Rousseau

Glenn Beck's been hitting the progressives pretty hard--and much of what those of us my age and younger (that would be most of the nation) know as the good old USA. Needless to say, we're getting a bit defensive. Oh sure, Hitler and Stalin are flip sides of the same coin and need a good smack, but Teddy Roosevelt? This morning in reading a piece by Nancy Pearcy editor at large of The Pearcey Report, I read this:

"Most of the ideologies that bloodied the 20th century were influenced by Rousseau. His writing inspired Robespierre in the French Revolution, as well as Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. So if you get a grip on Rousseau's thinking, you have a key to understanding much of the modern world."

She goes on to describe how he hypothesized that human relationships "are not ultimately real; instead they are secondary, or derivative, created by individual choice. . . . his most influential work opens with the famous line, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." He did not mean chains of political oppression, as we Americans might think. For Rousseau, the really oppressive relationships were personal ones like marriage, family, church, and workplace." And what will liberate us according to Rousseau, she asks?

"The state. The state would destroy all social ties, releasing the individual from loyalty to anything except itself. Rousseau spelled out his vision with startling clarity: "Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow man, and absolutely dependent on the state." No wonder his philosophy inspired so many totalitarian systems."

Rousseau and his mistress abandoned their five children on the steps of a state-run orphanage, Pearcey writes, even though most died or became beggars. Rousseau thought the state better qualified to raise children than the parents. In his own case, he might have had a point.

Today the government approves and encourages aborting them if they are inconvenient or not perfect; it spends their money before they are born turning them into beggars more dependent on the state.

Quotations from "Rousseau," A Faith and Culture Devotional, Daily readings in art, science and life, by Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington, Zondervan, 2009, p. 225-226.