The Christian vs. the collective

The Christian vs. the collective September 1, 2015

Anthony Sacramone has a quite brilliant post entitled “There Are Only Two Conceptions of Human Ethics.”  He begins with an excerpt from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a conversation between two Soviet-era totalitarians on the difference between the Christian ethic and the “collective” ethic.  Then he applies it.

Read the whole post.  Here is the conclusion.  From Anthony Sacramone, “There Are Only Two Conceptions of Human Ethics” | Strange Herring:

There lies deep within every soul an inkling, an intimation, that things are not as they should be—that something is fundamentally wrong, with society, culture, government, our very selves. We do not do what we want, and we do what we don’t want. In short, we act in self-destructive ways even as we protest that we are exercising our freedom in the name or survival and self-expression. We have “fallen” from a great height, a status, a stature, that we can still vaguely discern. Call this “golden age” a myth, if you like, but if we are merely material byproducts of an inexorable and natural process, with one trajectory, then we should be more comfortable in our skin than we are. Instead, an uneasiness about the state of things troubles everyone, as does the burden of putting down the Old Man and his anarchic predations so that a New Man can arise.

So again, there are two ethics at work in our world: the Christian and the Collective. One accepts the New Nature in a purely passive manner, as sheer gift, as grace, but also aware that it cost Someone a great price to win. Those who accept the New Nature must also bear it in a worthy manner, not out of compulsion but out of gratitude, always failing, always repenting, always striving again to witness to their new reality (as opposed to a mere abstraction or fantasy, an idea to be incarnated in some imaginary future).

The other, the Collective, seeks to construct a New Nature, a New Human, by law, coercion, threats, shame, mass-media manipulation. It demands compliance and conformity, plays god because it has outlawed Him as not up to the task of constructing the New Eden “which only we can see.” It rips the skin off babies with an eye toward a future that will be numb to any absolute notion of the truly human that is not first vetted by the Collective, always with an eye toward how this New Human will benefit that same Collective, and especially the elites that sit on its Central Committee.

Choose.

 

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