Compromising Liberty For Equality
Neo-Neocon in a post called: "Apologists for terror: liberty vs. social equality," compares the motivation behind todays Leftist thought process, with apologists for excesses of the French Revolution.
The italics are a summary by Martin Greenberg discussing the French Revolution (pages 148-170 in The Survival of Culture).
How did intelligent, cultivated people, then and later, come to excuse these abominations which ordinary simplicity sees for what they are? One answer, of course partial, seems to be the deep shift, anticipated by Rousseau, of moral feeling away from concern for liberty to concern for social justice.
For “social justice” please substitute any of the following: social equality, racial equality (or “justice”), ethnic equality (or “justice”), cultural equality (or “justice”), and economic equality (or “justice”) and you have the motivation behind much of Leftist thought and action. The fact that such equality is a fake “justice,” the fact that it cannot actually be attained by human society, and the fact that all efforts towards achieving it end up profoundly compromising liberty are ignored by its champions, who have as much difficulty now giving up their Utopian dream as they did then.
Perhaps more.
Perhaps more.
As Steven Malcolm Anderson (now deceased), a former commenter at Deans World so eloquently put it: Liberty without inequality, or liberty with equality, is an oxymoron. Liberty, or freedom, and equality, are opposites. Liberty, by definition, means individuality, diversity, difference, inequality. Equality means sameness, uniformity, conformity. Free men and women are not equal, and equal men and women are not free.
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Udog (mail):Thanks again Sandi. This one really hits home with me.
7.23.2007 8:08am