Sunday, June 29, 2014

‘Leftist Utopia’ and the End

In a blog post aptly entitled “I’m Sorry, But Your Utopia is Just a Little Creepy”, David Thompson assembles a series of rather ominous quotes and links on the modern family.

First, from Anthony Daniels (or ‘Theodore Dalrymple’ if you prefer), doctor and psychiatrist, on observations arising out of his practice in England:
“In the course of my duties, I would often go to patients’ homes. Everyone lived in households with a shifting cast of members, rather than in families. If there was an adult male resident, he was generally a bird of passage with a residence of his own somewhere else. He came and went as his fancy took him. To ask a child who his father was had become an almost indelicate question. Sometimes the child would reply, “Do you mean my father at the moment?” Others would simply shake their heads, being unwilling to talk about the monster who had begot them and whom they wished at all costs to forget.”
Then there’s this telling statistic:
“By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home. The child may be father to the man, but the television is father to the child.”
Next, there’s this from National Review’s Rich Lowry on the other side of the pond, who quotes MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry on the ‘progressive’ view of raising American children as a government project:
“We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families. Once [child-rearing is] everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
Lowry comments as follows:
“The foundation of the Harris-Perry view is that society is a large-scale kibbutz. The title of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller in the 1990s expressed the same point in comforting folk wisdom: ‘It Takes a Village’.”
and then adds this bit of gold:
“This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of professions to the contrary with a story. He told a woman, ‘My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.’ She said, ‘No, you don’t.’ Gramm replied, ‘Okay: What are their names?’ ”
Lowry sums it up this way:
“The truth is that parents are one of society’s most incorrigible sources of inequality. If you have two of them who stay married and are invested in your upbringing, you have hit life’s lottery. You will reap untold benefits denied to children who aren’t so lucky. That the family is so essential to the well-being of children has to be a constant source of frustration to the egalitarian statist, a reminder of the limits of his power.”
Then we get Thompson’s excellent two cents’ worth:
“For many on the left, the conventional family structure is at best problematic and, quite often, something to be disassembled. Beatrix Campbell, for instance, tells us that the typical family is “riven by power, patriarchy, conflict and the unequal distribution of resources and respect,” a description that doesn’t remotely fit any family I know.”
Thompson also quotes New Enquiry contributor Madeleine Schwartz, who:
“… dubbed this non-nuclear unit the ‘anti-family’, thus signalling its countercultural radicalism and general sexiness. We were told, based on nothing much, that ‘a couple cannot raise a child better than one [person] can’. Apparently, the ‘diffusion’ of the family unit — which is to say, absent fathers, hardship and subsequent dependence on the state — ‘is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation’.”
This, in its own words, is where much of the political left would like to take society.

*   *   *   *   *

The Old Testament ends with this statement:
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” (Malachi 4:5-6)
Tell me we’re not, as a society, in desperate need of someone who will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.

Because this is the Lord’s next step:
“… the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze.” (Malachi 4:1)

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