A Vision for America?

Has it occurred to you that progress, as the secular culture likes to define it, often leads to the dilution of individual freedom? There was a time, and it wasn’t too long ago, when the innocent citizen was besieged by endless images of some utopian metropolis, new, shiny and functional where monorails glided far above the orderly streets on a mission to deliver its passengers to sleek towers of commerce that mounted up like spires into the comforting heavens.

This place was the endgame of the social engineer. Through the power of technology coupled with governmental support, individual man would become a willing cog in some great humanist wheel. Slums and garbage and inequities of all kinds would vanish; individual man would be spared disease, war and pain and finally the eternal problems of life would all be banished from existence: Finally, a story with a happy ending.

The trouble with this picture is that it is a fairy tale. The laws of nature cannot conform to this constricted vision concocted from the minds of mere mortals. Achieving a utopian order would require enormous coercion and resistance would inevitably lead to the same wars that nations and their people have experienced in the past.

The present day social idealist, though, is determined to finally get it right, even though that might mean forcing the common man to march in lockstep to the vision. Wasn’t this the very same picture we remember from black and white newsreels: Images of fearsome soldiers parading in impressive precision before leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao and their henchmen? Wasn’t the last Great War fought to stop the spread of this maniacal tyranny that threatened countries built upon the principle of individual freedom and well being?

The Fascist and Communist movements rose up in the twentieth century to install a new order and build a new man. But both of these forces, conceived by human intellect as propositions for constructing a better life for all, ended in rubble and ruin with tens of millions of ordinary citizen lying dead in unmarked graves.

The American proposition was built on the enduring principle of individual freedom. In the beginning, when the new nation was defining its form of government, the founders looked back over the vast canvas of history to determine what would work best to protect those “certain unalienable rights…of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….” The new government would be instituted to protect those individual freedoms and so it was stated in the preamble to the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

For the utopian visionary the operative word will always be “enforce”. We will use the inherent power of government to enforce Justice as we chose to define it. We will enforce domestic Tranquility by silencing all opposition to our way. We will defend ourselves against those we consider our common enemies, both domestic and foreign. We will enforce the Welfare of some by using our power to take from others. And in the end, we will use the power of government to elevate our own stature and power and wealth.

Sometimes it feels that these very same social visionaries are already hard at work in the halls of government. Who will protect the rights of the ordinary citizen? Who will answer the call to honor and sacrifice? Who will blow the trumpet call to warn the people of this great danger? Who?