“[Of] every hundred new ideas, ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society. For these are the wisdom of generations, after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.” (Will and Ariel Durant)
“We can see what is possible, unburdened by what has been.” (Kamala Harris)
Harris’s statement is really confusing, and frankly, I don’t understand it (I wonder if she does). The grammar is discombobulated, which makes her words difficult to comprehend. Is what “we can see” supposed to be “unburdened” from “what has been,” or should what is “possible” be unburdened from the past? Her declaration either means, “We should unburden future possibilities from what has been,” or “Our vision of possibilities should be unburdened by what has been.” Her “Kamalaspeak” is incomprehensible, but ultimately, her meaning is clear. She desires to change the world based on her visualization of a radical, Leftist Utopia. Regardless, what she said is nonsense. And impossible.
Nobody, not even conservatives who believe very strongly in traditional values and history, is opposed to change. There is no human perfection in this world; there hasn’t been one since before the fall of man, and there will never be again. We all want to “improve” things and see “progress.” Of course, the problem is defining “improvement” and “progress,” here, the Left and Right vociferously disagree. I do not believe that killing unborn babies, mutilating children for sexual pleasure, or the destruction of the nuclear family is “progress.” The Left does. We will never agree on that. I will never have “unity” with anybody who believes in those horrid practices.
Recommended
But, yes, I think some change is often necessary. I’d like to “change” our society back to respect for human life, properly raising children, and marriage the way God intended it. As implied in the Durant quote above, those things have worked pretty well down through history. But the Left wants to “unburden” us of these very successful human traditions, and we are seeing some of the horrendous consequences of such in America and the world today. A tree is known for its fruit.
True wisdom will not attempt to “unburden” mankind from “what has been.” That is not only extremely foolish, it is utterly impossible. Nobody can divorce themselves from the past; every one of us is a product of it. What we can and must do is learn from history, or, as the Durants infer, to study the “wisdom of generations,” which are composed of “centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.” Mankind has made many mistakes in the past; we certainly need to discover those lest we repeat them. Yet, when something has proven successful—and it will do so if based upon the eternal principles that flow from the God Who is the source of all wisdom—then we are most imprudent to “unburden” ourselves of it.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The Left denies that, of course, and the past one hundred years of Leftist history around the world have demonstrated the costs of that denial. For example, when countless lives are destroyed by “unburdening” people from the eternal (and historical) wisdom of what a man and woman and husband and wife are, then our experiment has miserably failed. Even Confucius said, “The foundation of society is a disciplined individual in a disciplined family.” To try to “unburden” humanity from that God-ordained tradition and historically successful societal foundation is not one of the “one in a hundred” (or less) experiments that are superior “to the traditional responses which they propose to replace.” We should have had the sense and prudence to have never tried it in the first place. But we never learn from God or history.
“We can see what is possible,” Kamala said, and there is nothing wrong with dreaming. It’s a good thing, actually. She never tells us what she “sees” as “possible,” probably because she either doesn’t know herself or is afraid to speak her mind about it. We’d all like to have a world without racism (it will never happen) or where there is no murder, rape, adultery, war, and barbarity (ditto). But we can dream, and we should try. But it will never be done “unburdened by what has been.” Because “what has been” tells us that these horrors have no possibility of being eradicated except by virtue, godliness, trust, love, goodness—or monstrous, utterly totalitarian government. Virtue, godliness, etc., are qualities that Kamal Harris and the Left don’t believe in, or perhaps better, they want to redefine to mean what they want them to mean, not “what has been” has always taught us they mean. Somehow, “love” now means you can mutilate a child or murder an unborn baby. Kamala definitely sees those “possibilities,” and she wants to be “unburdened from what has been” traditionally believed about them. She isn’t “seeing” love, trust, godliness, etc. She is seeing a totalitarian government that will make all the rules. That’s what she sees. That’s what the Left has always seen.
The battle today is not just, or even mainly, between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between good and evil, God and atheism, truth and error, virtue and licentiousness. No knowledgeable, God-fearing person could ever vote for a Democrat today; Lord knows it’s hard enough to vote for Republicans. Change is fine, IF it is based upon the wisdom of the past, IF it returns us to that wisdom when we slide away from it, IF we are NOT “unburdened by what has been.” A Kamala Harris administration, in her own words, will continue the moral and societal degradation of America.
Subscribe to my substack: mklewis929.substack.com. History, Bible, the “why” things happen, not just the “what.” Follow me on “X”: @thailandmkl. Go back to a great age in American history and read my Western novels, Whitewater, River Bend, Return to River Bend, and Allie’s Dilemma, all available on Amazon.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member