Shownotes Transcript
Commissioner Johnston has previously laid out the foundation for a just society as emanating from the principles of natural law. The value of individual human lives is recognized in natural law as the predicate for a just society and just laws. As America’s Founders said, “To ensure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”
In this episode Johnston explains the current climate in the battle of ideas which rages against the idea of a right to life for innocent individuals. The current climate even rages against the use of natural law principles in creating society’s laws. The greatest, single fountainhead for this antithetical approach to the basis of our laws is best summarized in the philosophy of Hegel.
Hegelian Progressivism, which swept through the academic world of the 19th century, quickly began to fulfill its asserted “destiny” by seizing governments in the 20th century.
Essential to Hegelian thought is the pseudo-spiritual idea that history itself gives spiritual purpose and direction to mankind; and specifically the form of government is what enables the human spirit to be fulfilled. This combined spirit of contemporary government with its human participants (or “zeitgeist”) is the essential, animating and spiritual aspect of the Hegelian view of history.
Because Hegel builds on the conflict of ideas - the dialectic - the synthesis of new ideas and forms of government replacing previous ones, the revolutionary idea of constant change and ‘progress’ has become a familiar invocation for social warriors. Individuals are not held to account for justices are injustices but social groups and classes are either oppressed or oppressors. Elevating the oppressed and suppressing the oppressors becomes the goal of the Hegelian Progressivism. Such thinking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries lead to widespread civil unrest and anarchy, and finally the collapse of Russian government and its Marxism takeover.
Decades later, the identical principles were put into action, but as philosopher Brian McGee puts it, the ultimate goal is simply changed. Instead of economic justice, German National Socialist sought racial justice. As Magee states, it’s very easy to substitute for ‘X’ as your goal and use the formula for Hegelian thinking to see his government for whatever purpose you may seek.
Within a few years, the competing Hegelian progressive idea of national Socialism focusing on racial superiority emerged in Germany. It was a direct stepchild of the socialist and Hegelian worldview. By its very nature, Hegel‘s philosophy of progress demands changes of government. Everywhere Hegelian progressivism has taken over, millions of lives have been taken. Individual human lives are disposable to the flow of history.
Johnston includes direct comments from contemporary philosophers: Peter Singer, the animal rights activist who teaches at Princeton, and public intellectual, BBC commentator, Brian Magee. Commissioner Johnston points out that the Hegelian notion of progress pushing towards a brave new future and dismissing traditional values has become an inherent part, not only of foreign governments and ideology, but is widely accepted currently in American academia and even by large numbers of American office holders.
With significant quotes from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the current push to embrace certain new truths and new principles and a new radical form of government, is religiously and spiritually exciting to individuals who otherwise have no spiritual or ethical foundation. Hegel’s compelling, ‘spiritualized’ religious motivation is extremely widespread throughout American culture of the 2020s.
Hegelian disciples (even if they never heard his name) practice the routine ‘grouping’ of individuals, by race or class, or any other social structure. Rather than holding individuals responsible, the social conflict of groups is an essential element of Hegel’s dialectical conflict. The American principles of the value and significance of the lives of individuals is dismissed by Hegelian thinkers. They view humanity as groups - oppressors and oppressed, and injustices as accomplished as only corrected by sweeping social change, and not by holding individuals accountable for their individual actions. Ultimately, The human individual is seen as merely a cog in history. Their purpose and fulfillment is only to be found through the flow of history and righting society’s wrongs. Those who refuse to go with the flow seem to be obstacles to “the changes progress is calling for,” and must be re-educated or removed.
Wherever the Hegelian worldview is embraced, that form of government routinely dismisses the lives of entire classes of human individuals. The right to life of each individual is of little or no significance when it comes to changing mankind’s destiny and affecting the flow of history. That is the ultimate goal of the Hegelian progressive.
While many progressives associate the feelings and quasi-spirituality of Hegelian thinking with freedom, they are often disappointed with the reality that it mandates a belief in a controlling government which is “necessary to bring this inspired “freedom.” Their faith in statism is, in fact, an alarming call for authoritarian change.
The vague, pseudo-spiritual appeal of Hegel is akin to the now widespread American syncretism of George Lucas’ Jedi religion, which many Americans now espouse as their personal model. See, “How we all became Jedis“.” (Religious News service December 20, 2019.)
Failure to recognize the widespread influence of Hegel and his influence on contemporary society is a failure for those who wish to protect innocent lives. The falsehoods, the pseudo-science, pseudo-religion of Hegelian progressivism must be directly repudiated. As Pope Pius the Tenth wrote in his encyclical on Modernity (1907), progressive ideology seduces and destroys clear thinking, the desire to recognize truth and instead presents a synthetic truth, a synthesis, which misleads and superimposes itself on other human beings.