“It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could
ever as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that
has so little regard for individual wants. There is evidently a kind of
thinking that rejoices in setting up a social objective which has no
relation to the individual. Men are prepared to sacrifice their private
dignity and happiness to an abstract social ideal, and without asking
whether the social ideal produces the welfare of any individual man
whatsoever. But this is absurd. The responsibility of men is for their
own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical
welfare of some fabulous creature called society.”
Over time a man, if he is perceptive, comes to certain conclusions.
The most startling is that the greatest truths were spoken to him
throughout his life by ordinary men, simple preachers, old men sitting
around drinking soda and eating peanuts, his father. These men, if
beneficiaries of a culture and community that embraces common-sense as a
virtue, know truths that philosophers for centuries have tried in
various ways to express. Common-sense is something all men should know;
common- sense informs us of certain natural laws, common-sense is God’s
gift of understanding.
Progressivism is based upon perceived empirical or scientific
knowledge. One wonders what the ultimate cost of our fast-paced,
progressive materialistic, industrial/post-industrial, consumerism will
ultimately be. Over the course of history time and again philosophers,
theologians, poets, historians and ordinary men of exceptional
commonsense have written, spoken and preached against the various
outcomes incumbent in unrestrained progressivism absent a human
connection to nature and nature’s God.
