The 'Absolute Shall' Shall Always Absolutely Fail, Especially In America! And More Cheers For It!

'Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky: It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.'

- Mark Twain

'By God, I’ll drink to that,' Ken Burns must have thought to himself, as he settled into making his latest historical epic with fellow filmmaker Lynn Novick. This one would be about Prohibition, which, ironically, debuted on the same night as the ­Emmy Award-winning Prohibition-era epic, Boardwalk Empire.

Watch video here:

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/watch-video/#id=2082684137

Hold on to your hat.

"Prohibition: A Film" by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick has loftier ambitions. It’s seeped in sepia-toned nostalgia and the kind of first-person witness narrative so familiar to followers of Burns’ earlier epics The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball and The War. And then, there’s the music: breathy, bluesy jazz, soaked in fine whisky and delivered straight-up ... with ice.

“The conventional image of the Prohibition era is, of course, the rain-slicked Chicago streets around which the Model T is careening, machine guns blazing, or the flapper who is shimmying in her miniskirt with her bobbed hair,” Burns said in an interview. “We have a lot of that, and it is very exciting and sexy violent.

“But we also felt the story we needed to tell encompassed other things. Our whole first episode details the century of events that led up to Prohibition, and takes us right up to the moment the law goes into effect.”

Anyone with a sober, lucid view of 20th-century history has a vague idea of what Prohibition entailed, and virtually everyone knows it was an abject failure in the end. Burns’ and Novick’s Prohibition is filled with the kind of hidden, little-known detail that brings even familiar stories alive, though. It’s those little-known details that compelled Burns and Novick to tackle such a daunting, all-encompassing historical project. Passage of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on 16 January 1919, Burns noted, 'would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into law-breakers.'

'After Prohibition, after everyone had seen how devastating it was to morals, to policing, to government.  It was really a failure.  People are picking up the pieces trying to make sense of it.  The key thing, though, about this picking up the pieces after Prohibition, was the same God that laughs at our folly -- and there was folly in Prohibition -- still holds us responsible, still wants us to build a better society, to build a better world, and doesn't disdain human endeavour. And, I think that post-Prohibition, you were picking up the pieces trying to find a moral framework to build a better America, but without quite so much of the pride, arrogance and self-assurance that the Prohibitionists had.' 

- Martin Marty, Theologian

In strictly legal terms, the 18th Amendment barred the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof unto (and) the exportation thereof from the United States.” In real-world terms, it provided a foundation for the rise of organised crime. In Burns’ words, it pitted the countryside against the cities, natives against immigrants, Protestants against Catholics. It raised questions about the proper role of government, about individual rights and responsibilities, about means and ends, and unintended consequences, and about who was and who was not a “real American.”

Prohibition was repealed in the 21st Amendment, on 5 December 1933 — in time for Christmas — but the damage had been done: The so-called “American century” would never be the same.

Prohibition was, for a brief time, a uniquely American moment in history. Other countries were having none of it.

'The Home Secretary of Great Britain,' Burns said, his voice lowered in mock solemnity, 'a man named Winston Churchill, refused to life a finger to stop the flow of rum from a little protectorate off the coast of Florida named the Bahamas.'  As a Brit, you must understand why some many of us cheer our wonderful Winston!  I'll also tell you this:  Neither the Catholics nor the Protestants were much upset when the Puritans left the Isle and sailed the New World with their puritanical lifestyle, but even they had a ship hold full of rum and cider.

'Prohibition was an affront to the whole history of mankind.'

- Home Secretary of Great Britain, Winston Churchill

In fact, alcohol was as American as apple pie, Burns says: "The hold of the Mayflower, the ship that carried the first Puritans to Massachusetts, was filled with barrels of beer. At Valley Forge, George Washington did his best to make sure his men had half a cup of rum every day, “and half a cup of whisky when the rum ran out.” A young Abraham Lincoln sold whisky by the barrel from his grocery store in Illinois. “Intoxicating liquor,” he later remembered, “was used by everybody, repudiated by nobody.” 

'Very little good has ever been done by the absolute shall.'

