Submitted by Terence Blackett
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it’s His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. – – C. S. Lewis
Today’s world is a very complex place. Tomorrow’s world will be even more so. We are witnessing in this first decade of the 21st century, the fragmentation and flux which has created shifting paradigmatic changes that affect us in ways nothing has in the last 200 years.
The growing list of challenges we face range from immigration reform, terrorism and nation-state security, to public safety, criminal justice reform, capital punishment for sexual predators and offenders, proper minimum wage negotiations, “Green” environmental issues and our energy dependence on oil, healthcare reform, education and expanding human knowledge, the right to privacy, notwithstanding, the right to free speech, social welfare, race, class and social division, international affairs, population and aging and the complexities science and technology poses, to name but a few of the hurdles which stand in our way.
Amongst the most pressing public policy issues today hinge around the re-evaluation and reassessment of the fundamental resources and initiatives by which we as a society tackle our inherent social, political, economic and spiritual problems. Surely the time has come for a grassroots, tree-trunk and branch analysis of what can be done within our communities, using the resources of the church, civic organisations and the influence of people power to change our society from the inside out, revamping those methods which have not worked and implementing new strategies based on mutual consensus and agreement.
Contemporary discourse must attempt to offer a pragmatic response to the issues posed but also to offer a sincere elucidation of what I believe is at the heart of public policy formulation today, given the increasing strains and stresses of modern society. Most contemporary public policy debates over the last decade have been mired in legalistic and technocratic idealism which has left it bereft of social and spiritual consciousness. We cannot deny that out of the ashes of modernity has evolved a world of our own making, a world of big government but small solutions, to ever-increasing and evolving problems.
A new debate must centre on the traditional values of time-tested principles of the nuclear family, social morality, civic-mindedness and the role of God within what is now a postmodern society – although this may not fit into some people’s grand schema.
During the late 19th & 20th century, the seeds of distress were sown in a period of what many termed the “Enlightenment Age”. With this age of reason came the genesis of humanistic philosophy espoused in revered and powerful literary works of art which were formulated and adopted by governments and institutional leaders. These documents used today as treatises of learning within the hallowed institutions of academia still form the bedrock and the foundation of what we term civil society.
These threads, strands and tenets of philosophies which have moulded every facet of human life within the Anglo-Saxon construct, where within the socioeconomic and socio-political fabric of Western capitalist democracies one finds this emergent world in which we now live. A world dominated by insidious philosophies that have sadly shaped our moral consciousness:-
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In the 1830’s and 40’s Auguste Comte – the father of sociology remarked that “I have naturally ceased to believe in God”. His six volumes of work, The Course of Positive Philosophy forms the basis for much of what we call sociology today. Comte argued that the human mind had developed beyond the threshold of “theology” or theological interpretation (a belief that there is a God who governs the Universe), through “metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.
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Freidrich Nietzsche, a contemporary of Comte also purports this same concept of a God who is dead in his 1882 book The Gay Science. In a later work around 1886 titled Beyond Good and Evil resonates this same insidious lie masked as a philosophical truth. Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. He argued that “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation”.
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The Communist Manifesto by Marx & Engels is unquestionably the most damnable of heresies later used by mad men like Stalin, Mao and others to bring about global subversiveness and to alienate God from the due process of people’s lives. Since then until now, America’s foreign policy has been a war of attrition, where the struggle for democracy has been pitted against evil regimes whose sole purpose was the enslavement and subjugation of others and the mindless authoritarian rule by either the sword or the gun.
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In the 1920’s Adolf Hitler’s publication of Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was the catalyst for what was to be called the Holocaust where the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews was the end result. A document etched with the miasma of racist bigotry and the machinations of a tyrant whose sole political purpose for the German state was the complete domination of Europe and possibly the world.
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In 1948 Alfred Kinsey published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report and 5 years later a similar treatise called Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female which was a glorification of blatant promiscuity and sexual tyranny. For many today, a self-fulfilling prophecy too soon realized amongst both old and young alike.
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In the book Democracy & Education by John Dewey, the seeds of humanistic philosophy and rationalism were sown into the psyche of mainstream American educational thinking. His establish-held views had great influence on the direction of American education, particularly in public schools and helped nurture the Clinton generation. So with God removed from the lives of our children in schools, all that was left is a theoretical exercise in human philosophical exegesis.
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As we look within the socioeconomic structure of global capitalist market society, the ruminations and echoes of the works of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and John Maynard Keynes’ work ‘General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, both stands as formidable bastions to the Anglo-Saxon ethos of global capitalism. Keynes’ central argument was based on an ever-expanding government. He argued that when the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, the responsibility of government was to run up deficits, by borrowing and by spending money to spur economic activity. Marx’s Das Kapital on the other hand, had forced the proverbial round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits – (a tenet of the theory of globalization). Marx’s theoretical position was that the inevitable, eventual, outcome would be global proletarian revolution of bourgeoisie system of exploitation.
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Betty Friedan in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique disparaged the traditional role of the stay-at-home Mom as a life “in a comfortable concentration camp”. The central plank of her argument was that women were unfulfilled in this subservient role and that there was no real fulfillment to be had from such a life. The result is that forty odd years later we see the diminution of the family and the roles that mothers and fathers play in raising sound, balanced and production members of society. More than that, our society is now riddled with the plight of single parent homes where mothers continue to struggle to raise and nurture their children without fathers.
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There are many other philosophies which have shaped our public policy but many scholars, policy-makers and social scientists are reaching towards a practical social science which breaks with the technological and deconstructionist methodologies formerly used where neither method seem to really work to address the ills of contemporary global society. Joel Kotkin in “Rethinking Public Policy” argues that ‘such approaches cannot provide the public realm with a robust and viable sense of its future, in part because it denies the past that binds our families, our communities, and the nation. In the end, the reanimation of public policy will require a reaffirmation of our shared religious, moral, and political heritage – not as the total truth, but as the foundation upon which we can rebuild the public sphere.’
This is our challenge today…
The blogmaster invites you to join and add value to the discussion.