In a speech about the YMCA, this was Woodrow Wilson, in 1914, talking about young men as conservatives. My comments in parentheses-- ******************** As a matter of fact, they are the most conservative people I have ever dealt with. Go to a college community and try to change the least custom of that little world and find how the conservatives will rush at you. (You see that conservative, to Wilson, means someone who wants to keep traditions without any regard for their value, a sort of mindless resistance to change) Moreover, young men are embarrassed by having inherited their father’s opinions. I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible. I do not say that with the least disrespect for the fathers; but every man who is old enough to have a son in college is old enough to have become very seriously immersed in some particular business and is almost certain to have caught the point of view of that particular business. And it is very useful to his son to be taken out of that narrow circle, conducted to some high place where he may see the general map of the world and of the interests of mankind, and there shown how big the world is and how much of it his father may happen to have forgotten. It would be worth while for men, middle-aged and old, to detach them selves more frequently from the things that command their daily attention and to think of the sweeping tides of humanity. (Wilson takes the position that it is the educators place, Wilsons OWN place, to remove the son from the influence of his father and place the son within the influence of what is essentially Wilsons own worldview.) Therefore I am interested in this association, because it is intended to bring young men together before any crust has formed over them, before they have been hardened to any particular occupation, before they have caught an inveterate point of view; while they still have a searchlight that they can swing and see what it reveals of all the circumstances of the hidden world. (The sheer ARROGANCE of this. I can understand the desire to add knowledge and wisdom to the young life, but... Wilson put it specifically in the terms of separating fathers and sons. No wonder so many sad and baffled parents couldnt figure out what had happened to their children when they went to college. It was and is colleges PURPOSE to cause this disengagement! Such prideful presumptions on his part. There is the pretense of sharing the world with students, but this is really little more than teaching them to see it our way, regardless of the language. No matter how he might say with all respect to fathers, etc., he is demeaning them, damning them with faint praise.) I am the more interested in it because it is an association of young men who are Christians. I wonder if we attach sufficient importance to Christianity as a mere instrumentality in the life of mankind. For one, I am not fond of thinking of Christianity as the means of saving individual souls. I have always been very impatient of processes and institutions which said that their purpose was to put every man in the way of developing his character. My advice is: Do not think about your character. If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. (He is right about not thinking of your character. But here is the bone of the idea, in 1914, of COLLECTIVE SALVATION, upon which Obama has publicly gnawed many times. Wilson thinks Christians are not made to save individual souls but to somehow change the world-- as if the world is not made up of individual souls.) Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig. The only way your powers can become great is by exerting them outside the circle of your own narrow, special, selfish interests. (As a Christian, asked for counsel by a desperate person, giving everything Ive got to help that person find the salvation that Christ has given ME, I now presume that Wilson would have thought me selfish to waste my powers on such a small thing as a human soul. As Lewis would have observed, societies and civilizations last mere hundreds or thousands of years, but the human soul is an eternal thing, hence FAR more important. Any individual person is far more important than the Roman empire or the British Empire or the United States of America. There is no collective salvation.) And that is the reason of Christianity. Christ came into the world to save others, not to save himself; and no man is a true Christian who does not think constantly of how he can lift his brother, how he can assist his friend, how he can enlighten mankind, how he can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which he lives. (Sounds great, until enlighten mankind sneaks in there. And each man should make virtue the rule of his OWN conduct first; it will spread from there. To individuals, mind you, not to a circle. I am also deeply concerned at the no man is a true Christian thing. A true Christian is someone who knows the relief of the saving grace of Christs sacrifice for his sake. The trap of thinking constantly of how I might lift my brother is that I could become a busybody, a meddler, proud of myself for my own constance and effort and so forth. Wilson is already there, by his own implication, as he is lecturing others on what makes a true Christia, and seeming to include himself among them. Pride.) An association merely of young men might be an association that had its energies put forth in every direction, but an association of Christian young men is an association meant to put its shoulders under the world and lift it, so that other men may feel that they have companions in bearing the weight and heat of the day; that other men may know that there are those who care for them, who would go into places of difficulty and danger to rescue them, who regard them selves as their brother’s keeper. ************* As to the last paragraph, fair enough. Young Christian men, as a group, should help others. Doesnt take an educator or a president to tell them that. But the tone and tenor of the whole speech is that we, as Christians, ought to be busily repairing the collective and should be ashamed of ourselves to the extent that we are distracted by mere individuals. Wilsons thoughts are those of his day, but they are the seeds of what has happened to our educational institutions and procedures. Education is for the purpose of altering the mindset of every young person so that they become a part of the collective and pursue its good. From this comes the USSRs for ze good of ze state. The final, unnecessary part of the formula for the new kind of human being they are trying to create, the final part they end up discarding, is the Christianity. It helped them get there, by inculcating thoughts of charity, humility and sacrifice in the young. But in the end, its the Christianity that gets in the way of collectivism. Too many pesky individuals luring us away to see to their needs as individuals, distracting our efforts for ze good of ze state. Cant have that. I hate Woodrow Wilson. :-)
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 12:02:20 +0000
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