Neo-Liberal Charity: God Replaced by the Progressive Fuhrer

It is childish to hate everyone named “Lewis” because the kid who beat you up in grade school bore that moniker. It is perfectly idiotic to picture all Russians as good ice-skaters and wrestlers who will break your arms on a whim because you have been filter-fed your entire knowledge of the world by television. How, then, shall we describe the contemporary liberal’s loathing of Christianity based on a very limited exposure to slavering televangelists and/or sensational newscasts about pedophile priests?

The truth (and one may call it a “sad truth” if one regrets the loss of independence) is that genuine charity requires metaphysics. If we do not believe in a transcending, eternal spiritual reality, then we can have no acceptable reason to treat those people kindly who can do us no conceivable material favor. Quid-pro-quo “sympathy” is quite another matter. Were you as Grand Governor or High Judge, say, to bestow a free education (i.e., paid for by taxpayers rather than yourself) upon illegally resident children because you wanted the future votes of their legally registered ethnic brethren, then your act would deserve to be called, not charity, but calculated self-interest. Some will say (or someone OUGHT to say, since it’s a worthy point) that no human act is devoid of self-interest. Even the hero who throws himself on a bomb that those around him may live has perhaps compensated for the guilty memory of a hit-and-run incident. Yes… but the “selfishness” of assuaging a troubled conscience and the cool “investment” involved in milking votes are of two houses. The self one serves in yielding to conscience is one’s identity in God—a being purged of weakness and wickedness which, seen from another angle, compels us to a radical self-renunciation. I do not dispute that a politico may feel conscience-bound to educate poor children in his district. Yet let us be very clear: he must make sincere personal sacrifice and beware that his material profit should not amply compensate him for any pain if his “noble act” is to deserve respect.

Such is not the case in the acts of those who rule us. Their “compassion” for the less fortunate is so clearly calculated that they themselves seldom bother to sanitize of cynicism their public references to manipulated voting blocks. The funding for their “charity” depends upon picking the pockets of those they broadly characterize as the “privileged” (read “undeserving rich”): they point fingers like the televangelists they so loathe rather than reaching into their own coffers. They cannot be bothered, furthermore, to foresee the obvious repercussions of their plundering upon innocent citizens: the hard-pressed property-owner whose taxes are hiked, the masses of legally registered school children deprived of resources, the “magnet effect” created by this largesse which draws more hundreds of thousands into communities not equipped to handle them… the traffic, the pollution, the crime… none of this seems to upset our governor’s or magistrate’s conscience once he has commanded the populace to do the “right thing”—and ingratiated himself to his constituency, in the process.

Yet even if this lord and master (to return to the main point) genuinely bleeds for the underprivileged, we must suppose him a very dangerous man unless he believes in a higher reality. Should he think that feeding, clothing, and housing everyone up to a certain level of uniformity (NOT objective necessity, but a fluctuant standard indexed to how the neighbors live) is his solemn obligation, then he will invariably become a lawgiver, a Moses who has the Plan and the Light; and since every aspect of his plan is this-worldly, his view will in fact embrace the perimeter of All That Is. He will come to consider himself Jehovah or Great Zeus, as well. Neo-liberalism invites such messianic lunacy (on both knees, as one might say). Because it “rationally” reduces all ends of existence to finite, comprehensible ends within an earthly existence, it sees the enlightened despot—a Lenin, a Stalin, a Castro, an Ugo Chavez—as the benefactor of humanity. This luminary can trample down the past’s illusions in which the foolish masses wallow so that he may deliver them to the only real happiness of which they are capable: a free allotment of beer, a free hi-def TV, free cable channels (with approved programming), a free pass for public transport, a free health card, and six free tickets a month to see gladiators at the Coliseum. But for his contempt of the past, he could be Hitler or Mussolini; but since nothing in the past can match his progressive vision, he is instead… well, in the germinating stage, he is very like what we have now in the U.S.

When President Obama exhorted the graduates of the University of Arizona last week to work for non-profits rather than remunerative businesses and to serve the underprivileged as teachers and nurses, he revealed on two counts that he has already strayed into intellectual folly and spiritual hubris by demanding a complete transformation of human nature. In the first place, not only is all human behavior ever so slightly tainted by self-interest: most people most of the time are largely ruled by selfish motives. This is disappointing, but it is also pretty much non-negotiable. The idealist who would alleviate the situation realistically takes up the Cross and preaches to those who will listen that attainment of the next world requires a triumph (or a series of small and provisional triumphs) over this world. The lunatic secular liberal, in contrast, has himself elected to high office and proposes laws against human greed and ambition. Only robots can be good citizens in such a regime.

In the second place, the Obama homily displayed the nonsensical kind of postponement which Deconstructionists, caught up in a post-metaphysical prison, have been mapping out for decades now. If young people are to become teachers and nurses to serve the less privileged, then the less privileged will either have their lot bettered—leaving no more need for teachers and nurses—or else show themselves stubbornly resistant to betterment, in which case teaching and nursing must be but a smacking of the head against the proverbial brick wall. The neo-liberal NEEDS vast numbers of people to be perpetually underprivileged so that he or she always has windmills at which to tilt. Fortunately for these new crusaders, the President’s trillion-dollar deficits ensure that the ranks of the destitute will swell for the foreseeable future.

This man is dangerous. He has shown unmistakable symptoms of a kind of megalomania which didn’t mushroom from the rot of George Bush’s stewing worldview until after a four-year term. He intends to save the world—and all of us who begrudge him free rein to do so will be regarded as the enemies of humanity.