Interesting Times Ahead

J.B.Shurk today, at the American Thinker has an article entitled The Great Simmering of the West in which he outlines the current and future problems facing people living in the United States and Europe along with Australia and to a lesser degree Japan. No surprise, he points out that a very few, very rich men believe it is their right, though they view it as a burden thrust upon them, of course, to tell the rest of us how to live. It just so happens that their vision of our future makes them even richer.

People all over the world are worried about the future. While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many. However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors. Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders. Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions. Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.” With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.

The "surrender to A.I." will, of course, render us all as useless eaters (a term coined in the Soviet Union) in their opinion. No longer being useful to our demigods, as they view themselves, we can be disposed of. Note that the thinking here is strictly Marxist and materialist. It does not partake of a Christian outlook, knows no compassion, and assumes that not man, but these men, are the measure of all things.

For much of the last century, this noxious brand of Establishment “conservatism” has infected Western politics. Whatever monstrosity the political left constructs today, “ruling class conservatives” work breathlessly to conserve tomorrow. The West’s collapse has been a bipartisan effort. That’s why lowly citizens in America, Britain, Holland, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere no longer see competing political parties. They recognize one Establishment Uniparty working against them.

That’s bad news for Western “elites.” They have built a miserable world in which pornography, social media voyeurism, and online “likes” have replaced individual purpose, real relationships, and growing families. National pride and cultural traditions have given way to open borders and contradictory multiculturalism. Despite decades of technological abundance, the future still looks bleak and dangerous. “Art” is all the same because “artists” and “intellectuals” have been conditioned to think and say the same things.

But we have been here before. When Christ entered history, the great monster in the world was the Roman Empire. The Jewish High Priest and the Sandhedrin oppressed the average Jew to please their masters in Rome as well as to make themselves wealthy. Such is the nature of man left to his own devices. But there is another article today, also at the American Thinker by Twilight Patriot entitled Where the New Pope Came From that gives us hope that the new pope might actually intend to speak for Christ, as the Roman church claims.

Patriot makes a case that new pope wanted to send a signal that he, like Leo XIII would work for justice. Progressives and leftists are gushing over the new pope's choice of name as Leo XIV. But hold on a minute. Leo XIII was in favor of private property and capital. He just wanted the working men to get to earn a decent wage, be able to buy property for themselves, and raise a family faithful to God is He intends. Hmmm-isn't that what used to be the American Dream?

A lot of progressive commentators are gushing over the new Pope Leo’s apparent admiration for Leo XIII, whom they describe as a “social justice” pope, who, by issuing the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, “defended workers’ rights” and “laid the foundation for Catholic social teaching.”

The expectation seems to be that the people who read these headlines will nod along with the progressive buzzwords without thinking too hard about what these things meant in 1891, much less actually reading Rerum Novarum for themselves.

I am of the opinion that everyone should read Rerum Novarum. (Here is the Latin original; here is the official English translation.) “But I am not Catholic,” some of you might say, “so why should I care what a long-dead pope had to say about the proper relationship between labor and capital?”

So, I am not Roman Catholic either. And my Latin was never very good. I could never reconcile myself to learning a language that was no longer spoken except in the Roman church. And the English translation is quite long, as these things tend to be. But I urge reading it anyway, and pay particular attention to number 46:

46. If a workman's wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.

The Ten Commandments assume that people will have private property. That is why stealing is wrong, as well as coveting something that belongs to your neighbor. Yes, everything is ultimately God's because He made it. But He put us here to be stewards of His creation which means wisely using the things He has made. Well, it will be interesting indeed to see what Leo XIV will do with the office.