automated commit from wiki

david bentley hart on christian socialism.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+[link](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism) 
+
+> Persons of a reflective bent
+all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal [ignorance](#ignorance) can bring.
+[Knowledge is power](#knowledge is power), of course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness.
+At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are [prejudice](#prejudice), simplemindedness, blind [loyalty](#loyalty), and a militant want of curiosity.
+These are the virtues that fortify us against [doubt](#doubt) or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis.
+[Subtlety](#subtlety) and [imagination](#imagination), by contrast, often enfeeble the will; [ambiguities](#ambiguity) dull the [instincts](#instinct).
+So while it is true that [American](#america) political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in [slogans](#slogans) rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect.
+In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.  
+Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.  
+Not long ago, in an op-ed colum...
+
+What an opening salvo! I shouldn't trust someone more for writing like this, but it is honed to hit my weak spots.
+
+Many other good quotes: 
+
+> Any day now in [Sweden](#sweden), it seems, free dentistry will mutate into a secret state-police apparatus and a sprawling archipelago of reeducation camps.
+
+***
+ 
+> Just as we Americans have succeeded in turning “[Christianity](#christianity)” into another name for a system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every confidence that we will find a way to turn “[socialism](#socialism)” into just another name for late-modern [liberal](#liberalism) [individualism](#individualism).
+
+***
+
+> Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.
+
+***
+
+> What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by fantasies of a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however well-intended—those overly rosy views of class distinction, for instance, or that gauzily gleaming pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth preserving or reviving, except perhaps in radically qualified form.
+