The Good as Resistance to Secular Collectivism and Individualism
Dr. Kelly Fitzsimmons Burton
My good friend, Owen Anderson, in his book The Natural Moral Law: The Good After Modernity, argues for the need for a natural moral law based upon the Good as the source of1unity for humankind in the context of a “new global reality.” In this book, he cites the U2 song “The Wanderer,” written for Johnny Cash, in which Cash sings about the citizens who say they want the kingdom, but they don’t want God in it. It may be a strange thing to quote a pop-culture reference from the early nineties in an academic setting, but I think that the quote, and what Anderson gets to in his book is the reality of a “kingdom.” Similar to St. Augustine, I want to contrast what I will call “the kingdom of God” with the “kingdom of man,” to show how theGood is a source of unity for human life in “the new global reality” of which Anderson speaks. I want to use the analogy of “kingdom” as a form of polis that unites mankind in the “new global reality.” A kingdom is a way of thinking about the global unity of humanity under a unifying principle.My paper is about the Good as a source of unity and resistance to contemporary collectivism on the one hand and individualism on the other hand. My method is an act of retrieval philosophy. This means I am going to the past to address philosophical questions of the present. I will be retrieving concepts of classical philosophy.
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