David Warren: I Hate Nanny

Do you read David Warren's articles? I have his commentary emailed to me regularly and I usually find something insightful and encouraging from his comments. However, be warned! I have a strong feeling that many Canadians avoid him completely.

Last week, after returning from vacation, Warren confesses

The sense that one is returning from vacation to a madhouse is on me again. The question of whether democracy was really such a great idea bubbles again to the surface.

In speaking of our Nanny State, he explains what we are facing in order to change our dependency.

Yet neither do I see a plausible way to claw back the Nanny State, by conventional political means. For we have all, to greater or lesser extent, grown into its machinery. No one agrees to be the first unplugged from its cumbersome and arbitrary and often morally malignant life-support apparatus. The whole machine will have to break down, before the people attached to it can be set free. In the meantime we feel compelled by the illusion that the machine is capable of perpetuating itself and preserving us -- even after we, the people, have largely ceased to have babies, or make net contributions to the tax furnace that heats the engine that drives the machine.

One could easily include legalized abortion in the "morally malignant life-support apparatus" of which Warren speaks. He himself detests the current state of child killing going on in Canada.

I'm not so sure though that Warren understands the true significance and potential of the Church in returning our society to "a wise moral and spiritual order." He makes these comments:

This means in turn rebuilding the Church, and the many allied, non-governmental institutions that reinforce a wise moral and spiritual order. For I am not among the naïve who think that men and women are naturally sanctified. Guidance we need, and will always need: but guidance in freedom, not an elected minder that makes all free choices on our behalf.

Looking at the "Church" today and the "churches" of our day, it is not surprising that few Canadians understand the powerful commission entrusted to the Apostles by Jesus Christ and the attendant authority given to Christians as a Body. As a result they fail to see that the absolute starting point for a wise and moral spiritual order in any society is the Church. It's not a matter of ALSO rebuilding and reforming the Church, in addition to focusing on other components of society.

Rather, EVERYTHING [in respect to justice and the moral order] depends upon the Church in much the same way that the garment depends entirely upon the knitter. The garment's strength, durability, and even it's practical usefulness depends upon the one doing the knitting. The choice of wool, its colour, strength and manner of weaving, all factor into the finished product. Yes, society must have a garment and will always wear its garment and for the most part will be known by its garment, but that garment is woven by the Church, the worldwide Body of Christians.

That's why the solution to any particular moral difficulty, such as legalized child killing, is to be found in the Church. Political, social, and even educational solutions can never solve the problem unless their efforts find their origins in the work and initiative of the Church.