By DONALD DeMARCO
In every post-election period, so it seems, the cry goes out to overcome divisions and unify the country. Divisions, it is said, block the way to progress and prevent America from achieving its true greatness. Unity is what we all Americans desire and they can attain that blessed condition simply by doing away with divisions. But politics is incapable of solving divisions. It is far more adept, as history shows, at creating them.
A fundamental error is the belief that divisions are bad because they produce conflict. That is only partly true. But it is more accurate to say that conflict precedes divisions and that it is conflict that produces divisions. We should spend our energy, therefore, in avoiding conflict rather than in trying to overcome divisions.
Conflict lies at the root of divisions. We need look no further than the Book of Genesis to understand this. An original unity existed between our primal parents and their Creator. When pride entered the picture, Adam and Eve succumbed to the illusion that they could be more superior beings than their natures would allow. They believed that they could become Gods. Thus was born the initial conflict between man and God. It led directly to a division between them. Pride is the deadliest of the Deadly Sins and the first historically. It is also the precursor to other deadly sins.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, a fallen Cardinal Wolsey adjures Oliver Cromwell to rid himself of pride. In so stating, he is underscoring how this vice can undo not only himself but anyone:
“I charge thee, fling away ambition: By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then, the image of his Maker, hope to win by it?”
The root of the division between man and God is pride. If we can conquer our pride, we are well on our way to preventing major divisions from coming into our lives. This is something that cannot be accomplished by politics.
We need not read much further in Genesis to find a sharp division between brother and brother. But the root of this division is the envy that Cain had for Abel. A second deadly sin, anger, then roused him to commit the world’s first instance of fratricide. The elimination of envy and anger is the avoidance of another major source of division.
Reading further along in the first book of the Bible, we encounter twin brothers, Esau and Jacob. The former, who was famished, bargained away his birthright for the red stew that his brother had prepared. It was a foolish and intemperate act, suggesting a trio of vices that would plague the world for countless years to come: lust, greed, and gluttony. At the same time, Jacob’s barter was avaricious and unconscionable.
The Lord had foretold Rebekah, their mother, of the divisions that would be caused by Jacob’s gross mistreatment of his brother: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be divided; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” The conflict between the twin brothers led to a division between brothers and also a divisions between peoples. The roots of divisions are in conflicts that are fed by vices, especially those of the seven Deadly Sins.
The Bible is down to earth. It gets at the heart of the matter. It is anything but pie in the sky. Therefore, it is a great practical assistance. By contrast, political solutions for overcoming divisions and establishing unity often belong to the stratosphere and not to the human heart. They are lofty, indeed, but too lofty for human consumption. They are, in a word, utopian.
In 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson produced My Hope for America. Norman Mailer regarded it as “the worst book ever written by any political leader anywhere.” He said this because it revealed, in an unparalleled way, the politician’s tendency to dream of a world that cannot be. “Reality rarely matches dream,” wrote America’s 36th president. “But only dreams give nobility to purpose. This is the star I hope to follow — which I know most of you have seen, and which I first glimpsed many years ago in the Texas night.”
Had Mailer lived long enough, he may have been even more critical of Hillary Clinton’s utopian rhetoric. “The challenge now,” she proclaimed, “is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” She has called for “a new politics of meaning” that answers such questions as “What does it mean in today’s world…to be human?”
Her rhetoric soars, but cannot heal. She places too much hope in the power of politics and too little faith in common sense. She wants a “new religion” for America which has, as its basic principle, the right for any woman to have an abortion.
Abortion itself, it must be emphasized, rests on a conflict between the mother and her unborn child. It results, therefore, in a division between mother and child, and ultimately between wife and husband, individual and family, family society, and man and God. Politics cannot overcome divisions by multiplying them. Religion, not politics, is the way, par excellence, that gets to the roots of divisions. And these roots, as the Bible attests, are in the various unloving the ways in which we establish our relationships with God and our neighbor.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His recent works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World, and In Praise of Life are available through Amazon.com.
(His most recent book is Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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