Bach, Broke, and CRT
CRT will fail. Its fruit will rot. And there will cease to be harvests. Out of many will come not one, but a litigious tribalism directed by novelty.
By Douglas Daugherty
“God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” —Genesis 1:27
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” —Declaration of Independence
“Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection.” —Hermann Weyl
The proposition that man was made in God’s image, puts man at the highest possible level of ethics, morality, beauty, balance, justice, and civility.
When I want to feel the symmetry of life, I often listen to Baroque music. It has a liveliness and balance that I find emotionally and aesthetically symmetrical. It stands in my emotions/mind in stark contrast to the uncivil war we are in the midst of regarding Critical Race Theory, which seems atonal and symmetrical.
Listen to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6
The story of what has fought this furiously is one for theologians and historians.
Man has been conquering and enslaving one another from the oldest of days till the present. It has been the way of a world that chooses to spit in God’s eye rather than embrace Him as a Sovereign Father. From ancient times, through the glory of Rome, from China to India to indigenous tribes, on every conflict it has been mostly conquest and a frequent result of death or slavery. Even now, various estimates put world-wide slavery at over 40 million. In addition, women only own about 20% of property, by custom and law, in the 200 plus nations of the world.
YET, scholars and activists and artists communicate as if the United States started slavery, institutionalized slavery, and slavery/race continues to be the raison d'etre for every level of life and ambition in the country.
Slavery and second-class citizenship for both women and men are an existential reality: a stubborn thing.
Any aware person has now heard of the claims of white privilege, perhaps intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. This short essay shall not catalog CRT’s flaws. Just look at 36 state legislatures in the US saying, “not here”, corporate America’s rapid assimilation of equity executives/police, Chattanooga’s new Mayor’s promises, the UT system hiring of at least 24 equity officers rewriting college administrative goals for hundreds of departments, from humanities to hard science, to suspicions brewing about local K-12 indoctrination. It’s everywhere!
But the hope of man in the most diverse country in the world is the United States. We have several things going for us. A 236-year-old Constitution that can be amended, a strong private economy that is creating a Renaissance for a black middle class, and an historic, national vision for unity and civility: E Pluribus Unum, the official motto of the United States.
All this new focus on equity has a divergent view of life on the planet, motives that seem merely materialistic and a divergent vision for America. Any research will show the roots of Critical Race Theory is Marxist. It is about dividing people into groups, victims, and oppressors and nurturing the vices of envy, covetousness, and revenge. The macro-vision to Marx was about class and economics. In CRT it has changed to race, gender, disabilities, age, etc. The goal is still to divide and, as Marx said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in 1875.
One thing CRT is highly critical of is an incremental approach to true equality. They want the material outcomes now and seek to cancel or erase all obstacles. Story replaces fact and data. Outcomes are based on group quotas, nothing else. Discrimination is part of white DNA and has been institutionalized by mystic subtle degree.
The endgame, and this is not hyperbole, is the cancellation of Western Civilization. What has taken millennia to evolve is to be destroyed by riot and coercive, peer driven law. This is the start of a new dark age. The enlightenment is over. A new normal WILL be created.
What is wrong with equity as the driving force of civilization? Civilization moves forward as economies become more robust, invention flourishes, and art brings a high aesthetic to dominate the mind; none of which are supplied by equity and CRT.
Equity demands a mundane sameness that excludes invention and entrepreneurial progress and investments that take advantage of new opportunities that expand opportunity and prosperity for more people.
CRT is a philosophy of resentment, creating only further divisions and racial and class animosity. Unity and good will have been jettisoned. You cannot build with CRT. You can only destroy.
Conservatives want to keep what works and look for ordered change of what doesn’t.
CRT will fail. Its fruit will rot. And there will cease to be harvests. Out of many will come not one, but a litigious tribalism directed by novelty.
This is the Civil War we are now in. No one will escape if they have their way. Everyone will become a combatant.
Yet, a greater power eternally exists, much like the power behind the good in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is the power of love, forgiveness, charity, and human dignity because man IS made in the Imago Dei. That is hope with the deepest possible roots…but it takes two sides for this to be a wonderful dance and not a terrible battle. Where will you be?
