Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 8:20 am
Yesterday I finished The Overton Window by Glenn Beck, the only Beck book I have read. This is what I posted at my Goodreads account about it.
I picked this one up in an airport on a whim. I had been hearing people froth about it, and wanted to see if it was as bad as they were saying, which apparently was bad enough to make the back teeth ache. But, as it turns out, it wasn't. Beck wrote a fictional pop-thriller, which means the prose has to be assembled out of two by fours, but as a result it was sturdy. And Beck is clever, and so gets a number of good lines off. But not surprisingly his main problem is theological, which I may write more about over at Blog and Mablog. As much as Beck loves his country, and wants to fight for it, his theological anthropology is the rot in our foundational timbers.
Our problem is humanism, and we cannot effectively counter radical leftist humanism with apparently milder right wing forms of it. The humanist believes that mankind is basically good and, going back to Socrates, the explanation for evil is ignorance. If man is basically good, where does all this evil come from? It has to come from ignorance, and the solution to ignorance is education. The solution to the political pathologies we see in Washington today is to get involved and "get informed." But the biblical answer is repentance, and repentance all the way down. Our solution is not to get angry at what "they" are doing to us, but rather to be grieved at what we have done to ourselves. One of the basic things we have done in this regard is flatter ourselves -- and Beck's approach here is part of the problem.
The protagonist is named Noah Gardner, and his father is Arthur. The archvillain in this book is the protagonist's father and, in a nice touch, is going to enslave the world through his PR agency.
As Noah is starting the process of becoming a real patriot, his father asks him this question. "Do you believe that people, human beings, are basically good? That -- as your loyal friend Molly would no doubt preach to us -- all they must do is awaken and embrace liberty and the highest potentials of mankind will be realized?" (p. 208). The answer, eventually, is "Then yes. I do believe that people are basically good."
Just as Grendel was a straight line descendant from Cain, so all the wickedness in Washington (which Beck, to his credit, does see) is a straight line descendant from that chirrupy Pelagianism. But this is a monster that cannot be fought unless we acknowledge its paternity.
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