The Victory of Socialism?
By Dr Michael Miller, from LifeSite News
Friedrich Engels saw three major obstacles to the socialist vision: “private property, religion and this present form of marriage”
(clip) I’m not suggesting that Americans or Europeans live in socialist states. That would trivialize the suffering of those who lived behind the Iron Curtain. Rather, I am suggesting that socialist ideas have transformed the way many of us think about a host of important things. Ideas considered radical only 75 years ago are now considered quite normal and even respectable.
Look, for instance, at co-habitation rates and the number of people who “do not believe in marriage” or view it as a “bourgeois” institution. Directly or indirectly, they got those ideas from people like Engels and Adorno, who argued that “the institution of marriage is raised… [on] barbaric sexual oppression, which tendentially compels the man to take lifelong responsibility for someone with whom he once took pleasure in sleeping with.” The same-sex “marriage” movement and hostility to the traditional family follow Engels’ goal to destroy “this present form of marriage.”
In other realms we see increasing secularization, religion being equated with intolerance, and decreasing religious practice. Look at the common acceptance of ethical and cultural relativism and the fear of making truth claims lest one be labeled an extremist. Look at the unquestioned supremacy of the materialist and Darwinist thought that dominates the scientific community — or the political correctness that pervades language. Look at our public school system, increasingly focused on indoctrination rather than education. We joke that the universities are the last bastion of Marxism. But who do we think writes the textbooks that teach primary and high school students? The “long march through the institutions” has been more successful than its early advocates could have dreamed.
Of course it would be simplistic to blame socialism for all that ails the West. But socialism has been the principle vehicle of many of these ideas, carrying them into the mainstream.
So how is it that, after such dramatic failures, socialism continues to allure? Perhaps because — as future Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, wrote — the Marxist dream of radical liberation still captures the modern imagination.
It’s a dream that will always betray because sustained liberty requires a certain moral culture: one that respects truth and conforms to it; one that recognizes the inherent dignity and spiritual nature of the person; one that respects the role of the family and encourages a rich and varied civil society; one that acknowledges that culture and religion are more important than politics; one that respects rule of law over the arbitrary rule of men and rejects utopian delusions; one that recognizes that the difference between right and wrong is not determined by majority, consensus or fashion; and, finally, one that recognizes that the ultimate source of liberty is God and not the state.
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