There’s an old expression I just made up: There’s no liberal in a bear attack. In matters of life and death, like a bear ripping apart your house, there is no time to morally preen and pat yourself on the back for how smart you sound.
Back in the day, life was pretty brutal for everyone, so there just weren’t any liberals. Unserious people starved to death or were mauled by giant sloths. With death lurking around every corner, people had no time for useless worries like whether warming the ozone would kill unicorns or whatever.
Things are a lot easier now — so easy that even useless people can survive — and thus we now have to suffer liberals. But we have one brutal leftover from the olden days. War. And it’s not something a liberal is ever going to learn to deal with.
Absolutely. A favorite saying of mine is "ecoguilt is a first world luxury". Same idea, but Mr. Fleming says it better. You can read it here.
Insulating folks from the consequences of their useless or counterproductive ideas and actions is a feature of modern affluent society.
In the old days, there was no cushion, and if the wolves killed the milk cow or the crops failed to come in, your family went hungry and possibly died. If the next village over had a crop failure, you could bet that they would be coming over the hill with spears in hand to see how badly you wanted to keep what was yours. In this environment everyone understood that food was important and security a close second.
Social cohesion is an element of security and a vehicle for that cushion. Religion is something that encourages social cohesion.
Since the end of WWII the unprecedented affluence of society has allowed a couple of generations of folks who have never experienced a lack of food, have never seen an empty store shelf, or faced a group of people who view them only as an impediment to what that group wants and is perfectly willing to kill them to get them out of the way. Thus the loss of social cohesion, the diminuation of the importance of religion in social life, and the rise of modern liberalism.
I believe this affluence is an unnatural situation that requires careful maintainance in order to persist (eternal vigilance). I don't believe that vigilance is being applied, and so between the rise of trans-national gangs and islamic terror once again folks are going to be coming over the hill to take what is yours. I heard a saying once that "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged". Well, I think we're all in line to get mugged here.
