A primary failure of Western Civilization is the removal of the person. We have contracts, not covenants; we don’t even understand the latter. We have laws, not Law. All our wonderfully thought out procedures crash against the rocks of reality and we don’t even have the sense to realize it.
In ancient times, when human culture obliged person to person, and people understood love as commitment, not as some overpowering emotion, humans stayed with their extended families and clans. That was life; that was justice. But in the vagaries of human variation after the Fall, there were always threats of some sort. Most threats didn’t wait for your town hall committee meetings to finish, but demanded response when they appeared. Thus, it was of necessity your chief elder would appoint someone as warlord, and everyone knew when the warlord started shouting, it was time to act, not discuss. Just as your elder was vested by God’s Laws as someone whom everyone could trust for daily decisions, so you presumed the warlord could be trusted.
Eventually the warlord became king. Even in the Bible the kings knew they were not absolute monarchs. They had their assigned role, and dared not tread upon the decision-making process coming down from God. They also refrained from messing with the local clan leadership. Judges were seldom appointed by the king. It was not a matter of overruling the king; he was obliged to voluntarily recognize what was just and submit to it. Justice was not some disembodied concept of abstract principle, but Justice was God Himself. The king knew the limits of his role, or he faced the wrath of God.
Nothing, nothing at all, replaces the necessity of engaging persons. Our Western doctrine of depersonalizing controls guarantees dehumanizing the results. Instead of a rough-n-ready warlord standing by to fight when called, we have a bureaucratic agency which snuffs the life out of any hope for rapid response. The bureaucracy does not serve, but simply kills. Yet, we are placed under some obscene burden of civic religion which makes that bureaucracy sacred. We thus call evil “virtue.”
Frankly, God isn’t going to have to work that hard to crush America, nor Western Civilization. The seeds of destruction are sown in the very ground of our existence. We are going to end up with a third of the world’s oceans devoid of life because of the petty bickering, lying and hedonistic self-interest which is favored and blessed by the very nature of our social structure and culture. There are no clean hands, but plenty of blame for every party to bear. Petty turf wars will be played out as life is choked by this lust for one more supply of cheap gasoline.
Yeah, quality of life.
Update: It only gets worse, as everyone with any power is desperately trying to keep us from knowing anything about the seriousness of this disaster.
