Angelo Codevilla sets forth the secular materialist Confession of Faith: modern life in the West is
based upon the proposition, self-evident to many, that omnicompetent government as the executor of modern science can be the agent of unprecedented wealth, justice, and happiness. We err at our peril if by focusing on the bloody show of totalitarian regimes, we imagine that they were wholly extraneous to the great trends of our time or to what is happening among us. [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p.5.]One cannot help notice how the policy directions of the modern secular state claim to be "science based". This tells us not much about science per se, but the general belief that the government becomes more competent to deliver perfection upon earth when it is guided and justified by "science". The disciplines of science have become equivalent to a sacred text, above and beyond ordinary centres of authority, by which society will be guided and led to health, wealth, and happiness.
And science has delivered what has been asked of it.
It tells us that it's perfectly OK to regard monogamous marriage as primitive and to look to society organised upon lines of fleeting and temporary human relationships. Science has apparently told us that the unborn child whilst in the uterus is not a human being. Science has also told us that there is no such thing as fixed genders, but there are any number of them, and science can assist government by bringing such progressive glories about. Science has developed new disciplines loftily titled "hormone replacement therapy", along with "gender reassignment surgery" to turn males into females and females into males or whatever, whoever, and however human beings can be morphed, changed, and moulded. The government health authorities have even produced a document spelling out the appropriate standards of care for such "treatment". Tax payers are made to fund this Brave New World.
And then science--always objective, clinical, experimentally based of course--has led us into the great global warming crisis. Governments, claiming the rubric of research based facts, have led us into paths of determined ignorance, where it is believed that repeating nonsense often enough will suffice to make global warming so. Meanwhile the media are awash with "scientific" studies and research which urge us all how to eat and drink under the ban. The government will bring us to glory by controlling our diets. Of course, the corollary of that promise and prospect is that the government must control more and more of our lives and treat us like children in a day-care nursery.
Science throughout the West is coming progressively to resemble the ideological hide-bound science of the Soviet Union, where some doctrines and beliefs received official sanction, the truth be damned. Back then, western countries laughed at the invincible ignorance of the Communist Bloc; now it has become its ape.
The twentieth century has retaught us the awesome power of governments to shape the character of the peoples living under them. The great totalitarian movements left a legacy even more fearsome and instructive than one hundred million corpses, namely, the changes they wrought in the mentality and habits of the people who survived them, which they are now passing down to new generations. The joy that greeted the collapse of communism was followed by the realization that it would be harder for whole nations to take socialism out of themselves than it has been to take themselves out of socialism. [Ibid.]The West is now thoroughly dominated by populations and governments who genuinely believe that this is all a great idea. It's what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is all about.
But it's also the Great Lie. Its collapse is just as inevitable as the Soviet Union and the GDR. But without repentance over our great sin (both individual and national) and humbly bowing once again at the feet of the Son of Man so that we may live freely again, our folly and the suffering will be replayed without end.
It is the great Western Ground Hog Day.
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