The source of world peace
worldnetdaily.com
The "world community" is acting to restore peace, as they say, in East Timor. This sounds like a good thing, and doubtless it is true that thousands of Australian troops will help discourage further massacres of priests and nuns. But peace is more than the silence of guns, and this week seems an appropriate time to raise the question of what would be necessary for the "world community" to really be an agent of peace, or even a community at all.
These days, of course, the "world community" typically means "the United Nations." So the question is, can the U.N. be a cause of peace? I say it cannot, at least as long as it is riddled with institutions, organizations and activists whose principal objective is the destruction of the true sources of human community, and therefore of peace, all over the world. While the troops arrive in East Timor, we should remember the deeper implications of the agenda promoted by U.N. activists under the rubric of the promotion of "rights." Primary among these is the elimination of the very notion of motherhood.
It is remarkable, but no coincidence, that the idea of rights has been much in vogue in a century that has seen more disregard for human rights and human dignity than any other period in history. Rightly understood, respect for human rights can be the basis for securing human dignity and building institutions to nourish it. But the modern notion of rights held by the legions of population planners and "feminists" infesting the U.N., seeks to free human life and will from all authority, and from all principles of moral judgment that are not somehow determined by human choice. The U.N. agenda has at its core the assertion of human willfulness at the expense of the transcendent authority without which human will often becomes an engine of human atrocity.
To see this, we need to turn from diplomatic and bureaucratic sophistications to some common sense. The opposite of rights is wrongs, injustices. But how can you tell the difference between rights and wrongs, if there is no objective difference between right and wrong? The very concept of rights, therefore, rests upon a foundation of objective moral truth.
The crucial question is whether the ground for moral truth can be sustained simply by human will, choice and power. Is convention, as the ancient Greek saying put it, "king of all things"? Sometimes people agree on things that are atrocious. Does this make them right? Honest historians in the future will consider the 20th century to be the worst century in the history of human existence up to its time, because of the number and scale of human atrocities, all over the world. Perhaps the only thing that kept pace with these atrocities was the ominous expansion of the horizons of a certain kind of materialistic human knowledge.
This was no accident, because part of the basis for that expansion of scientific knowledge was an abandonment of the view that the world is ordered by a will beyond human will and law. We have dared to treat the world as if the order that we perceive in it implies no moral foundation for human life, but presents only a potential that can be used or abused according to human will. When scientific materialism dominates one's understanding of human things, then human beings as such cease to be ends in themselves. They cease to be sacred vessels of something that transcends the material world, and they become instead mere things, just like the elemental forces that we can use or abuse to make our cars go or build nuclear power plants.
The denial of a transcendent and objective will in the world offers tyrants and their clerks a grave temptation to disregard of the universal claim of human dignity. And what does the word "rights" mean then? It all too often becomes simply an empty label placed on policies that aim at the attainment and concentration of power in human affairs. Human beings simply become the playthings of ambitions, appetites and theories -- theories that may perhaps aim at realizing a concept of a better world, but which do so at the cost of our ability to distinguish between what is truly better and worse in the human realm.
This is why the international "rights" agenda focuses so much on the whole issue of so-called "reproductive rights," and why abortion has become a central focus of the battle. The practice of abortion translates most directly the dehumanizing results of scientific materialism into the human context, asserting that it is not only legitimate, but necessary for the larger good, that we should treat human beings as if they are mere things, with no more intrinsic significance than any other elements of the material world that we deal with and manipulate.
The body-destroying assault of concentration camps and extermination ovens has not been the most gruesome aspect of the atrocities of modernity. It has been the soul-destroying assault, which attacks the organic wholeness of both the human person and human institutions and societies, that has most deeply destroyed peace in our century. It is a great irony that throughout the U.N. and its associated activities are found so-called champions of women's rights who actually do their best to undermine the understanding that the opportunity to be a mother is a central part of a woman's nature. They know that the real aim of their agenda of death must be not just the destruction of physical life in the womb. The very concepts that sustain our elemental human institutions must be either translated into a new and meaningless language, or else destroyed.
Without the formative concepts of family and mother, the world literally will no longer contain individuals worthy of the name, because there will be nothing about them that is acknowledged as elemental or indivisible, deserving respect in itself. The only acknowledged organic whole will be created by the power of government and other institutions which are supposed to represent the higher welfare or purposes of human society. These institutions will have as their raw material millions of animate bodies that are tolerated as they pursue their satiating pleasures. But they will not acknowledge individual souls that can lay claim to any intrinsic respect against the powers that seek to manipulate them into being docile parts of a larger whole.
Standing in the way of realizing this totalitarian future are the institutions that most nurture the moral sense of the human individual, that teach us that we are not in the world simply to serve the purposes of others -- of government, of society, of institutions -- but rather as ends in ourselves, to be respected as such in our dignity.
Most human beings learn this lesson from mothers, who show in so many ways that the significance of their children goes beyond the fragile little body. Mothers treat the helpless little child as if it were the king of the world. In doing so they teach the world the most important lesson of all about the intrinsic and universal dignity of man. The love of mothers teaches us to acknowledge the presence of God in the child. Through this affirmation we realize the real foundation of the human claim to dignity, which is that spark of divinity in each of us that makes us moral beings, with a dignity that goes beyond our circumstances and condition.
The agenda of proliferating "rights" and of the supposedly liberating freedom from such things as motherhood and family leads directly to the view that the worth of human beings is determined by material conditions. The shrill chorus of demand for "rights" to material success and personal liberation confines the field of human hope to our physical circumstances and our ability to manipulate those circumstances through scientific trickery. Such an understanding of the human condition denies our capacity to transcend all such material conditions and circumstances, and thereby ignores the anonymous heroism of cradle and hearth throughout the ages of the world.
Whatever material efforts the world community makes to restore peace in the world's "trouble spots" will be in vain until the nations cease to acquiesce together in the deepest war of all -- the revolt of human will against the nurturing constraints of nature that God has not imposed, but given, to make us free to be His children. There can be no "world community" except on the basis of this truth, and no true peace.
Former Reagan administration official Alan Keyes, was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council and 2000 Republican presidential candidate. |
