YOU CAN'T TURN THE CLOCK BACK . . . NOT!

by Tim Manning (Notes) on Saturday, March 23, 2013

How many times have Southerners been told that “You can't turn the clock back!” by some well-meaning anti-intellectual moron who has no culture or Christian belief system? Anyone who says such a thing neatly fits into one of those two hopeless categories. The kindest thing a Southern gentleman could say to such a person is that they “are confused in a fundamental way about life, the universe and everything” as the English writer Douglas Adams puts it in his Hitchhikers Guide Trilogy. Only the most juvenile Star Trek fan believes that you can go back in time and would make such a mindless assertion about history.

 Many times historically challenged non-Southerners have used this description sincerely believing that they have adequately refuted the most romantic minded Southerner who has the emotional temerity to believe that “the South was right”, and that the poor creature just can't admit that the South loss and that the old way of Southern thinking and living was forever defeated and ended when the Armies of the South surrendered their swords. Sadly I have heard the phrase more from Southerners than from anyone else.

 What the classical minded traditional Southerner and all orthodox Christians believe is that there are some things in how we think and live which do not simply have their subsistence in a point or era of time. People with the Southern philosophical convictions firmly believe that certain virtues should be cultivated and preserved in their generations regardless of the point in time into which they were born.

 It is most certainly a character deformity to say that a worthy philosophy or set of moral standards, such as the fixed absolute moral principles of the Biblical Ten Commandments are found in the past, but now the past is simply gone, and we are obligated now to move-on or “progress” in our world views. Non-Southerners have a difficult time understanding people of sound moral principles, meaning that the people of the South surrendered their swords but not their western and Biblical principles that defined their beliefs and personal and cultural practices. This is why many northerners who are sympathetic to and often supportive of the “Southern Cause” cannot get a firm grasp on how Southerners live and think. Some of those who move to the South easily feel that they are “fitting-in”, but when the Southerners they have as neighbors or with whom they work are asked a very different story comes to light.

 The whole nature and value of a worthy philosophy and a sound Biblical perspective lies in its detachment from the accidental conditions of the time and its commitment and adherence to the things which are essential and permanent. Without the “permanent things” there is no true sense of social coherency, culture or civilization.

 Any morality worth preserving must insist, as the great North Carolina agrarian wrote, “that circumstances yield to definitions and not definitions to circumstances.” This brings cultural and personal stability in an otherwise unstable industrialized society.

 Spinoza wisely concluded, “In so far as the mind conceives a thing according to the dictate of reason, it will be equally affected whether the idea be of a thing present, past, or future.” This explains why the current western nations have no sense of nationalism and lack stability in their marriages, jobs, laws, morals, national policies and in their momentary false sense of culture.

Reprinted by permission.