Ed Driscoll

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Perfecting The Human Condition

December 10, 2009 - 1:55 pm - by Ed Driscoll

While frequent Commentary contributor Abe Greenwald believes that Obama is “Going Neocon”, Victor Davis Hanson spots quite an interesting “tell” in President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

Obama offers us, “But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected.” That thought of the perfectibility of the human condition, in lieu of deterrence and military preparedness, throughout history has gotten millions killed. The human condition can be improved, but only by acknowledgment of the lethal propensities of some — and by readiness to prevent those propensities’ becoming manifest. Most of the great wars of the 20th century were fought against those who were convinced that “the human condition can be perfected.”

Which isn’t the first time Obama and his wife have used such eschatological rhetoric, of course.

(Via Jude Christodal, guest-blogging for Hugh Hewitt.)

Related: “Barack Obama as a person is a fantastic individual, but Barack Obama as an idea marks an evolutionary flash point for humanity,’ gushed actor Will Smith, who will co-host Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo.”

Filed under: Liberal Fascism, The Future and its Enemies, The Return of the Primitive, War And Anti-War

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1 Comments, 1 Threads

  1. 1. westsoundmodern

    I was just having a similar thought regarding this quest for perfection of the human condition that animates the Left. One of the main arguments against this desire to perfection has been, as VDH rightly pointed out, the cost in human misery that is nesescary to acheive this so called perfection.

    What if in this age however, violence is no longer needed as the means for such massive societal change but instead we can simply be seduced through the popular culture, media, entertainment, that which we see everyday and become more and more comfortable with which each passing year, and quietly, happily in the case of many, we submit to that which had to be taken by force in earlier times. The Left may feel that they have reached the point where they will not have to chain us into accepting their philosophy as we incresingly seem willing to slip the shackles on ourselves.

    Strange times.

    December 10, 2009 - 2:33 pm   Link to this Comment