I have a recommendation for MindBlog readers like myself who are concerned about their immersion in the liberal bubble of the New York Times, Washington Post and the numerous sarcastic evening show commentators (Colbert, Maher, Maddow, Noah, etc.). The media (alas, like scientific reality in general!) does indeed have a liberal bias. I'm now finding a crystallized antithesis to my bubble in the American Greatness website, whose daily email screeds I have subscribed to after reading an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times by its publisher and editor Chris Buskirk. To note only three of the twelve pieces in last Thursday's email:
Democrats’ Collapse Could Happen Quickly ,
Yes,Christians Can Support Trump Without Risk to Their Witness , and
Why the Left Mocks the Bible . A clip from the last of these, a telling piece:
...on virtually every important value in life, the left and the Bible are diametrically opposed...
The biblical view is that people are not basically good. Evil, therefore, comes from within human nature. For the left, human nature is not the source of evil. Capitalism, patriarchy, poverty, religion, nationalism or some other external cause is the source of evil.
The biblical view is that nature was created for man. The left-wing view is that man is just another part of nature.
The biblical view is that man is created in the image of God and, therefore, formed with a transcendent, immaterial soul. The left-wing view—indeed, the view of all secular ideologies—is that man is purely material, another assemblage of stellar dust.
Relevant to humans being 'born in sin' I hope to do a post soon on a book I just finished, Nicholas Christakis' Magnum Opus
“Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society”. This book, like Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" , the subject of
previous MindBlog posts, paints a more benign picture of desirable human traits that have evolved to make society possible.
Christakis' book sounds similar to Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Society. I'll look out for it.
ReplyDeleteI've been doing some writing on the history of ideas in liberalism. You use "liberal" in the US sense of "left wing" though from the UK none of your liberal politicians look left wing. Your "liberals" are still seeking individualist rather than collectivist solutions to social problems.
But if we look at classical liberal authors: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith and J S Mill (not to mention Freud and some of the US Founding Fathers) they all share something like the Biblical assessment of humanity as flawed and evil.
In classical liberalism humans are bellicose, aggressive, acquisitive, and selfish. The new liberalism (ushered in over there by FDR) did not reject this view, but adopted the position that given the opportunity humans could rise above their nature - the better angels of our nature as Pinker says.
And in fact this liberal view of man as redeemable is very much consistent with Christianity.