March 18
To Joseph Pearce and his blogpost that blames the Coronavirus pandemic on progressives for what he sees as their implementation of globalism. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog
The virus has spread for multiple reasons. One is our global connections. To blame globalism here is like blaming one's car for breaking. After all, when there is no car, it can't break--but then again, it can't help us either. So some globalism is a necessity. In addition, another reason for the spread of the virus is what was happening within the boundaries of some nations. Thus we can't scapegoat globalism for the pandemic.
The main problem with the spread of the virus is alluded to too concretely in the article because Pearce was too busy blaming progressives. The main problem is having unnecessary black-white views of the world. Black-white thinking can only see globalism as something that swallows national sovereignty or it can only see national sovereignty as something that ignores both international cooperation and the international rule of law. We should note that people from all ideologies employ such thinking, it isn't just progressives. The antonym to such thinking can be seen in Martin Luther King's Jr. comparison of capitalism with communism. He didn't pick one side or the other despite his sharp criticisms of Soviet Union communism as well as Marx. Rather he saw legitimacy and peril on both sides. He saw that life was both individual and and social whereas capitalism and communism each saw life as being only one of those traits.
If anything, it is neither globalism or nationalism--or even progressives--that should receive the focus here. It is our tendency to unnecessarily employ black-white thinking when interpreting problems and their solutions which should be challenged with how we think of globalism and nationalism as working examples. rather than progressives and globalism per se.
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March 20
To Kyle Grow, a Westminster Seminary student, and his guest blogpost about the necessity of good works from the perspective of the Heidelberg Catechism and Ursinus’s writings on the necessity of good works.. his appeared in R. Scott Clark’s Heidelblog.
Besides the fact that the writer is spending more time exegeting Reformed traditional writings, in particular those of Ursinus, than the Scriptures, the issue of elevating those writings is an illustration of why Traditionalists provide a mirror image of Narcissists. Both elevate designated time periods over all others as if to say that those in those chosen time period(s) have everything to teach and nothing to learn from the rest. For Traditionalists, one or more past time periods are elevated over all other time periods. And then this elevation is promoted in such a way so that its "influence" (a.k.a., control) over our thinking and behaviors is solidified. This shows the penchant Traditionalists have for authoritarianism. And verbal illustrations of that authoritarianism is easily found in many of the sources for those traditions, such as in Calvin and Luther, when they deal with dissent.
Narcissists elevate the present over the past in ways that say that their heroes have everything to teach those in the past and nothing to learn from them. They assume that they have nothing to learn from the past. As a result, there is no value in learning from the past. It is the present that holds the ultimate in human learning. Of course how could one prove that claim without fairly comparing what is said today with the past?
So it isn't the mere quoting of our traditions that is wrong, it is the exclusive quoting of them that shows how Traditionalists are more similar to Narcissists than they care to admit. It is from that perspective that I think that the article could have made its desired point much more strongly if it dared to use references from the present in addition to particular circles from the past. For one has to wonder whether Kyle Grow's focus in the article is on the subject of the necessity of good works from a Scriptural point of view or is it on the traditions and the people who provided those traditions. And if his focus is on the latter, what makes this work less man-centered than the present culture about which Grow is complaining about?
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