The People Shall Dwell Alone
Thesis: Winning elections is pointless when the culture and the people themselves are corrupt. A few people at the top won’t be able to change the character of an entire nation. We have to build a better society from the ground up.
Antithesis: Any effective cultural change must go through the centers of power and influence; elites alone have the power to change society. All of the largest social changes of the last century were imposed from the top down.
Possible syntheses:
A. Change in a leftist direction can be effectively top-down, as all they need to do is tear things apart rather than build them up. Change in the other direction must be bottom-up.
B. You can effect social change from the bottom up, but only if you form a separate mini-society with its own set of elites who are independent of the larger social structure. It helps if your smaller society has way different celebrities. You can’t save the whole vineyard, but you can be a fruitful bough whose branches run over the wall.
C. Revolution and mass defenestration of elites is our only option.
Any other possibilities I’m missing? I recognize these are not all mutually exclusive.
Filed under: Deseret Review | Tags: civil war watch, culture war, LDS, politics, revolution
Bruce Charlton
February 19, 2015
@MC- I was with you until C.
Who exactly is supposed to do the revolting and defenestrating?
Not, surely, the tiny and weak and suppressed minority of serious Christians and those who seriously support them?
G.
February 19, 2015
Both your thesis and your antithesis come from scripture. King Benjamin says that in a monarchy, the monarch can lead his nation for better or worse morally. (Counter-example: Mormon may have been something like a military dictator at one point, but on morals his people just refused to be dictated to. Irish democracy.)
But in the judges period in Nephite civilization, which had some kind of participatory/consensus connection to popular opinion, the chroniclers tell us that the people got the government they deserved.
G.
February 19, 2015
@BC,
a feckless and weak government certainly can be overthrown by a tiny, weak, and suppressed minority that is united and ruthless enough. But such a minority would have to be bloody and cruel, so not seriously Christian.
Vader
February 19, 2015
The funny thing is, notwithstanding the jab at BYU’s supposed lack of diversity, it is one of the few contributors of any real diversity to the broader scene of higher education.
Which higher education is working fairly hard to crush.
Agellius
February 19, 2015
Vader:
Exactly!
MC
February 19, 2015
BC,
I was being somewhat facetious with C, although I think G’s answer is also correct.
Vader,
Right, Steve Sailer would say that BYU contributes to macrodiversity, not micro:
“There are, by nature, two kinds of diversity: micro and macro. Globalization drives the world toward micro-diversity, but away from macro-diversity. Practically every strip mall in Los Angeles, for example, features a Mexican taco restaurant, a Cambodian donut shop, and an East Asian nail salon. Each strip mall is therefore diverse within itself. Yet, even the most ardent diversiphile has to admit that every strip mall seems an awful lot like every other strip mall in L.A.”
Vader
February 19, 2015
I find this distinction between micro- and macrodiversity disturbing.
Not because it’s wrong — I think Sailer hit the nail on the head — but because I know which seems more important to me, and it’s not the one promoted by diversity activists. On the contrary, I predict they will increasingly act to shut the wrong kind down.
James
September 23, 2015
@Vader “Which higher education is working fairly hard to crush.”
If higher education is trying to crush Mormonism, it does so in direct conflict to market demand, which consistently sees over-representation of Mormons in highly ranked programs. If it’s true, then Mormons have achieved something like “tolerated” status of the Jews of the Middle Ages, them for their usury and us for our youth spent in disciplined investment in human capital.
Vader
September 23, 2015
That’s an interesting insight, James, and probably has more than a grain of truth to it.
But I was referring more to higher education trying to crush BYU. Either by actual destruction (through disaccreditation) or by forcing BYU to assimilate.