WhenWeAreQueen

That is what the Left would impose on us, stripping us of individual liberty in favor of their definition of group “fairness” and “community service.”  That is what the vacuous phrase “social justice” means—obliteration of the rights of the productive individual in favor of preferential treatment of politically preferred groups.  Taken to the extreme, the Left’s elevation of group rights is of course socialism—a social system with a myopic focus on the distribution of material goods that abrogates the private property rights of the individual and forces redistribution of goods and services.  Because humans are not naturally charitable in such an extreme way, at least to those outside of their inner circle, some authority must be established to set and enforce the rules of distribution.  Inevitably, other individual rights, such as the right to speak critically of the authorities and the right to assemble, must be circumscribed, lest those from whom the system takes more than it gives seek to overthrow the authorities.  We know from the miserable economic failures of frankly socialist states such as the USSR and Cuba that absent rewards for production, the productive cease to be so, and everyone stumbles along in poverty and deprivation.  (Everyone except the lucky elite imposing the system on everyone else—they always have money and access to what they want.)

Despite inescapable evidence that socialism is intrinsically defective, the Left in this country seeks to impose a redistributionist system here.  Seduced either by the Utopian rhetoric of Marx or cynically aware of the power to be had for the bureaucracy in a socialist system, they ignore history and deny human nature.  Because most of us have an altruistic streak, and because we have been steeped in the language of “fairness” and “equality” for the past 60 years, we have a difficult time countering their assertions that we must provide for everyone’s needs and that it is our fault that some have less than others.  And because we have pushed the Divine out of our public conversation, we are unable to proffer a meaningful philosophy of living other than materialism’s insistence on the supreme value of consumption.

Indeed, American-style soft socialism is perhaps more disposed to failure than elsewhere because underneath the group-rights rhetoric persists a stubborn insistence on the individual.  Socialism’s only chance of success lies in the extinction of the urge to individuate.  With its mythical identity of rugged individualism, America does not incline itself to subsuming the one into the many.  Whether this self-understanding will be enough for us to push off the collectivist politics being forced upon us by the current administration remains to be seen.  Certainly, those now trying to grow a Leviathan state and starve the market economy understand well that many humans have a tendency to prefer to take from others rather than produce for themselves—and they are diabolically clever in designing a system that incentivizes dependence and demonizes resistance to collectivization.

Ironically, a society conforming to a divinely-inspired ethic would probably become more socialistic, but in an organic fashion that built in natural incentives to be a productive member of the community. Indeed, one can make a forceful argument that a Christian society by nature is not one that emphasizes individual rights, but rather one that insists on collective responsibility.  Love thy neighbor as thyself is a simple command with clear ramifications for how individuals are to care for one another’s needs.

I have given this much thought since an Orthodox friend of mine pointed out to me that Christianity is not really a celebration of the individual, and the early Christians would have been incapable of understanding our insistence on personal liberty.  My rebuttal to him lies in the fact that we do not live in a liturgical community governed by scripture and tradition and given life by the Holy Spirit.  In such a community the individual willingly sacrifices his self-interest for the sake of the whole body of Christ, knowing that the body cannot consist of a single part, but is made up of many parts.  The crucial characteristic of such a community, however, is that every member sacrifices his interest so that no one takes advantage of the charity that permeates the society.  Because humans are not perfect, conflict is inevitable—but the liturgical community not only has shared values, but also the ability to sanction those who repeatedly refuse to conform to those values.  That is what we lack in a materialist society where God is a dirty word.  Everyone claims the privilege of charity while eschewing the responsibility that comes with accepting it; and those who sacrifice self-interest have no means of protecting themselves from being manipulated.  What is voluntary in a liturgical community becomes coercive in a secular society. 

Robert Bork has written that the path back to a healthy America lies in a re-Christianization of the society.  I don’t think that is possible; we have too far down the path of materialism.  We will have to find a public and political language that encompasses not just the mandate to be charitable, but the duty to receive charity humbly and graciously.  Conservatism used to have the words to express this, before most of them were reconstrued as code words for bigotry by the Left and a complicit media.  I don’t think we have a public figure brave enough to reframe our creeping statist policies and the taxation that accompanies them as coerced charity.  Perhaps by giving up our insistent focus on “rights” we could also shuck off the pernicious talk of entitlement.