The communist manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility for even their own livelihoods-much less for the social consequences of their… [book] - has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kind of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements[1]… around the world and down through history… the crucial point is not privilege as such but the insulation from responsibility that that provides, particularly during[2] youth.
Thomas Sowell
There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired... The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life... They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares[3].
GK Chesterton
Today, we are not interested in our individual sins but we are only interested in condemning the sins of “society”. Young people of all backgrounds, and even young Christians, buy into it in large numbers. They are ready to believe that our “society”, often meaning America or all rich white heterosexual males, bear all of the guilt for the present evils of the world. Many are ready to admit their own share in the guilt. What part they have done wrong and feel guilty for is not easy to determine. Most of the people who are so ready to join in this self condemnation were not even alive when the evils of the past took place.
They are condemning themselves for something they have not done, and at first, this may be thought of as a harmless error. Because men rarely repent from their actual sins, the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might almost seem to be a good thing. But what actually happens to the young and old who participate in this is a little more complicated than that. “Society” does not make decisions. When we speak of “society” doing this or that what we really mean are the actions of our neighbors. And proclaiming guilt presupposes condemnation. The fatal charm of this collective confession of guilt is the encouragement it gives us to ignore the unpleasant task of acknowledging our own sins. Instead we quickly move onto the pleasant one of expressing regret, which is really a dishonest way of denouncing the conduct of others. If it were clear to the young and old that this is what they are really doing then perhaps they would remember that we all need forgiveness. But the very words by which this activity is expressed, hides its true nature. By a dangerous use of words, the one doing the condemning calls “society” not 'they' but 'we'. Since you include yourself you can say anything you want about ‘society’. You are not encouraged to be charitable to ‘our’ sins or to wonder if there were circumstances that you have not taken into account. You can indulge in the popular evil of condemnation without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are doing good. A group of people will say, 'Let us repent our past sins'. What they mean is, 'Let us attribute to our neighbor (even our Christian neighbor), whenever we disagree with him, the very worst motivations and slander that we can come up with.’ Such an escape from personal repentance into social repentance, and its idol social justice can be quite pleasant. It is a tempting fantasy land where a self righteousness freed from religion has the opportunity to run wild and never hear it called out for what it really is. It would be welcome to the moral cowardice of anyone. But it is even more attractive to the young idealist. Older adults who really did commit evils in the past have the costly task of admitting wrongdoing and dealing with false beliefs and actions that hurt others. But a semi-educated young adult who is now in his twenties or thirties usually has no such actions to address and correct. In media, daily life, and politics, the young adult is always part of an angry and restless group. Such semi-educated young adults are drunk, figuratively and literally, on a distrust of tradition, whether religious or political, and a contempt for their less-educated fellow citizens, even while they pretend they are the champions of the less educated citizens.
Young people know to proclaim that they ‘love all’ and that they should not judge, yet as one author has said , “The most prejudiced people in the world are those who think they are unprejudiced[4].” They maintain the outer appearance of goodness by claiming to love their enemy, but if you listen to young people talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is. Their enemies seems to come in two categories—the traditional Christian and the white heterosexual male businessman. Both are considered bigots and racist. I suspect that both might even be just one category to many of the young, but this is just a guess. What is certain is that when such young people join in the self congratulation of condemning ‘society’ and rejecting it altogether, you are asking them, not to change the sin within themselves, but to indulge, their egos and desires. It is good to repent of things done wrong, but only if one has done them. The communal sins which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class—its arrogance in its specialized and shallow education, its contempt for the uneducated and its elders, its readiness to suspect evil in everyone but themselves, its self-righteous verbal abuse of those it views as backwards, its obsession with lust, its spending on intoxication and highs which they could forgo in order to have money to share with the less fortunate, and its love of expensive food and drink all while pretending to care about the poor. We rarely hear of these sins committed by young people. Until we do hear about recognizing these things as being not just hypocritical but wrong, I must think the self condemnation of young and old alike a cheap bit of theatre and not worth praising.
Based on the work of CS Lewis in God in the Dock
[1] …the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh and their lesser counterparts [2] Marxism by Thomas Sowell page 219-220 [3] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Tacoma, Washington: Angelico Press, 2013) page 136, Kindle Edition. [4] http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/personhood.htm
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