From Under the Rubble…Why Can’t We Just Leave?
“The problem our nation faces is very much like a marriage in which one partner has an established pattern of ignoring and breaking the marital vows.”
So writes Walter Williams, one of the world’s most sensible economists. But don’t hold that against him: he’s also a realist.
When the offending partner will not reform, he says, the time has come for a divorce:
Our nation is at a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative
The only “peaceable” alternative?
Yes: all the others are violent. Williams might applaud a campaign that would successfully persuade petty tyrants to turn their SWAT tanks into ploughshares, but that isn’t going to happen.
His critique is on target. All of our political institutions have profoundly violated the constitutional principle of limits on power. It doesn’t matter which party is in charge.
Without a profound break with the tyrannical trajectory, we will either be further enslaved or we will be fighting in the streets (which, by the way, is why they have those tanks).
Slavery or violence? Williams rejects both options. We should go our separate ways, he says – literally – and “find a way to peaceably separate into states whose citizens respect liberty and the Constitution.”
We have said that Dr. Williams is a realist. Is this proposal for real?
Your devoted Rubbler doubts it. Rather, always the teacher, Professor Williams is rubbing the face of the Left in their own pathetic, pandering rhetoric.
The liberal Peanut Gallery gaggles pleasant paeans to diversity, but they are totalitarians at heart.
“If you believe in diversity, well, prove it,” Williams says.
He knows they are lying. They would never let us leave without a fight – there’d be no sheep left to shear. There’d be no one left to blame for their abysmal failures. And no more other people whose money would pay their bills.
But there’s a deeper reason, and it comes with a warning:
At the Last Judgment, Christ will separate the sheep from the goats.
In the meantime, we can’t.
Like Augustine, Williams knows that the powerful temptation to the lust for power is inescapable. If we “separated” today, that temptation would arise anew in whatever freedom-loving, “constitutional” republics we formed.
Our Founding Fathers knew that all too well. They “separated” from England, all right – and it wasn’t peaceful. But that didn’t solve the problem of tyranny: aspiring tyrants just changed hats.
The Founders recognized that the lust for power was the greatest threat to liberty in our young republic – and it is a threat that comes from within.
Since Augustine, western man has recognized the fundamental principle of limits on power. Those limits are as unique to Christendom as they are essential.
The purpose of life is salvation, Augustine taught, and government can’t save your soul. Yet that is man’s highest goal: so government must be subordinate to it.
But government is necessary. It must provide the foundation of peace, order, justice, and liberty, all of which man needs in order to work out his salvation.
Those limits also apply to the desires of man as well. As Aristotle observed, before he can rule others, man must rule himself. Today’s tawdry tyrants can’t do that so long as they continue to wallow in narcissism, self-indulgence, and denial.
And then comes Augustine’s warning.
Like Williams, many of us would like to send the tyrants and their enablers into the wilderness, out there in the Land of Nod with the murderous Cain.
But who among us is so without sin that he can show them the door?
And who’s to decide who’s the tyrant? After all, no politician I know runs on a platform that says, “I’m a power-hungry, egoistic, greedy liar and I want to tell you what to do with your life.”
Well, almost no politician I know.
Augustine understood power. The lust for power, the libido dominandi, is the deepest perversion of the will. It is the sin of Satan, who is the Prince of this World and the leader of the City of Man.
That City is very crowded. But it has no fences. People can change their hearts, and change sides, at will.
Yes, Satan’s followers in the Earthly City – fallen angels and men alike – are consumed by the desire for power over their equals.
Members of the City of God, on the other hand, are united by love, not geography. Citizens of this Heavenly City can never be “separated out” from the City of Man and given their own states, because they too are fallen, and power lust will follow them there and tempt them ceaselessly – the way it did in our young republic, in which, today, the libido dominandi is the price of admission into the ruling elites.
To separate the saints from the sinners here on earth is the Manichaean dream. From the Communist ideology to “American Exceptionalism,” it confers upon the anointed the authority to defy limits – all for a noble cause, of course.
The tyrant always tells his victims that “it’s for your own good.”
We can be “forced to be free” after all.
As Solzhenitsyn observed, falsehood always brings violence in its wake. Today Americans are gasping for breath, drowning in a sea of lies. As much as Professor Williams might welcome it, there is no “peaceable” way out. Where the lie rules, there can be no peace.
This article, From Under the Rubble…Why Can’t We Just Leave? is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/from-under-the-rubble-why-cant-we-just-leave/
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Good morning, Christopher Manion. Please allow me to do a very poor job of commenting on this post, due to cold-induced befuddlement here in forty-below Chicago, where the snow is heaped half-way up my windows and the wind is howling. I congratulate you in this post for bringing together every possible argument why we must do nothing to attack the root causes of our present civic plight, which could include the founding of an alternative party (you rightly point out the unity of the present two, altho you do not name them both as liberal, with the present Republican party being the more liberal of the two) to offer a conservative platform to the American people, such as FIDESZ has recently done in Hungary (or to do so state by state in that type of separation instead of a ‘national separation’ through national election). You use the metaphor that we are married to this secular government and have no right to divorce it. You give any number of other assertions, that ‘saints and sinners’ may never be separated, that because of Original Sin temptations would overwhelm the government of any actual, real City of God, should any of us dare to separate and form our own civic order. You paraphrase Augustine to say governments can’t save souls (and neglect the social encyclicals of several popes who say the opposite, that governments indeed must help establish conditions that make it easier to save souls). You use Jesus to say only He may separate the sheep and the goats–so we cannot separate them before hand, meaning allow them every opportunity to ‘be goats,’ even if it means chaos, economic hardship for all, and tyranny. The role of the sheep is to offer the goats the alternative lifestyle, and that is all.
