Today’s post continues the thoughts started in the earlier post – A Critical Crossroads.
In the musical presentation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel, Les Misérables, the character of police inspector Javert is confronted with a reality that is beyond his ability to comprehend…he is shown mercy. In response he blurts out these words: “The law is inside out, the world is upside down.”
I can’t think of a better description of our present day than Javert’s – the law is inside out and the world is upside down.
At this critical crossroads in our history our leaders seem to be incapable of knowing right from wrong. They solve the problem of crime by not enforcing or re-writing laws so that wrongs magically become rights. They abandon the science and constants of genetics and biology in favor of anything-goes proclamations about what constitutes male and female. In athletics, men identifying as women are rapidly erasing and rewriting the record books, while women’s rights groups sit silently by. The Constitution’s Bill of Rights is suddenly filled with irredeemable wrongs that must be canceled, while centuries of milestone events are erased from our history and from our collective consciousness.
Why is this happening? Because the leaders of the current revolutionary moment have only hooey to offer. Hooey means nonsense. These self-proclaimed authorities don’t know the first thing about wisdom because the starting point of wisdom is this: the fear of the Lord. Without an objective standard beyond ourselves our society is reduced to following the latest pronouncement of hooey.
Nearly 3,000 years ago the biblical King Solomon made this request: “Give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.” Solomon became known for his wisdom, and it is a certainty that his wisdom was indistinguishable from his ability to know the difference between what is right and what is wrong. It was, and is, an absolutely essential quality in governing justly.
Without the ability to know right from wrong as objective truth, we live now in a time when truth is not consistently and universally recognized. Instead, it is refashioned to be whatever is desired, by anyone, at any time. Everything is fluid; nothing is unchanging. Or at least that is the hooey that today’s thought leaders would have us believe. Unfortunately for them, however, wisdom will never be extinguished because the consequences of hooey are increasingly recognized for what they are – unacceptable nonsense. Wisdom will never be extinguished because it has been established by an Authority immune to mankind’s quest to be its own god.
When we embrace hooey, it leads to fanatical consequences expressed in all kinds of hatred and divisions. When we act upon wisdom, however, it produces a different and far better set of consequences. The characteristics of both will be explored in part two of this post.
I concluded the Critical Crossroads post and podcast with this question: which consequences will we bequeath to the generations that follow? The answer will be found in our willingness to decisively reject the hooey, and demand that our leaders act in wisdom.
That’s all for now, but I’ll be back later with part 2 of this post to explore the characteristics of different kinds of wisdom that lead either to nonsense or wisdom, disorder or order.
