To exalt any other temporal idea above this would be, by definition, inhumane.
We might say that the one idea that matters the most is the idea that people matter, because people are made in God’s image. In fact, he contended “above all” that “love of our fellow human beings” is inseparable from a particular idea, a particular belief in the dignity of people. Johnson was not downplaying the importance of ideas-far from it. Somehow we have to bring back into our private lives, and into our public life, the spiritual element, the sense of awe at the magnificence and possibilities of creation, the pride in goodness and altruism, the fear of wrong-doing and materialistic arrogance, the poetry of the numinous and, above all, the love of our fellow human beings which is inseparable from the belief that all human life, in some way, is created in the image of divinity. In the essay, Johnson warned readers about “the spread of ideologies based on the proposition that ideas matter more than people” as well as the growth of secularism. I was a college senior when I encountered it, and it remains one of the enduring readings of my education.
I distinctly remember reading Johnson’s 2006 essay “The Human Race: Success or Failure?” in The New Criterion.
0 kommentar(er)
