If This Goes On
18th February 2014
Sarah Hoyt connects the dots.
I’ve been listening to If This Goes On in audiobook while I clean the house. I still think that Heinlein was right about the coming theocracy – that is he was right about the theocratic impulse that he saw in the American people. I see it too. It’s what I’ve referred to in the past as Americans being, in the community of nations, the Aspergers kid who takes things seriously, things that no one else accepts as written/said. This has a good side, such as a lot of us taking things like the Constitution very seriously, and a bad side, such as people taking the whole multiculti thing seriously. (The rest of the world might parrot it, but no, they don’t take it seriously.)
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I grew up in an area where every invader and every ruler left behind a piece of folk religion and a bit of superstition. People believed in them all and in the official religion, regardless of the contradictions.
This is more what Progressivism resembles. It’s made of the myths of many groups, all of which are sure they’re THE group and willing to tolerate fellow travelers. Thus progressive women have their myths, starting with the Earthly paradise of the matriarchy and ending, eventually with the restoration of the same matriarchy. Black supremacists… we won’t go into their myths. We’ll just say they deny other races full humanity. If you poke around, you’ll find it. And the myths of the class warriors start in a distant paradise of Rosseau-like nonsense, where men neither spun nor labored and yet had everything they needed, through the current vale of tears of Capitalism, which is weirdly responsible for every human vice (that is for vices that existed before it existed) and which will end in the wonderful classless society of the future, where, to quote Star Trek, “we don’t have money, we just work because we want to.” (Thus throwing all the credits system away. Never mind.)
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One of the mistakes Heinlein’s generation made was thinking the religious impulse went away when organized religion did. It doesn’t of course. As religion loses force, the state-as-religion moves in. Of the two the second is probably the most harmful, as it wants to bring about a reality that simply doesn’t fit into the physical world. No matter how much we squash capitalism, we’re not going to have an Earthly paradise. (On the contrary.) The paradise hereafter is each person’s concern and ultimately neither testable nor enforceable (not to say that some places and times haven’t tried it.)
February 18th, 2014 at 11:54
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
? G.K. Chesterton