The Paradox of Reason by Thomas Brewton

Liberal rationality leads to chaos, thence to tyranny.

The foundation of liberal-Progressive-socialism, beginning with the pre-Revolutionary French Encyclopedists, has been belief in the supremacy of human reason as the sole guide to social order. In practice it turns out to be a foundation of sand, always washed away in the deluge of political tyranny.

Reason as the only source of wisdom was almost immediately stripped of such pretense and revealed as naked savagery in the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, instituted to compel conformity to the revolutionists’ political aims.

After the 1789 Revolution, France was reeling under wild swings from monarchy, to attempts at constitutional government, to the rule of street mobs. Matters came to a head with the execution of King Louis XVI in January, 1793. The Assembly’s Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety announced,

It is wholly necessary to establish briefly the despotism of freedom in order to crush the despotisms of Kings. (quoted in André Maurois, A History of France).

What “the despotism of freedom” meant was the bloody Reign of Terror. The Revolutionary Tribunal, during fourteen months of continuous sessions, condemned more than 70,000 people to the guillotine: children, men and women, old and young, aristocrats, monarchs, priests, ordinary citizens, and peasants.

Similarly, sixty years later with the advent of Darwin’s hypothesis of evolution, liberals began the destruction of the English and American foundations of constitutional democracy. As Darwin’s champion Thomas Huxley declared, the morality of Judeo-Christianity was ignorant superstition. There was no such thing as sin, no such thing as right or wrong; there was only the struggle for survival.

Full Article...

Sphere: Related Content