Good-grief, this is exactly what we are creating and leaving for our children, isn’t it?
“…an impoverished ideal of democracy that cannot resist the greater coherence and articulateness of totalitarian movements…”
Here’s a simple question to stump the kids in school today. How do we tell the difference between right and wrong? Looking? Feeling? Tradition? Learned behavior?
That’s all well and good until someone else has a different feeling, tradition, or education.
Understand: You can’t base democracy in nothingness.
If everything is a matter of opinion, and if everybody is entitled to his own opinion, force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion. And of course if success is the test of rightness, right is on the side of the heavier battalions.” And an educational system that does not have as its central concern “moral and intellectual and artistic and spiritual development” is ipso facto bequeathing to its young charges a decadent, impoverished ideal of “democracy” that cannot resist the greater coherence and articulateness of totalitarian movements.
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)
