When G.K. Chesterton first came to the United States and visited fresh York City, they hit him and even blinded Broadway lights. "I looked not without joy at this long kaleidoscope of colour lights arranged in capital letters and chaotic company signs, advertising everything – from pork to piano – through the 2 most surviving and especially mystical gifts of God: colour and fire." He was besides struck by the chasm separating gargantuan blichtra from the slur and triviality of the advertised products. "What a wonderful garden of miracles," he noted, for anyone who was fortunate adequate to be incapable to read."
Today you don't request to go to Broadway or Times Square to be profoundly affected by flashing electronic billboards. They're everywhere. It takes just a mile or 2 on any urban road to come across these scandals disturbing the scenery and the weather of the eye of imagination. Most of them insult our aesthetic sensitivity in a way where the ugliness of the average matches the ugliness of the message. From time to time, these billboards are not just provocative, but they besides make you think.
One of those billboards caught my attention late and made me think. Most of his electronic space occupied a photograph of Martin Luther King Junior. This image was accompanied by words of counsel, which were almost a reminder: “The hope of unity in the planet of division.” I am not a learned specialist from Martin Luther King Junior, but I fishy that these words are not his, but alternatively individual who uses or abuses his image to advertise his own aphorism, with which I uncertainty that Luther King would agree, or at least not without a essential objection.
Although the moods expressed in this aphorism seem "nice", they are much little sympathetic erstwhile we find that what is "nice" demands subtle distinctions. We request to look a small closer at the sense of words to realize them. erstwhile we do, we may find that we are willing to conclude that this sense is actually pointless.
Let us so submit what is “nice” to specified subtle distinctions. The fact is that “unity” is not always good, and “division” is not always bad. The totalitarian government can impose “unity” on its subjects, suppressing any dissident behaviour on the grounds that it is dividing. The Empire may impose its will on the nations that it conquered, considering that the "unity" of the empire—whether it be Pax Romana, Pax Britannica or Pax Americana—requires the crushing of all "dividing" nationalism among the peoples of conquered states. A certain unity is diabolical. For example, there is nothing more united than mobs. The mob mentality is nothing little than toxic unity. What about “division”?
It is good that the human community is divided into individual families and that it is not united in government communes. It is good that villages and tiny towns are separated from each another and are not united in immense ecologically and economically parasitic agglomerations. It is good that the map of the planet is divided into individual sovereign nations, each reflecting a unique culture revealing good, fact and beauty.
It is better to have individual nations radiating their unique identity, like different flowers in the garden of culture, than to have all nations united in a globalistic and globalized monoculture. It is good erstwhile the national government is close to the nation and so reacts to the nation. It is so good for the political scenery to be divided into a number of reinforced and tiny local authorities, alternatively than for the full government to be united into 1 large, centralised government.
It is better erstwhile people have real participation and real property in the economy, which means that an economy divided into many tiny businesses is better than a united and "consolidated" economy in the hands of comparatively fewer global corporations.
No, unity is not always good; while division may not only be good but besides essential if they have freedom and peace.
The thing we should hope for is not unity, but love of neighbor. We should hope for this genuine love of neighbor, which requires an uninterested sacrifice of ourselves for the sake of another. The absence of specified love, manifested in pride and hatred, which is its inevitable and inexorable consequence, is the origin of the world's problems. We should hope for a planet where accepting work for others takes precedence over demanding our own “rights”.
I know that G.K. Chesterton would disagree with the stencility of this billboard and its message to the degree that it disagreed with the raging and trivial billboards he saw on Broadway. I say Martin Luther King Junior would agree with Chesterton as well. They would not number on unity in a divided world, but would pray for unity in neighbor's love as a way of preserving and protecting healthy divisions in human society.
Joseph Pearce
Source. theimaginativeconservative.org
Jan J. Franczak
