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The Active Voice

From The Angel's Blackboard: The Best of Fulton J. Sheen:
The repeated use of the word crisis in reference to morals is interesting, for it reveals a tendency on the part of many modern writers to blame the abstract when the concrete is really at fault. They speak, for example, of the problem of crime, rather than the criminal; of the problem of poverty, rather than the poor; and of the crisis in morals, when really it is a crisis among people who are not living morally. The crisis is not in ethics but in the unethical. The failure is not in the law, but in the law breakers... There are ultimately only two possible adjustments in life: one is to suit our lives to our principals; the other is to suit our principals to our lives. "If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live"... Many a budding liberal mathematician cannot crush the urge to say that three times three equals six... This kind of philosophy would never have permitted the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11) to return to his father's house. It would have settled the "crisis" by finding a new and handsome name for the husks he was throwing to the swine, and called it "progress away from antiquated modes of morality."
Fulton Sheen (1895-1979), was the Archbishop of Newport. He is famous for the Television series Life is Worth Living, which ran on NBC from 1951 to 1957. I have found Sheen's book to be a bit hit and miss so far, but I enjoyed this passage. It reminded me of how much modern people view themselves and others as helpless meat puppets who can't really be held accountable for anything at all. In the name of 'liberty' they peel back and peel back the realm in which we can wield an active voice in our thinking and doing, and when we are painted into a corner and shown how little agency we have, they propose we yield it to the government, which is somehow not crimped by the forces that plague everyone who pays into it or who runs it. I for one do not believe that free agency is an emergent property that governments have. I think this is simply a new twist on aristocratic snobbery that would have the so called able convince the rest of us that we are peasants with little more life than a cabbage. Anybody see the first episode of the new Apprentice? The new season looks at the contestants through class rather than gender. They're calling it "street smarts vs. book smarts" and it looks like it might be interesting. Street smarts won the first contest handily and had a 3:1 lead in earnings going into the contest.

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