I like to blame the French for the current delusions sweeping the West.

In Rousseau are all the foundations of modern liberalism, and to be a Rousseau, you must be a religious squish

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

Man will be good, if you keep from him all the tools with which to be bad

Without the Bible how do you persuade any man he too is fallen? Many like Rousseau, will find an explanation that makes themselves the exception.

Doomberg on January 3, 2013 at 10:26 AM

Exactly. The progressive idea is that with enough money/education/laws/whatever, men will become angels. Which is why a study of history is so important. Of course, the progressive answer (much like their answer to Socialism failing everywhere it has been tried – including the Soviet Union – is that it hasn’t been tried “properly” yet) is that all those folks in the past *didn’t* have enough money/education/laws/whatever. This time it will be different.

The conservative answer is to buy guns and wait for the inevitable downfall, then to scrape together the pieces and start over building a society where it is safe for progressive stupidity to take hold again.

[Fenris on January 3, 2013 at 10:33 AM]

Good point. One aspect of Catholic belief is that, to say it simply, good is knowledge and evil is ignorance.

Christians and Jews have known this for thousands of years.

Logus on January 3, 2013 at 10:26 AM

I’ve only known it for a half century or so. Okay, I’m being a smart alec, but I do have a point. If you don’t “train the child in the way he should go” then things tend to deteriorate.

In short, man is neither good at heart nor bad at heart. Man is rational and has a free-will. It’s what he does, not what he is, that is either good or evil. When man fell in paradise, it only showed he is not perfect.

Murder isn’t caused by poverty or gory videogames or low self-esteem – or guns. Nor are wars caused by nuclear missiles, or al-Qaeda terrorism by box cutters. We fool ourselves if we imagine that by fixating on missiles and box cutters we can avoid reckoning with the cruel side of human nature.

Part of the reason the left is so fixated on this stuff is because of the concept of the New Soviet Man, an outdated idea that remains highly influential in leftist thinking today. It inherently assumes that man is “perfectable” and essentially rejects the concepts of human nature depicting man as an inherently flawed.

It is no surprise to me that societal paradigms which accept the nature of man as flawed and try to adapt and mitigate the evil of men are far more successful than societal paradigms which assume man is a computer which will do everything “right” if only they are programmed properly.