Technology and Barbarism

Technology is not a cure for barbarism.

"Intemperate Minds Cannot Be Free"

Edmund Burke wrote in 1791:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites .... Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. 

We tend to define freedom in terms of the maximizing of choice. We think the more we can have what we want the freer we are. The Christian view of freedom is the ability to do what is right. Since we have given up on any standard of right and wrong that applies to everyone, we are left with, "I'm free to do what I want any old time." This is a recipe for bondage. Jesus didn't say, "He who sins has free choice." But, "He who sins is a slave to sin."

Burke explained the proliferation of law that we see today. Our view of freedom as personal choice throws off internal restraint. We aren't born with internal restraints. They must be instilled by parents and other God-given authority figures teaching the word of God through words and wood. This needed little back up from government when churches and parents were doing their jobs. Today it's left up to government and laws try to keep up with accelerating lawlessness. But now the law looks more and more arbitrary and is taken less and less seriously.

John Witte Jr. argues  that without a basis in divine and natural law, positive law becomes a sort of wish list. To make up for this courts are invested with divine like power. In an episode of Seinfeld, Poppy challenged Elaine to defend her pro-choice view by asking her, "What gives you the right?" She replied, "The Supreme Court!"

Rick Santorum recently remarked in a Republican debate that government doesn't give us rights. It's job it to recognize and protect our God-given rights. This is much more satisfactory than Ron Paul's naive view, expressed in the same debate, that his religious views wouldn't affect his presidential politics. "You can't legislate morality," they say, but isn't it the case that we shouldn't legislate anything but morality? If so, where do we get it?  If we don't get it from God it will be the end of society. If we return to him individually and in our homes, work, churches, and in public, there is hope of a most glorious and gracious kind.

To sum up: Without divine law there's no internal restraints. Without internal restraints positive law increases. Without divine law to back it up, positive law has little force. To give it more force we give more power to our government, especially our courts. But its not the job of government to give us laws and rights but to maintain the God-given ones. If we don't acknowledge what we acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence then we won't be independent much longer. If we return to him we return to hope.