Another Cultural Revolution?

I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion lately that, to the people of the world, there is no right way or wrong way. Plenty of us think we have the best way, but to tell you the truth, all of us are wrong to some extent – at least in the eyes of the world. There is no right side of history. There’s just history. Face it. Just because we do it a certain way, doesn’t mean that people on the other side of the world have to follow along.

Now, just because we’re all wrong doesn’t mean there isn’t a right way. I believe God created an ordered world that we humans have put out of skew. It’s just that even my own understanding and enforcement of that view is wrong. The most I can do is study and think. And to keep on doing that until I’m done.

I open like that because a few news items about the workings of the Communist Party in China have been catching my eye lately. It seems that they’re really stepping up to shape the moral backbone of coming generations — what we Americans would think of as stealing the wonder years of youth. Limiting video games. Erasing pop idols and actors. Banning cartoons. It’s really quite fascinating, from the “observation of human nature” perspective. I’m sure whatever they’re doing will twist a new generation some years down the line, but I can’t say what’ll come of it. Because, again, there is no “right side of history.” There just…is. Whatever today’s Chinese youth think in another 30 years or so will just be what it is.

Now, the Communist Party’s attempt to control so many aspects of their citizens’ lives flies in the face of America’s founding documents. But we can’t have it both ways, can we? America’s founding documents clearly state that we get our rights from something outside of ourselves. A “Creator” – generally understood to be the Judeo-Christian God. Over the two and a half centuries since the establishment of the United States, people have worked tirelessly to get that God out of it all, and the ones who haven’t have not done a very good job of fulfilling his purposes. But if he’s out, then who’s in? The people? Well, here we are again, then, with nothing to say about the way a country runs its business. As long as they have the consent of the governed, they’re good to go. I mean, if the Communist Party’s governance in China is by the will of the people, then why would we bristle at the thought of them limiting video games and banning cartoons? “But, that’s an infringement on their liberty!”

Says who? You?

This goes back to the conscience. There are things that all of humanity just knows are right. Even the people of China, regardless of their conditioning to believe otherwise, have a sense of liberty. The American founding fathers, flawed as they were in some things, got just about as close as you can when they said “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.”

“Self-evident.” We just know it.

So we have yet to see what will come of this in China. The leaders there have no reference for any “Creator” from which they can get their concepts of freedom, so they step in and take the mantle themselves. But what has humanity gotten us so far? And does it look to be getting any better? We may have moved beyond the wholesale bloody murder of the 20th century (something of which China should be aware as both the receiver and the giver of that brutal violence), but that doesn’t mean we’ve moved beyond other, even more nefarious means. We cannot deny that even those with the best intentions find them failed and twisted with time. This is just the reality of it.

But China isn’t doing anything different than what’s been done throughout history. Men have had a thing about wanting to do God’s job from pretty much the beginning. I just can’t see how that is going to end well though. It never has.