GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston
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 Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2006 2:54 pm Post subject: POTUS, Supreme Court & the NYT in Today’s World |
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POTUS, Supreme Court & the NYT in Today’s World
Kirk writes,
The Federal Constitution and the Supreme Court and other checks upon immediate popular impulse are to the nation what the higher will is to the individual. Where our society succeeds, usually it is in consequence of this restraining influence in our thought and political structure; where it fails, often it is in consequence of our sentimental humanitarianism: “We are trying to make, not the Ten Commandments, but humanitarianism work---and it is not working. If our courts are so ineffective in punishing crime, a chief reason is that they do not have the support of public opinion, and this is because the public is so largely composed of people who have set up sympathy for the underdog as a substitute for all other virtues.” The utilitarian energumen, with his emphasis on “outer working,” moves further and further toward a dehumanized society.
...
To trust in the divinity of the average, dispensing with leadership altogether---a popular notion---is worse folly still; and the fickleness of the public has made even the radical reformer lose faith in this dream. No, in this hour when our need for leadership is desperate, when our power extends across oceans and gropes blindly for the lack of direction, it will not save us to “evolve under the guidance of Mr. H.L. Mencken into second-rate Nietzscheans.” Leadership can be restored only by the slow and painful process of developing moral gravity and intellectual seriousness, turning back to the strength of traditional doctrines---the honesty with which they face the fact of evil. Our spiritual indolence can be overcome only by a re-examination of first principles. “The basis on which the whole structure of the new ethics has been reared is, as we have seen, the assumption that the significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society. If we wish once more to build securely, we may have to recover in some form the idea of ‘the civil war in the cave.’ “1
Shame is a great ‘civil war in the cave’.
1Kirk, Russell ‘The Conservative Mind’, p.429 Quotes-Babbit, Irving ‘Democracy and Leadership’
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"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy |
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