I just heard an incredible essay about America, Ideas and Liberty by Andrew Klavan the author of numerous books. You can listen to it at http://www.pjtv.com/video/Klavan_on_Culture/_September_11%2C_2009/2411/ but here's an excerpt of the speech by this eloquent man as I tried to write down his words:
Ideas are interesting things...
Ideas are known to us only by physical means but have no physical presence...by our brain chemistry. Ideas take the shape of our culture and our cultural moment...
Ideas have qualities and characteristics. There are good ideas and false ones....
Ideas create a force on human action....Ideas create a tension between themselves and our behavior and the resolution of that tension can set the very course of history.
Our nation once tore itself apart because its' practice of slavery could not co-exist forever with its' principle of liberty. That liberty is the great American Idea...
As our founders knew, embracing the idea of liberty means leaving other attractive ideas behind. You can't be free in all things...
The price of liberty is great...
You can't be free and have guaranteed financial security...
Showing posts with label bad ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad ideas. Show all posts
Friday, September 11, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Iran - "A Tragedy of Bad Ideas and Bad Culture"
The author, Andrew Clavan made an amazing connection between bad ideas and tragedy after watching the movie "The Stoning of Soraya M". Americans should watch this movie to learn the lesson of the consequences of bad ideas because we are headed down the road of serfdom to the state with Obama's government takeover of our health. This is another "tragedy of bad ideas" which will have long term consequences for every American. It is a giant step for state control over our lives. Ideas have consequences - either good consequences or bad ones. It therefore goes without saying that there are good ideas and there are bad ones. Freedom is a good idea...being dependent on the state is a bad idea. State control of our health is a bad idea that will lead to tragedies.
"The Stoning of Soraya M." is based on a book by expatriate Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam which recounts the true story of a woman falsely accused of adultery in the slave state of Iran and after being found guilty was then stoned to death in 1986 in accordance with Shariah law. The bad idea infecting the world today is Multiculturalism and one of the tragedies resulting from this ideology - that all cultures are the same and must be respected - is the way women are treated in the Middle East.
...The tragedy of bad ideas unfolds from a moral flaw in a worldview or philosophy as inevitably as classical tragedy unfolds from a flaw in individual character. Tragedies of bad ideas are the most common, pervasive and destructive man-made mass disasters. Yet our thinking class has become powerless to oppose them or even recognize them for what they are.
The reason is that too many of our intellectuals are themselves ensnared in a bad idea. That idea is multiculturalism -- the notion that no system or government is inherently better than any other, that the rules of morality are just a doctrine written by history's winners. Thus there are no enduring human truths, only "narratives" by which almost any beastliness can be explained away if committed by a people with a claim to having been victimized by a dominant culture.
This bad idea has all but silenced our nation at a moment when the world most needs our voice. Thousands of people in Iran are marching in the streets, protesting a sham election, heroically risking life and limb to try to tear some little breathing space in the smothering shroud of theocracy. Yet President Barack Obama, the leader of the most powerful free nation on earth, responds with mealy-mouthed strategic dithering. The man who in his recent speech in Cairo drew an absurd moral equivalence between Western errors and Islam's unstinting history of oppression has condemned the Iranian government's violent reaction to the demonstrations but remains canny and vague in his support of the protestors.
This is too shrewd by half. There comes a time in the affairs of men when bad ideas can be -- and therefore must be -- powerfully opposed by good ones...(Read the rest here at WSJ).
"The Stoning of Soraya M." is based on a book by expatriate Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam which recounts the true story of a woman falsely accused of adultery in the slave state of Iran and after being found guilty was then stoned to death in 1986 in accordance with Shariah law. The bad idea infecting the world today is Multiculturalism and one of the tragedies resulting from this ideology - that all cultures are the same and must be respected - is the way women are treated in the Middle East.
...The tragedy of bad ideas unfolds from a moral flaw in a worldview or philosophy as inevitably as classical tragedy unfolds from a flaw in individual character. Tragedies of bad ideas are the most common, pervasive and destructive man-made mass disasters. Yet our thinking class has become powerless to oppose them or even recognize them for what they are.
The reason is that too many of our intellectuals are themselves ensnared in a bad idea. That idea is multiculturalism -- the notion that no system or government is inherently better than any other, that the rules of morality are just a doctrine written by history's winners. Thus there are no enduring human truths, only "narratives" by which almost any beastliness can be explained away if committed by a people with a claim to having been victimized by a dominant culture.
This bad idea has all but silenced our nation at a moment when the world most needs our voice. Thousands of people in Iran are marching in the streets, protesting a sham election, heroically risking life and limb to try to tear some little breathing space in the smothering shroud of theocracy. Yet President Barack Obama, the leader of the most powerful free nation on earth, responds with mealy-mouthed strategic dithering. The man who in his recent speech in Cairo drew an absurd moral equivalence between Western errors and Islam's unstinting history of oppression has condemned the Iranian government's violent reaction to the demonstrations but remains canny and vague in his support of the protestors.
This is too shrewd by half. There comes a time in the affairs of men when bad ideas can be -- and therefore must be -- powerfully opposed by good ones...(Read the rest here at WSJ).
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