This is a really wonderful lecture
and a wide-ranging. Although Saul Alinksy’s work and life is the organizing
principle of the talk, he has fascinating things to say on a variety of other
subjects. At the beginning the talk seems rather dry and concerned only with
biography and with local Chicago politics, but Morris builds up steam as he
goes and becomes really moving when
he speaks about John Adams as hero of the American Revolution, and about the
unique experiment that is the United States of America. His conception of the
USA is one that is perhaps well-known, but I had never heard it stated so
brilliantly before; it has made me more secure in my conviction that the United
States was granted by Providence a great role to play in the salvation of
humanity from the disasters of modern history.
That Providential role has been
sabotaged and undermined by many, not least of whom is Saul Alinsky, who
declared his allegiance for all to see on the opening page of his book Rules for Radicals:
Lest
we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first
radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where
mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical
known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively
that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.
Just to be clear, the kingdom which
Lucifer won is hell. Hell: where he lives in perpetual misery with the other
fallen angels, and can do no good for anyone, including himself; but instead
seeks to ruin and immiserate other created beings—in the same way a man who has
lost a fight will go home and kick the dog. Hell: where the subjects in his
kingdom are the men, women, and children whom he has damned, whose destiny he
has stolen and whose birthright taken, whom he has conned into trading an
eternity of blessedness for dust, ashes, fire, and chains.
Many of us have discerned the
fingerprints of Satan all over the history of the twentieth and, now, the
twenty-first century, especially in the political realm. But perhaps this
detective work is a bit superfluous. That both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are
disciples of Alinsky, himself a disciple of Satan, makes clear to what precise
destination the conductors are directing the United States train. And with the
United States goes, perhaps, the realistic hope of preventing the drainage of
Western civilization into the sewer of hell.
Lest this leave the reader with a
depressing conception of Joseph Morris’s talk, there is a wonderful few minutes
during the questions when he talks about what hope we have, and what is to be
done by believers. Nothing unites allies like a common enemy—and it is clearer
now than ever before that believers in the natural law and the rule of God are
natural allies against the angel who would drag all men down with him into
nonentity. Starting at 1:00:54, Morris talks about how Jews (and he himself is
a believing Jew), Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants can understand one
another. It is such a lovely few paragraphs that it is worth quoting in full.
A few of us in
the room had the privilege of having dinner together last night, and in the
course of our conversation I made the observation: you ever notice how
sometimes, for believing Jews and believing Christians—including Evangelical
Protestants and Catholics, for example—we feel more comfortable with each other
than we do with people nominally in our own faith traditions who really aren’t
believers? and who don’t share our ethical and moral concerns?
There’s a point
there. I think we have reached a time in history when it ought to dawn on us
that although clearly, we have important differences—important things to debate
and discuss and learn from each other, and fight about! in a civil sort of way—at
the end of the day people who share a fundamental belief in God, and the idea
that there is a loving God to whom we are accountable and who is the source of
both nature and natural law, and morality and moral law—and Jews and Christians
agree on that!—and if we then agree that we can reach back to something as
familiar to us as the Judaeo-Christian tradition (we don’t need lofty and airy
and hard-to-fathom modern scholarship) to understand the basic rules that make
for a decent and humane society, like the Ten Commandments—which we share!—if we’ve
got agreement on that then we’re a long way along the road to building and sustaining
the society that we all agree we want.
And the
remarkable recognition comes that there really are people in our midst, our
brothers, our neighbours, our colleagues, and so on, who no longer share those
fundamental points of agreement with us. They no longer are comfortable with
the Judaeo-Christian tradition. They are in a post-Judaeo-Christian world where
God talk is alien and where it’s almost silly—it’s almost demeaning!—to be talking about these ethical imperatives when the
morality that is encountered on a day-to-day basis is so situational, and so
not rooted in these fundamentals, that there is a disconnect. There is a divide—and
it is increasingly difficult to communicate across that.
I would, with hesitation, and open
to correction, propose that we may even share this common language with the
Muslims. Certainly when Muslims abominate Western civilization for its luxury,
obscenity, irreverence, and, above all, praise of sexual sin, we ought to be in
agreement with them. Perhaps the key division is that we want to save Western
civilization while they want to destroy it. But I have no personal knowledge of
what Muslims think about these things, and so I leave it as a question for
others to answer.
In sum, a brilliant lecture by a
brilliant man. Well worth listening to and absorbing.
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