Please allow me to disagree and to quote the SSPX website’s recent observation about a very similar argument given in Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium (I won’t give the link, anyone interested in the complete commentary may easily find it on the sspx dot org site). Pope Francis prefers to use the wheat/tares subterfuge rather than the sheep/goats one, but it amounts to the same thing, and this is what the Lefebvrists say about it:
“2. Furthermore in the document a concrete sense of reality is missing and it even abandons itself to the illusion that the Truth by itself will conquer error. In order to prove this notion recourse is made to the parable of the weeds among the wheat in #225: “The parable of the weeds among the wheat[8] graphically illustrates an important aspect of evangelization: the enemy can intrude upon the kingdom and sow harm, but ultimately he is defeated by the goodness of the wheat.” This interpretation is a distortion of the Gospel and certainly a falsification of the meaning of the parable.”
SSPX challenges Francis’ interpretation of the parable, and I believe the same challenge must be applied to the misinterpretation here of the parable of the sheep and the goats. Just because they will be separated into heaven and hell at the last judgement, is no argument that we in America cannot ‘separate’ from bad government by explicit changes to it. Christendom was real, it had a Catholic government, it dared to establish limits, to say that human beings may not be made into commodities.
I just had this exact same argument with a follower of SSPX and a very conservative and very dear man. He says simply that things have gone too far and that any struggle for change is doomed. But I did not know that success was a prerequisite for martyrdom. Even Christ apparently went into His death throes calling out to His Father who appeared to have abandoned Him. Maybe our efforts would be ‘doomed.’ And maybe n. But like Walter Williams (maybe not like his economics, I don’t know him), that doesn’t mean we needn’t try. I have not learned that martyrdom is optional, when circumstances put a person in that quandary.
To that gentleman, I appealed simply for the sake of women. As you may know, abortion is on the retreat around the nation. I think the number is twenty-two, the states that have initiatives to severely limit abortion. Right to lifers are claiming victories, but I think the far greater reality is that the money guys finally see the relation between abortion and their pension problems, their empty cities, their closed schools, their diminished tax bases. Now they will rescind the ‘freedom,’ just as fascists and communists alike did when they saw the same bottom line. But what about women? My conservative friend is happy to see the limitations on abortion, but otherwise would leave women in the worst conditions we have ever known, especially African-American women, without doing anything about the economics and morality that make it so easy to consider abortion. I won’t bore you with statistics–surely you know the hell that women are presently living under. A recent report on NPR reported that in a township in the northern part of the UK, every single woman under forty was engaged in one form or another in the sex trades.
God does not make us suffer these conditions without possibility of change. We are not married to it. Of course we would be tempted, had we the reins of government. That’s what sacraments are for. The City of God can be a reality, not a metaphor. As it once was, and a better place for human beings to live in in spite of imperfections.
Hey–I think I thawed out! I hope you will forgive me for being as always of contrary opinion, especially when the topic is the desirability of burying one’s head in the sand.
“Members of the City of God, on the other hand, are united by love, not geography. Citizens of this Heavenly City can never be “separated out” from the City of Man and given their own states, because they too are fallen, and power lust will follow them there and tempt them ceaselessly – the way it did in our young republic, in which, today, the libido dominandi is the price of admission into the ruling elites.”
I have been thinking about the quote above ever since this post appeared. It is representative, it seems to me, of the thinking that characterizes Vatican II. Just as Vatican II ‘subsisted’ the Church along with the rebellious protestants into a greater body in which we are equals, so does this quote make us equal to them (and anyone, everyone else) in strength against temptation. “They too [us Catholics] are fallen,” and will be unable to resist the ‘libido dominandi’ which is the price of admission to power. Well, I deny that. It seems to me that so does St. Paul and all subsequent traditional theologians who wrote of the Mystical Body. Our sacraments have power. They give us power. We can resist temptation better than those who do not partake of the Eucharist, of confession, who are not baptized, who do not receive the very real spiritual powers the sacraments give. It simply is not true that we are ‘equal.’ WE ARE BETTER. We are better.
This is less than theoretical to me. My last job was team leader of the re-accreditation body investigating high schools and universities on the east coast and Puerto Rico. What I discovered time after time was that schools were led by practising Catholics, not necessarily in positions of formal leadership, but in the trenches. Catholics are well regarded by their fellows, and dependably and patiently deliver the work, time and again.
But of course it is theoretical too, and traditionally the Church has taught the very many ways in which Catholicism makes us strong. Not supermen and women, but we don’t need that, we only need a tipping point against corruption. Yes, that can be done. An army of men and women in the state of grace can move mountains even if it is only one rock at a time. To argue otherwise is to fail to take responsibility, that’s all. We can do it and we have to do it by virtue of our Faith.
Btw, “our young republic,” really? Are you truly under the illusion that the United States was ever blessed? The United States was formed as a deliberately secular entity–one which fails to perform the first act of justice, honor to God in the Trinity. It has never been capable of any other justice since then, as Pius XI taught (Quas Primas) and its record reveals the truth of that–just consider how our ‘young’ republic (it never was young!) treated its slaves and native Americans. Our ‘ruling elites’ are the legitimate heirs of the protestant rebellion upon whose tenets we were founded. They were predictable from the beginning. It is time they, and it, were overthrown.