The Wisdom of the Ages or the Superiority of Modern Thought
Old man, look at my life.
I’m a lot like you were.
Love lost, such a cost.
Give me things that don’t get lost.
Like a coin that won’t get tossed
Rolling home to you.
Old Man – Neil Young
…..
One of the major schisms between the left and the right, is how we look at those who have gone before us. On the right, we value the wisdom of the ages; the words of sages who have gone before; enduring values that transcend any given political or societal movement. On the left, they believe that they are smarter than that. Thousands of years of history have made today’s persons (no way they would say “men and women”) more omnipotent than anyone who preceded us. There are no enduring values. Only old mores that need to be rejected or revised.
It is clear where the left stands on this. First it was Confederate Generals such as Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson whose images had to be removed and whose existence erased. They have moved on now to Abraham Lincoln and basically all of what we on the right call the “founding fathers.” They reject the teachings of the Bible and Judeo/Christian culture writ large. From Plato to Aristotle to Shakespeare, none of the architects of what we know as “western civilization” are to be read and nothing is to be learned from them.
You see, the elite leftist professors at Cornell and Yale (and many other “leading” universities) possess all the wisdom that society requires. In their benevolence, they have put aside all that has been and replaced it with their own entirely new morality code, standard of behavior, economic theory and political constructs. After all, Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, gender fluidity and any other number of leftist doctrines thought up out of thin air in the last 40 years were not fully understood by anyone who lived before this generation and therefore anything that prior generation ever said must be discarded as rubbish.
And on the right, the opposite is the case. We believe in the enduring values that have stood the test of time and served society well for centuries. Hillsdale College teaches classes on the “great books,” where the accumulated wisdom of the ages can be read, understood, and absorbed so as to inform our future.
We don’t believe you should judge characters from the past according to the standards of the present. To my leftist friends, I often try to illustrate this by asking if 100 years from now, abortion was seen as a reprehensible and unjustifiable act, should all the pro-choice people today have their lives and accomplishments discarded even though being pro-choice was a legitimate political position in their time? The leftists discard the idea that that could ever happen. I try other examples with the same result. When I suggest what if the converse were true and abortion became as common as a tooth extraction should the pro-life people of today be discarded? They of course say that they should.
You cannot debate these people. They are so convinced of their own righteousness according to the standards that they make up that they reject any notion that they could ever be wrong about anything and embrace the idea that any who disagree with them are worthy of cancellation from life and existence. They are like a sports team that makes up all the rules after each play. They can never be wrong.
This is one of the great problems that makes me not optimistic that there might be some political reconciliation in the near term. It is hard to find common ground with groups who do not share any fundamental beliefs, history, or framework of right and wrong.
The Science Fiction writer Robert Heinlein said many wonderful things. Amongst them is that “a generation that ignores history has no past – and no future.”
May we not fall into that trap.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast and Live free