Ghost of a flea

The ransom of the world

One trouble with Marxists and, ultimately, with Marxism is the trouble of advancing a system of ethics whose basis - whose justification - may only ever be inferred or, more properly, assumed. Readers of the Communist Manifesto, for example, do not have to stop and question why it should be good that workers of the world unite in a bid to free themselves of their Dickensian chains; freedom from slavery is, to most readers in the West, a self-evident good.

The trouble is just why that should be the case, how we know freedom is better than slavery in the first place. The whole policy edifice of the Left relies on sentiment rather than reason - good intentions rather than sound ideas - toward a host of good causes. The fight against wrongs such as inequity, injustice or intolerance only make sense, however, if we as a culture have already agreed poverty, bulllying and quick judgement are self-evident wrongs. The trouble is these "self-evident" wrongs are not self-evident, they are learned. What we consider to be self-evident values are values whose universality was revealed to us:

Revealed to us by a succession of prophets and ultimately by Jesus Christ.

The denial of this revelation is the trouble of the Left. They cannot fully realize their dreams because they have cut off their dreams from their source; cut off from the idea of the Good, all they are left with are a handful of good intentions. Having denied the source of their good intentions, the Left has nowhere to turn when confronted with a moral quandrary, instead left to flail about as a fallen world confounds their works. Without Christ's teachings and, more fundamentally, without the transformative experience that is the discovery of Christ, the Left is left with hand-me-down moral prescriptions with no justification in themselves.

Small wonder the Left claims to fight discrimination by discriminating, to fight poverty by impoverishing everyone, to oppose intolerance with mandatory intolerance of those who disagree, to promote diversity by denying the reality of difference. Small wonder every Leftist Utopia is quickly revealed as a new improved man-made Hell on earth.

None of this is to deny commonalities between aspects of Christian teaching and those of other worldviews. But it is to deny the arbitrary universality of the Left's moral claims. The ultimate source of the Left's moral claims is indeed universal but, cut off from Christ, the Left's claims to a universal system of value has no basis.

Small wonder the Left's commitment to fairness, to tolerance, to compassion is a mile wide and an inch deep. Small wonder the Left believes it can impose fellow feeling and legislate kindness. Small wonder so many converts to other, more militant, ideologies are to be found among the Left; the seemingly arbitrary nature of their values is difficult to defend from the confidently advanced and internally coherent claims of an expanding, aggressive ideology still connected to its infernal origins.

The Left has denied the universal source of its values yet demands these values are somehow universal in themselves. An absurd consequence of this denial is the further denial of differences between systems of value. When anyone attempts to point out differences between and among different systems of value, the Left insists these differences are illusory, a lie or a matter of form rather than substance.

I can only imagine most Canadians, having been converted to a philosophy of good intentions bereft of good ideas, would recoil at the thought of comparing the teachings of Christ and Mohammed side by side. When they say "it is all relative" what they really mean is "it is all the same" and assume as a matter of course that all good people everywhere believe the same good things if only they could be left to act on their good intentions.

The Left is, of course, wrong in summary and detail. The irony lies in advancing difference and diversity while condemning the expression of difference and diversity, going so far as to criminalize the knowledge of difference and diversity.

With this in mind, all I ask of a skeptical reader is the following: When you consider this linked comparison of the teachings of Christ and Mohammed do not assume every reader will automatically "know" which column we are meant to approve of and "know" which column is a defamatory caricature.

If you were raised as a Muslim there is nothing in the teachings or actions of Mohammed to be criticized, in fact, to criticize is the act of an apostate. If, by contrast, you know peace is better than war then your values are Christian even if your ideology denies Christ.

Finally, if you should express your doubts, there is one saviour who will welcome them as the road to wisdom. His debating opponent would have you beheaded. And if, after all that, you should still think "it is all relative" it is your neck on the line.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at May 21, 2010 10:18 AM

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