To the Editor:

I’m writing, in part, to respond to letters by Ed Nicholson [“Let students march and let them raise their voices”] and Paul Scilipoti [“It is time to protect the rights of students, their teachers, and all Americans”] in your March 30 edition.

America is conflicted by opposing worldviews. It’s a culture clash of immense consequence. They are, (broadly speaking and leaving aside exceptions and blends), primarily these two opposed groupings:

— 1. Humanists, atheists, socialists, social gospel, and liberation theology Christians, and New Agers; and

— 2. Those largely committed to historically traditional American founding values.

Those in the first group mostly believe humans are simply evolved social animals — randomly-mutated accidents of bio-chemical matter, where the fittest survive and govern the less fit, granting, infringing, or rescinding alienable human animal-defined “rights.”

Those in the second group mostly believe humans are eternal beings created in the image and likeness of a personal Creator-God with God-given responsibilities and unalienable “rights” to life and liberty.

When those holding traditional American values encounter those committed to humanist doctrines, value conflicts result. Differing worldviews embrace different criteria (epistemologies — logic, empiricism, intuition, feelings, altered states of consciousness, divine revelation) for interpreting the sense data of experience. So, only those in a particular group share their “common sense” views. Values and viewpoints are no longer shared nationwide.

These conflicts include government laws and regulations, government unions, schooling, environmentalism, judicial and economic equality, Fabian socialism, the United Nations, Islam, gun control, etc.

Worldviews differ on:

— 1. The criteria for determining truth, morals, and values;

— 2. Views of God and Cosmos; and

— 3. The nature of the Self.

Today, one’s “Self” is viewed differently from Christian colonization days. An Oxford English Dictionary 1680 entry reads, “Self is the great Anti-Christ and Anti-god in the world.” By the mid-1800s, American views of self were changing. Walt Whitman wrote, “Nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self.”

Contemporaries Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the Self as one’s sole, ultimate authority in a vague transcendentalism which replaced Christian morality with humanistic, non-Biblical, flexibly evolving moralism. Abraham Maslow, noted 20th Century psychologist, asserted: One’s highest psychological goal is Self-Actualization — a peak experience common to gnostics and Eastern pantheists in becoming one’s own God and law.

In essence, “Do what Thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law.” Clearly, massive cultural changes have occurred, considering the worldviews prevalent at our founding.

In 1776,  the Continental Congress selected a Committee of Five to conceptualize the Declaration of Independence, which acknowledges, “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … .” The declaration was the visionary mission statement for the United States; the Constitution and Bill of Rights, its practical implementation plan.

The founders held to varied hues of Christianity, Deism, and Freemasonry. None were atheistic humanists or Eastern pantheists.

In his later years, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, the Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence. That He ought to be worshipped.

“As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, is the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.

“I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House they labour in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.”

Today, our Republic’s founders would be in a minority; labeled “Deplorables” and “Bibliophiliacs” by university consensus-ideologues, the bicoastal cognoscenti, Hollywood’s glitterati, and the chattering classes who devoutly follow the secular priesthood of pundits, anchors, journalists, psychologists, and certified experts employed by the Big Six Media Cartel, the major philanthropic foundations, and big government to enable their keeping up with what’s “in” and the currently correct consensus on political opinions.

The founders would note our transformation from a Republic into an ever-expanding, plastically pliable mass democracy. Careful students of history, they knew democracies, with manmade standards, are radically flexible. In time they led, inescapably, to disorder, anarchic fragmentation, and chaos resulting in some variant of despotism.

St. George Tucker, judge, soldier, (sometime smuggler), and law professor, a leading legal and constitutional thinker of the American Revolution, who fought at Yorktown wrote, “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty ... The right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most governments, it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”

Asked after the Constitutional Convention, “Well, Doctor, what have we got?” Benjamin Franklin, then 81, answered, “A republic if you can keep it.”

Additionally, he observed, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic,” and, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” and, “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”

A lifelong letter-writer and a one-time newspaper owner, Franklin, as an old man, having read so many of his and others’ letters, concluded, “Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”

Franklin would have found repugnant those of our humanist contemporaries who embrace postmodernist poet Edward Hirsch’s worldly-wiseguy conclusion: “Wisdom is for the Child. As you grow old, Cherish folly. Leap into the Void.”

Pity those valuing the spontaneous protests of children’s crusades over civil discourse, study, and seasoned reflection as foundational for wise public policy and for foolishly abandoning the fullness of Solomon’s insightful proverb, “We admire the strength of youth and respect the gray hair of age.”

Victor Porlier

Berne

Editor’s note: The 1989 Oxford English dictionary cites an early example of “self,” a word that first appeared in English in about 1300:  “Oure awn self we sal deny, and folow oure lord god al-myghty.” By the late 1600s, another meaning with positive connotations had emerged as apparent in self-interest, self-confidence, and self-made, coinciding with John Locke’s theory of the mind, the basis of the modern conception of self and identity.