Manifesto of Old Men and Simple Preachers

“It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could ever as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants. There is evidently a kind of thinking that rejoices in setting up a social objective which has no relation to the individual. Men are prepared to sacrifice their private dignity and happiness to an abstract social ideal, and without asking whether the social ideal produces the welfare of any individual man whatsoever. But this is absurd. The responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society.”

Over time a man, if he is perceptive, comes to certain conclusions.  The most startling is that the greatest truths were spoken to him throughout his life by ordinary men, simple preachers, old men sitting around drinking soda and eating peanuts, his father.  These men, if beneficiaries of a culture and community that embraces common-sense as a virtue, know truths that philosophers for centuries have tried in various ways to express.  Common-sense is something all men should know; common- sense informs us of certain natural laws, common-sense is God’s gift of understanding.

Progressivism is based upon perceived empirical or scientific knowledge.  One wonders what the ultimate cost of our fast-paced, progressive materialistic, industrial/post-industrial, consumerism will ultimately be.  Over the course of history time and again philosophers, theologians, poets, historians and ordinary men of exceptional commonsense have written, spoken and preached against the various outcomes incumbent in unrestrained progressivism absent a human connection to nature and nature’s God.