The “melancholy long, withdrawing roar” of faith leaving a culture according to George Will in a new book, leaves it susceptible to feverish quests for redemption through political action” * We are witnessing some of those feverish quests now as folks throw as many concepts up against the wall as they can to see what sticks. Policies are submitted and debated for fixes to problems that developed because of past quests for redemption through political action. The denial of God as creator leads to overblown magnanimous central planning that usually results in some kind of suffering and a resulting tyranny. History is replete with the stories of feverish quests for redemption through politics. It could be argued that the whole of the arch of the Old Testament is the history if these quests.
The longer the quests last the sillier they get. When we witness a politician who solemnly declares that the way out of a homeless crisis is having Doctors write prescriptions for houses, we may not have hit the bottom but we may be getting close. It’s happened and it will probably tried. Who will build the prescribed home and how much it will cost are questions left unanswered. If there are not enough homes that can be afforded now, an Rx pad with a signature on it seems to be hopeless. We need to remember that it was a kind of Rx pad signed by some central planning guru that caused a housing shortage in the first place. It was a signature by some feverish quester that got the mentally ill and the drug addled out of treatment centers and turned them out in the streets in the first place.
*George Will, The Conservative Sensibility (New York) Hachette Books 2019
