Decay and Rot Is A Perpetual Norm

A Perpetual Fifth Column

It has been said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  Why?  The presumption behind the adage is that men are not just corruptible, which alone would be sufficient reason for eternal vigilance, but that men are prone to corruption.  Given half a chance the ever nascent spectre of the Lord of the Flies emerges from a putrescent carcass.  We must needs be vigilant precisely because the risk of tyranny is real. 

Not that this should surprise us.  All Nature is in decay in one way or the other.  Steel rusts.  Foundations rot.  Rivers flood.  Species die out.  It's no surprise, therefore, that the human species would be prone to decay and retrogression.  It's what made the Cold War a very real threat.

G. K Chesterton takes this a stage further.  He suggests that the threat to human liberty is that liberty itself allows--even promotes--decay and rot from within.  A previous generation's glory becomes the downfall of the next.  Our glory becomes our next curse.  It is for this reason that eternal vigilance is required.  He cites some historical examples of liberties producing tyrannies in fast order:

But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies . . . . that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before.  Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic monarch of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards) went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First.  So, again, in France the monarch became intolerable, not just after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored.  The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined.

So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people, until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant eating the people like bread.  [G. K. Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 320.]

He selects another example much closer to our daily experience:

So again, we have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion.  Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind.  They are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men. . . . It will not be necessary for any one to fight against the proposal of a censorship of the press.  We do not need a censorship of the press.  We have a censorship by the press.  [Ibid.]

Because the biggest threats to our liberties come not from without--not from some overseas threat--but from recent progress in liberty within, that eternal vigilance is in order.  Who would have thought that the social opportunities and liberties won for women would have led to industrialised abortion and homosexual "marriage"?  Yet, so it has transpired.  And there is nothing new in this.  As Chesterton points out it is normal; it is to be expected.  That is why vigilance is needed, if liberty is to be maintained.

For the Christian this is even more the case.  The Christian knows the risks of liberty and expects the threats to it:

Christianity spoke again and said; "I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human being.  This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress.  If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin.  You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is--the Fall.  [Ibid., p.321.]

The revolutionaries, the idealists, the progressives, the evolutionists, the secular humanists--all these represent the biggest threats to liberty.  For a time they may be collaborators in the hard fight for winning a new liberty.  "Every child shall be taught to read, write, and calculate.  No child left behind!"  A worthy and important goal.  Within a lifetime it will have morphed into the tyranny of a state educational establishment notoriously marked by pedagogical theories opposing formal education in favour of letting the child discover for himself.  "Don't you dare teach this child.  You will harm him.  You will damage him."  This would be bad enough, but the tyranny goes further.  Not only does the state insist that children not be taught in schools, only be given the opportunity to learn for themselves, it also insists that no-one else apart from the state be allowed to "educate". 

This is the doctrine of original sin in action.  It is the Fall in motion.  Consequently, Christians, alone, expect corruption and decay in a free society.  The revolutionaries, the idealists and the secular humanists never do. Therefore they sleep on the walls.  Christians, however, know that eternal vigilance is necessary.  It is the price of liberty.  They also know never to trust a Progressive with a bright idea.