- Anonymous American clergyman, 19th century 

Prior to Prohibition, Americans drank at every meal, including breakfast. By 1830, the average American over 15 years of age drank the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey every year, three times as much as their 21st-century descendants do. Americans spent more money on alcohol each year than the total expenditures of the Federal government. 

'Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.'

- CS Lewis

Clearly, something had to give — and not just the degradation of ­Saturday night.

'What we begin to understand is that the study of history provides us insight, and (we hope) helps us apply compassion and tolerance to the political circumstances we find ourselves in today.' 

'Prohibition is not a matter of abstract morals; it is a matter of social welfare, like the abolition of the personal liberty of spitting where one chooses or the institution of compulsory vaccination.  Viewed in this light, it is the greatest and most interesting experiment that has ever been tried in civilisation.  It is certainly worth trying fairly and honestly...We believe that a substantial majority of Americans what to see that trial made.'

- New York Governor, Alfred E. Smith, Democratic Presidential nominee

Progressivism is the child of the Pietism movement, which originated primarily in Protestant churches in the Northeast with a few Jews and Catholics jumping on for the ride.  Modern Progressivism may have abandoned its Christian roots, but it hasn't left behind religion.  It has just replaced the original God of their ideology with one or more others...like Gaia, nutrition (by the way, one of the Hitler Youth slogans was 'Nutrition is NOT a private matter!'), various ethnic movements, eugenics in the form of abortion and population control, pseudo-sciences such as those promoted by New Age prophets, etc. 

'When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.'

- Eric Voegelin

'When people lose sight of the proper objects of religious passion, they do not necessarily lose their religious instincts. Many will fill that hole in their soul with things of this world.'

- Jonah Goldberg, When Liberalism Fails

As the 20th century progressed, so did Progressivism's movement away from 'Social Gospel' to 'Social Justice.'  The dogmatism and evangelicalism fervour remained, but the God of the former was replaced with whichever god or gods were affiliated with a particular subset of the overall crusade.  As noted above, Gaia replaced God.  The 'Black Power!' fist, which was a product of the Soviet's disinformation programme, replaced its predecessor which contained the cross indicating its nearly wholesale abandonment of Christianity in favour of either atheism or a form of political Islam.  Salvation became a collective endeavour.  Man could perfect man.  Humanity could build its own 'Heaven' on Earth.  The Ten Commandments were replaced with an ever-changing, ever-growing list of do's and don't's - sins. 

The 'fire and brimstone' clergy was replaced by the 'fire-breathing' nomenklatura.  Just  as the Temperance Movement was anything but tempered and moderate (temperance actually means virtue), the tolerance of modern-day Progressivism is anything but inclusive, judgemental, accommodating, welcoming, and peaceful.  As long as you agree 100% with the current flavour of the Progressive orthodoxy, you will not be subjected to a contemporary witch test.  If you agree with the nobility and movement makers, you will not be thrown into the river to sink & drown as a heretic or float & drown as an innocent, but misunderstood adherent.  Furthermore, you must formulate your opinion based upon the latest 'evolution' of belief.  

The tenets change constantly depending upon the feelings or 'adjustments' made by the clerics and apparatchiks.  Yesterday, the rule may have been against gay marriage, but today, you must find anything less than 'marriage equality' abhorrent.  If the computer models fail to support the proclamations of the 'scientists,' then global warming becomes climate change which becomes climate weirding then climate chaos.  Undoubtedly, they will eventually close the circle and find themselves back at their hysterical warnings issued in the 1960s and 70s about the impending catastrophe to be brought to us by the New Ice Age.

'[Modern, elite Progressives adhere to and promote] social gospel, without the gospel. For all of them, the sole proof of redemption is the holding of a proper sense of social ills. The only available confidence about their salvation, as something superadded to experience, is the self-esteem that comes with feeling they oppose the social evils of bigotry and power and the groupthink of the mob.'

- Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America

On the history of Pietism:

Obama's Neo-Nationalism

'Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.' 

- Senator Barry Goldwater, (R-AZ)

'What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.'

- Friedrich Hoelderlin

In his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II delivered a scathing critique of socialism, declaring that 'the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated. . . . Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil.'

Obama couldn't disagree more with Pope John Paul II:

'Sometimes this is a difficult road being in politics.  Sometimes you can become fearful, sometimes you can become vain, sometimes you can seek power just for power’s sake instead of because you want to do service to God.  I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God.

