Have you ever been confronted by young activists with a cocksure belief in their righteousness and your malevolence? I have as an academic of way too many years. Unbeknownst to the youthful firebrand, their understanding is as shallow as a street puddle, and filled with rhetorical generalizations for which they have devoted too little time and thought to review.
Shout the slogans and it’s off to the barricades. It’s the plague of our time, the plague of arrogance of the young and too many adults who should know better.
Of course, I am referring to our woke moment. Being “woke” is the neo-Marxism (often called post-modernism) of reducing all our social reality to a dialectic of oppressor/oppressed with power, explicit or implicit, covert or overt, governing all relationships, public and private. Karl Marx devised the scheme for socioeconomic class. Others in the 20th century chimed in with race, gender, and sexual orientation. It’s the same old spiel of reducing everyone to faceless groupings by pigment, genitalia, and bed partner.
There’s no need for individuals in the paradigm. Toss out the corpus of Christianity, the Ten Commandments, and individual accountability and redemption while you’re at it.
Our time is lacking humility, especially among the youth on our college campuses. While shouting down an appeals court judge – as what happened recently at Stanford – the disruptors were consumed in their self-anointed rectitude and acted like it. Their condemnations of American and western man past and present are absent any of the reserve of the thoughtful.
The indispensability of humility was captured in the music of Kenneth Branagh’s “Henry V”, particularly “Non Nobis Domine” after the Battle of Agincourt. The piece stems from a composition by Philip van Wilder in the 16th century to commemorate the advent of Christ and thanksgiving. The line in the lyrics from Psalms 113:9 that captures the theme is “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to thy name give the glory” (KJV) (Latin: Nōn nōbīs, Domine, nōn nōbīs, sed nōminī tuō dā glōriam).
It’s an admonition against pride and its accompanying arrogance. Today’s young campus extremists would do well to take notice.
Enjoy the clip from Branagh’s “Henry V”.
RogerG