Only if you aren't a student of human history. A fellow who pops up in my feed every now and then, who seems to be about 3 or 4 hits to 1 miss, points out what should be obvious: Why you should judge people as individuals, not races.
Of course societies and nations and empires, being made up of people, suffer that same tendency we all suffer as people. That is, it's easier to descend into vice than to ascend to virtue. Let's face it, when was the last time anyone said, "You know, all my life I wanted to be a lazy couch potato, but I just couldn't overcome the temptation to eat right and exercise." Vice and bad and unhealthy are easier than virtue and good and healthy. Let's be honest.
Which is why civilizations and cultures, being made up of people, tend to suffer the same thing. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, equality and fraternity, of the people and by the people are tough. Tyranny, oppression, conquest, bigotry and imperialism are easier. As we're seeing now.
Even now, we have journalists informing us that freedom of speech can be dangerous and sometimes we need a little of the old government censorship (kudos for that one 60 Minutes). Barry Lynn once told Anderson Cooper in 2005 that the First Amendment clearly didn't mean religions that promote discrimination and prejudice (that is, that disagree with him). And since BLM we've been informed that it's time to stop judging based on content of character and get back to judging based on the color of one's skin or any one of a thousand other demographic identities. With the caveat, as Deacon Greydanus pointed out, that saying JD Vance is white has nothing to do with him being white. It being postmodernity with its post-reality dogmas.
At the end of the day, that post-WWII PTSD that the world slipped into in which we decided everything before must have been flawed and we were now going to get it right, has passed. Many of those lofty ideals of total and complete tolerance, respect, openness, freedom of expression, and most of all never judging based on group identity or accident of birth are dead Jim. As any student of history should be able to predict. If they ever really lived.
The post WWII consensus only made sense if you had a relatively moral people or agreed upon moral fabric. Americans began as a self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-making people. (In reality, "self" should be replaced by "community" because that was more often than not the truth, but you know what I mean.) Somewhere along the line, aided by government welfare programs, broken families, and subversive educational institutions, that sacrificial, bootstraps-pulling mentality was replaced with victimhood and expectations. All rights and no responsibilities.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, if you are going to hate people, you should hate people individually with cause.
I fear it was already breaking down. When I was in seminary, they called it America's last Great Awakening - the 1930s. Faced with the Depression, and then the growing prospect of another great war, people flocked back to churches or at least turned to things less 'Roaring 20s' and more 'Love God, raise family, love country and work hard' especially with work so hard to find. But that was an awakening of, well, convenience. Practical. By WW2, it's easy to see that was already fading and the 'can't we wrap up and get to the well earned parties' mindset was already taking over. And the 'expert class', by then, was already about a generation into the 'put this God stuff behind us and get with the secular. Which made it so easy to do in that PTSD the world experienced after the war.
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