is not "accidental" but essential.

For the hysterical/angry left, it is always "the end of the world," unless you allow them to "make it right." But for us, the world cannot be made right, only the person can be. For the left, the person cannot be made right, only the State. If only the state is big enough and coercive enough, it will somehow heal man. It will remove the greed from free enterprise, evil from the hearts of terrorists, and "unempathic" justice from the legal system.

We know that this is folly on stilts, doomed to fail before it gets underway. Again, the anthropology is all wrong: as with Darwinism, good theory, wrong species. This is why leftist ideas are always shovel ready. They emanate from a kind of intrinsic and perennial madness (AKA, the ineveateapple "fall") that is not susceptible to "fine-tuning," only a truly radical metanoia. The cure for sleep is waking up, not a government program for free sleeping pills.

Man cannot become who he is in the absence of the interior collective, beginning with that first collective known as "mother-infant," or, more generally, "family." Now, why do you suppose that the left would be so intrinsically hostile to the family? Why would they want to redefine marriage, or replace fathers with the federal government, or embrace kooky man-hating feminism, or promote (as opposed to tolerate; old-fashioned liberal tolerance is the new hate) homosexuality?

I discussed this in a previous post, A Family is Any Two People Who Love the Government. I wonder what I said? Since it's almost three years old, it's pretty much all new to me. Let's see. I'll cut it off when I get bored.

*****

Yesterday, there was an article in USA Today entitled Marriage Gap Could Sway Elections (HT Dennis Prager). The implications of this article are so profound, and yet, I seriously doubt that it will get any play from the moonstream media.

The article is very short and rather matter of fact, but extraordinary in its ramifications. The most amazing statistic in the piece is that Republicans control 49 of the 50 districts with the highest rates of married people, whereas Democrats represent all 50 districts with the highest rates of adults who have never married.

As for how this played out in the last presidential election, President Bush beat John Kerry by 15 points among married people, whereas Kerry beat President Bush by 18 percentage points among unmarried people. If I recall correctly, the gaps were even wider than that regarding religiosity. Something like 90% of irreligious people vote Democrat.

Let’s analyze this situation as a leftist would. For a leftist, free will is a dubious construct. Unlike classical liberals, they reject the idea that essence determines existence. Rather, they believe that existence determines essence. This is the whole basis of their class consciousness, their victimology, and their identity politics. For a leftist, someone is black before they are a human being, which is why they believe it should be against the law to think in a color-blind manner (hence their desire for government enforced racial quotas).

As we mentioned yesterday, leftists believe that poverty causes crime, or that America (or Israel) causes Islamist terror (instead of bad values causing crime or an evil theology causing terror). Likewise, if we engage in harsh interrogation of terrorists, we are exactly like them -- an abstraction that ignores, precisely, who we actually are. But that doesn't matter. For the leftist, only the abstraction is real, like "Democrats are for the little guy," irrespective of how much contempt they have for him.

The bottom lyin' for the leftist is that even our philosophical beliefs are a result of class. I believe what I believe only because I am a whiteuppermiddleclasspriviigedheteronormativemale, whereas women or blacks are from “oppressed” classes (oppressed by me and my kind, of course), so that their consciousness and interests are entirely different. "Perception is reality."

Back around the time of the O.J. trial, for example, I heard black (actually, leftist -- their race is irrelevant) legal scholars argue that O.J. Simpson was literally not gulity if black people believed he wasn't. This is called "critical race theory," and it is actually taught in American classrooms.

Since Democrat fortunes are so directly tied to the devaluation and destruction of marriage, is it any wonder that, in their own class interest, they would adopt polices that are harmful to marriage and the family? That is, the more people get married and have children, the less success Democrats are going to have at the polls.

How do they accomplish their goal of weakening marriage and the family? In any number of ways. In a social welfare system, the government replaces the family, so there is no need to get married. We see this even more dramatically in western Europe, where marriage has become a quaint thing of the past, to such an extent hat these nations are dying, economically, spiritually, and demographically.

And of course, this is how liberals took the wrecking ball to the black family in America, causing untold damage to both blacks and to the victims of their consequent cultural pathology (e.g., skyrocketing crime rates after instituting various “oh, Great" Society programs.

All wise men know that women exert a civilizing influence on men, so that when women give up their “gate keeper” role in converting boys to responsible men (i.e., sharing their bodies with boys), the culture in question will produce uncivilized boys in the bodies of men. Why grow up? Thus, ovary tower feminist doctrine -- which taught that there is no difference between men and women, and that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” -- simply produced pathetically de-feminized women and de-masculinized men. It also promoted the crazy idea that single mothers could raise boys just as effectively as married couples, ignoring the basic truth that only a man (either real or symbolic) can raise a man.

The destruction of the family also explains Democrats' desire for higher taxes. After all, the higher the taxes, the harder it is to support a family. But the government will be your family, so it doesn’t matter to them. It would also explain their jihad against Walmart, a place where people with modest incomes can purchases necessities, including food and medications, at rock bottom prices.

Liberals will respond, “We’re the real pro-family party. We’re for homosexual marriage!” Ahem. First of all, homosexuals are already allowed to get married, marriage being defined as a union between a man and a woman. What liberals favor is the thoroughly Orwellian notion of redefining -- in a way both magical and totalitarian -- a word and a reality with which they take issue.

My desire to remain faithful to the dictionary has nothing to do with homosexuals, much less “homophobia.” Rather, it has to do with a clear understanding of the very basis of civilization and therefore humanness. Civilization is not built from the top down, as leftist social imagineers would have you believe. Rather, it is built from the bottom up, brick by brick, family by family, the unit of civilization.

Put another way, leftists think they are merely rearranging furniture on the top floor of civilization, when they are blasting away at the foundation of the building. Being ahistorical, leftists cannot but help being oblivious to the forces that underlie history.

We can all see the damage to the black family produced by 50 years of liberal ideas. What if we were to try 50 years of rigorously applied conservative ideas? That is, what if we try to inculcate the same values in black culture that, say, the Mormons do in Provo, Utah, or that Asians seem to do to everywhere in America? Stay in school, work hard, get married, don't have children out of wedlock. Ironically, this was part of the strategy of the original liberal civil rights leaders of just a couple generations ago. Now, groups like the NAACP are plainly no longer liberal but thoroughly infused with leftist ideology that promotes dysfunction and dependence.

Why? Why are they so averse to individualism and self-reliance? In order to advance their own class -- not ethnic -- interest. What class is that? The class of people who gain power as a result of having fewer families and more dependent and self-defeating victims. Democrats.

*****

What can I say? It kept my interest to the end. Perhaps I'm easily amused. But this post is now long enough, so it is officially over.