3 years ago

by RALPH K. GINORIO/Keep Right
| April 4, 2022 12:23 PM

How can we make peace with people who want to destroy us?

We are blessed with a surplus of decent folk whose mantra is that we should all come together in fraternal civility. I agree that those things which unify us are more significant than anything that divides us. As individuals and as a society, our loyalty to concepts of freedom and human dignity define us more than any petty disagreement over the best ways to apply these ideals to everyday circumstances.

Or, they should. Unfortunately, we often want to win arguments more than to solve problems. This is true on the extremes of both Right and Left.

Fundamentalism is how these extremes define themselves. Fundamentalism is a reduction of all the subtleties of human existence to one narrow interpretation of a simple set of rules. To a Fundamentalist, adherence to “The Rules” is the only measure of virtue; any deviation equates to vice. So, Fundamentalism is both Legalistic and Millenarian.

Legalism reduces society to a set of clear and enforceable laws. Legalists relentlessly monitor and reward compliance while punishing dissent. Without exception, every Tyranny, Theocracy and Totalitarian Police State in human history is rooted in Legalism.

Millenarianism is the conviction that the world as it now exists is irredeemably evil and unjust. No compromise can or should be made with this world. People should live as apart from it as possible.

Millenarians invest all of their hopes in awaiting an existential crisis that will utterly destroy the current world order. They wish for a Judgment Day or Revolution that will end human life as we know it. After our world is gone, a Utopia will be built in its place; a new world rooted in justice. This “Millennium,” a proverbial thousand years of peace, is their only hope for humanity.

This equates to an obdurate and thoroughgoing hatred of the world as it is, and for everything in it. The only true love is that reserved for the world to come and the only permissible companionship is with other Millenarians.

There can be good and glory in such a worldview. Many of the early Christians who suffered unspeakable oppression under Pagan Rome were Millenarians. Their hopes ultimately led to a new Christian Western Civilization.

Today, on the Right, many Christians retain an essentially Millenarian outlook. Because for them the virtues of our American Republic are not significant, they often withdraw from controversies about how best our society might move forward.

On the Left, most every Marxist, Communist, Anti-Capitalist, BLM supporter, Antifa thug, Intersectional Feminist, CRT devotee, radical Environmentalist, Post-Modernist Deconstructivist, Social Justice Warrior, Anarchist, and LBGTQ activist is likely to be a Fundamentalist; a Legalistic Millenarian.

The Woke crave a society with no privacy from their ubiquitous scrutiny, purifying laws, and corrective punishments. Their shared goal, to replace the current Western world with their paradise, is more significant than any difference in the particular cause which motivates their activism.

Most of us are neither Legalists nor Millenarians. Most of us can, with effort and good will, be reminded that we share more in common than divides us. Most of us can happily work for our personal hopes and dreams within a broadly pluralistic American Constitutional Federal Republic.

However, we in the majority cannot make real peace with those who see our world as entirely evil. We simply cannot trust those who hate this world and wish its coming end to help us save what is good in it from what is bad.

As much as we may want to, we cannot make peace with those who are determined to destroy us.

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: [email protected]

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