"Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness"

Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 1510, Michelangelo. Fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome.

"We are reduced to Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness," asserts William Staneski in an American Thinker essay that Lucianne calls "Probably the most important piece you will read this weekend." Staneski has a lot of good stuff to say about the Gramscian march through the institutions of the "post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day," but we are frankly horrified at his gratuitous dissing of both Darwin and the animals, two of our own staffs of life. First a few Staneski excerpts and then our take:

It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism …

It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can't escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don't realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth.

All well and good, and the fish "not aware of the water in which it swims" called to mind the liberal media's who-me? cluelessness regarding their own Pauline Kael bubble [via The Qand O Blog, via Maggie's]:

It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

We weren't shocked, shocked at all, but only, once again, frankly horrified at one of our big-time fave moviemaker's, Woody Allen's totalitarianesque take on what we had thought was supposed to be a democratic election:

It would be a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win.

Forget about the electorate. These folks want an acclamation. Talk about "Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness." Speaking of which, the Vatican is a welcome voice in the wilderness:

From time to time, Catholicism can be seized with fits of enthusiasm and veer toward one extreme or another. Over the long run, however, its instinct is usually to seek the sane middle, driven by what Pope Benedict XVI has called the Catholic genius for seeking "both/and" solutions to seemingly "either/or" problems.

In Rome this week, a blow was struck for the sane middle on the most vexed issue in the modern relationship between faith and science: the theory of evolution …

Leclerc said of intelligent design that it "substitutes divine will for the mechanism which it is the province of science to study, even though this is obviously a matter of two distinct levels [of causation]."

Creationism need not apply.

Update: "Loved your post, and used it here," emails Fausta, who dives into William Staneski's "Drumbeat" — referenced above — and comes up with Obama's head:

Where is the substance? Where is the unmovable core? Where are the absolutes Obama stands for?

"Obama is indeed," she writes, "the perfect candidate for the post-modern sea."

Comments

[goomp]

Catholics are fortunate to have such a Pope as Benedict XVI, and the world is fortunate also. While no one can prove the existence of God, neither can anyone prove that God does not exist. I was most impressed by the rational supposition that God is responsible for evolution. Mature acceptance of scientific discoveries by those who believe that God exists takes down the wall that often exists between believers and non-believers. Now it is the task of those who have secular beliefs to recognize the value of the moral standards which humans have come over the ages to find necessary for a free and prosperous society.