Extinct Brontosaurus
Inspired by the podcasts by Ravi Zacharias and the three part series on the Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of the Left by Dr. Sanity:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
The West is on the verge of collapse created by its own hands. Between good and evil there is an irreconcilable contradiction. One cannot build ones national life without regard to this distinction. We the oppressed people of Russia watch with anguish the tragic enfeeblement of Europe. We offer you the experience of our own suffering. We would like you to accept it, without paying the monstrous price of debt and slavery that we have paid.These words were uttered decades ago. Yet they are still as relevant today as they were in Solzhenitsyn's day. Solzhenitsyn's intellectual nemesis Arthur Schlessinger, said this :
The mystic prophets of the absolute cannot save us. Sustained by our history and our traditions we must save ourselves at whatever risk of heresy or blasphemy. We can find solice in the memorable human struggle against the absolute in the finest scene in the greatest American novels. I refer of course to the scene when Huckleberry Finn decides that the plain hand of Providence requires him to tell Ms. Watson where her runaway slave is to be found. Huck writes his letter of betrayal to Ms. Watson and feels "...all washed and clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life and I know that I could pray now..." He sits there for a while wondering how good it is all this happened so and how near I become to getting lost and going to Hell. But then Huck begins to think about Jim and the rush of the great river and the talking and the singing and the laughing and the friendship.I say, no Mr Schlessinger, this is what America has become. And it is weaker for it.
Then "...I happened to look around and sees that paper. Then I took it up and held it in my hand. I was a trembling because I'd got to decide forever between two things and I knowed that. And I studied a minute, holding my breath and then says to myself: Alright then, I'll go to Hell! Then I tore it up."
That if I may say so, is what America is all about.
The conclusion of Malcolm Muggeridge is hard to escape:
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that 20th century man has decided to abolish himself, tired of the struggle to be himself, he has created boredom out of his own affluence, impotence out of his own erotomania and vulnerability out of his own strength. He himself blows the trumpet that brings the walls of his own cities crashing down, until at last having educated himself into imbecility, having drugged and polluted himself into stupefaction he keels over a weary old brontosaurus and becomes extinct...The West is entering a defining period in history. Either it keels over and lets itself be overrun by people of stronger courage and conviction or it must stand up, return to its roots Christian inspired secularism, intellectualism and pluralism and be counted. The experience of C.S Lewis spiritual transformation (as is described in A Pilgrim's Regress) is powerful:
As I was making my search for the Truth, I entered many kinds of worldviews and philosophies and thinking that intuitively I felt were not right. I had no rational answer, I had no logical answer. But something in my intuition told me that worldview was not right. And so I rejected that purely on intuition, until I came to know Jesus Christ and picked up a regressive journey. For now I had the answer to why I had rejected all else along the way.The testimony of Neo-neocon's political conversion is inspirational for those of us who feel overwhelmed by Chomskism, Frankenism et al.: