Miles to Go

Secular Winds . . . and Whirlwinds

New Zealand is a proudly secular country.  In this it is not alone: most Western countries either share the vanguard with us, or are fast followers in the drive to work out the secularist mantra: "Man is the master of all things, and nothing human is foreign to me". 

The seedlings of secularism began in the Enlightenment, but have since grown into mighty trees. There are no chainsaws in sight.  The forest is now in full bloom, and the fruits of secularism are ripening.  But some are starting to complain that the taste of the fruit is a bit off.

Once we were able to see the blue sky.  Once we could see the sparkling lights of the Milky Way.  Now there is just the close, fetid air of Fangorn.  The secularist state has become our father, our mother, our nursery, our sustainer and provider, our Great White Hope.  The state has become our grand insurance policy, and, as Neddie Seagoon once observed, insurance is the White Man's Burden.

What does the secularist regime actually look like, metaphors aside?

Today, in much of the world, the state has taken over from churches (largely by default) the role of arbiter of morality.  By taxing and spending to provide for retirement and medical care, the government has preempted individual providence for the elderly and has taken on the role of older children in families.

By providing sustenance to people who cannot or will not work, government has preempted private charity and assumed the role of husband and father in the lives of countless women and children.  A framework of laws regulates family life. Not only in Sweden, which, as the saying goes, has laws on everything from raising children to walking dogs, parents may raise their children only so long as the government does not choose to take them away.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p.35.]

The great impediment to going further in the matter of state childbearing and state child raising is not a lack of desire in principle, but a lack of resources and money.  When tax levels rise to a certain point, people are smart enough to stop working and make themselves unemployable.  It's self-defeating.  The secularist proposition of the state providing a nursery from cradle to grave collapses.  And collapse it inevitably will--but meanwhile we have some way to go.  There are still too many ardent secularist disciples, True Believers all, who think that what we need is a bit more time and a bit more money from tax payers and Nirvana will break out upon us.

By becoming the principal financier and regulator of education, research, and professional qualifications, government has effectively become the arbiter of truth.  Even in the United States, religious schools must be licensed.

It is difficult to find any government on earth that spends less than one-third of its people's total product.  Most spend about one-half.  Government is the biggest employer, awards the most contracts, and legislates so as to make all occupations expend significant amounts of effort to comply with its regulations (which are further shaped to its advantage).  Government is the biggest maker of winners and losers in society. The world is abuzz with governmental schemes to remedy the ravages of governments. [Ibid.]

Recently we heard of an award winning artisan cheesemaker being driven out of business because she could not meet the cost of compliance with government regulations written for multi-billion dollar enterprises.  Government is making her a loser.  The winners in secular statism are those "too big to fail".  This is just a small--yet archetypal--symptom of statism which always attends and accompanies secularism.

The West has sown to the wind.  It is beginning to reap the whirlwind.  We have miles to go.  It is a path we must tread on the way to national repentance.  There are no easy short-cuts.  The statist god must first become more malevolent, then crumble before our eyes before folk lose their devotion to secularism.  It will not be pretty.

But the night is always darkest before the dawn.