Wednesday 8 November 2017

Soros Versus God

Boundless and Bare

In the Progressive world view, novelty is a prized achievement.  The past is an impediment to progress.  The new, the fresh, is immediately attractive.  To be avant-garde is to command respect.  Life and human progress is an unending new season fashion show.  To be alive is to keep up with cutting edge couture.  The Progressive ideology insists upon progress as its lifeblood.

In the Christian world view the past is all determinative.  This contrast alone sets the Christian faith to be against Progressivism.  It sets the Christian faith against modern Western culture.  The God of all creation is a promise maker and a promise keeper.  Every person, society, and nation is subject to God's promise making and promise keeping.  These promises were all made in the past.  We are shaped and conditioned, for example, by the promises and vows God made to the patriarch, Noah (Genesis 9).

Another way of expressing this is to say that God is a covenant making and a covenant keeping God.  God takes oaths and vows.  Moreover, he keeps his oaths and vows.  His oath keeping shapes our entire existence.  Ironically, this does not mean that things do not develop and change.  On the contrary, God's vows include oaths taken to bring the creation to a glorious climax, when every tear will be wiped away and every caviller will be silenced.

These two radically contrary perspectives--Progressivism vs Christianity--necessarily involve very different views of human society and its progress.
  For the Christian, man must go back in order to have a future.  The only sustainable future is to approach and build it upon the foundations of the past.  For the Progressive, man must occlude the past, if not eliminate it, in order to go forward in any meaningful sense.

The Christian view is reflected in the rise of Western Christendom.
Continuity is crucial in this story.  Many of the jumbled ingredients of nationhood--beliefs, myths, institutions, customs, loyalties--that were already present  in the ninth century or reinvented in the twelfth.  Thereafter they gained in potency beasue they pwersisted, deriving legitimacy from their every-growing antiquity, enhanced by linking them with the real or mythical pasts of St. Edward the Confessor and King Arthur.

England's laws and institutions came to seem untouchable and immutable, as if in the nature of things, dating from time immemorial.  They could be seen, in Edmund Burke's famous phrase of 1791, as creating "a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."  In such ways nations and identities are "constructed": that is, made by people, and not determined by geography, genes, or blood.  [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2015), p. 83.]
For the Progressive, the only constants are change and flux.   These must inevitably destroy and deconstruct the past and the present in order to create a future.  One of the most incandescent examples of this worldview at work is now before us in Europe.  The Europists want to break down "Old Europe" to make way for the radically different future--a new future.  Being Progressives they have no idea what that future will be--only that it will be different.  In order to realise the future, it is necessary and incumbent that the past be annihilated.  The Progressives, however, are also resolute in their belief that this unknown future will be better than the past.  By dint of Progressive ideology that has to be the case.

Owing to Progressive ideology, European nations can no longer replace their own populations.  They need immigrants to fill up the gaps.  But these immigrants largely believe an alien ideology.  Ironically these welcomed immigrants will break down the beliefs and dogmas of Progressivism.  In other words, Progressivism will turn out to be a house built upon sand.  The inevitable deconstruction of Progressivism--by its own hand--will serve as an incandescent testimony to its own folly.  It will turn out to be a "colossal wreck, boundless and bare."

Ozymandias of Progressive Europe
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


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