We’re going to keep on praising together. 

I AM CONFIDENT THAT WE CAN CREATE A KINGDOM RIGHT HERE ON EARTH.'

- Senator Barack Obama, 8 October 2007 

'My individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country. Unfortunately, I think that recognition requires that we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices to bring about a new day and a new age.'  

- Barack Obama, 1995 

'... my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country. Um, unfortunately I think that recognition requires that we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring about a new day and a new age.'

 - Barack Obama, 1998

'My individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.' 

- Barack Obama, Dreams of My Father, 2004

'I ask you to take it because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.'

- Barack Obama, Xavier commencement address, 2006

'Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition.'

- Barack Obama, Wesleyan commencement address, 2008

It is nothing but sheer arrogance and delusion to imagine that one can save the collective, it can save you, and Heaven can be built here on Earth.  Man can no more be the saviour of another than he can control the temperature of the globe.  A better example of the Absolute Shalls and the movement from the Social Gospels to Social Justice cannot be found than in one of the most militant, radical and theocratic environmentalist movement.  In his review of the book The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall, Charles Moore writes:

The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.

Science has become a religion.  It is no longer a product of the scientific method.  It is a statement of belief based upon a quest to find, jigger, and create evidence to support the belief that you want to be the answer.  Honest science requires that it be allowed to be disproven.  Did Galileo, Einstein, Tesla or Edison declare 'the science is settled'?  No, they each produced the results of their work and invited anyone to disprove it.  On the other hand, Al Gore, Maurice Strong, Michael Mann and the rest of the Cult of Gaia proclaim what the science is, close the case, and seek to smash the fist of the Absolute Shall down upon the people.  You shall not question.  You shall not attempt to prove...their case, much less the opposite.  You shall leave your open mind in a closed corner of your mind.  You must believe or face the heretic's shaming and hell.

In reading Darwall's description of the Absolute Shalls, I am struck by how the fanaticism, stringency, harshness, dogmatism, austerity, harshness, and rigidity of today's Absolute Shalls resemble their Pietist and Puritan predecessors: 

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”). 

'Warmism' can be substituted with any of the social sirens sounded every other second by Progressives, i.e., racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, Islamophobia, Imperialism, colonialism, micro-agresssion and on and on and on.  As they continue to invoke their various alarms, their warnings become increasingly furious, frantic, raging, convulsive to the point that they become parodies and take on the form of the neurotic that stands on the corner and screams 'Repent! The end is nigh!'

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.

...

The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but the “catastrophe” came all the same.

...

Some of the utterances of the warmists are preposterously specific. In March 2009, the Prince of Wales declared that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”. How could he possibly calculate such a thing? Similarly, in his 2006 report on the economic consequences of climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern wrote that, “If we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least five per cent of global GDP each year, now and forever.” To the extent that this sentence means anything, it is clearly wrong (how are we losing five per cent GDP “now”, before most of the bad things have happened? How can he put a percentage on “forever”?). It is charlatanry.

And, as the Absolute Shalls of the Cult of Gaia have become more insanely intense and hysterical, the more that they are rejected...which is a good thing considering the alternative is frightening.

Progressives believe the Hegelian concept of ‘The God State.’ In other words, they believe that what they believe should be done is what God would do, if God existed.  Since God doesn't exist, it is for government to do what he would have done.  That's the delusion under which they suffer and inflict same upon others.  The idea of 'The God State' is the impetus for their quest to create 'Heaven on Earth.

As I always say, Whenever men set out to create 'Heaven on Earth' or a 'Kingdom on Earth,' they invariably end up creating Hell instead. For what Progressives fail to comprehend is that God would be perfect, man is not nor is he 'perfectable.'  The statists' notion of a 'perfectable' man has resulted in Homo Perfectus (Nazi Germany), Homo Sovieticus (the Soviet Union and its satellites) and the corresponding hundred-plus million corpses.

Progressives have been screaming for decades that one shouldn't impose his morality on another; yet, they are the most moralising people on the planet...and, with their bloodstained history and tyranny, I'd prefer that they keep their totalitarian temptations to themselves.