Disordered Love

Last month, I came across this article: "Boomers are refusing to hand over their $84 trillion in wealth to their children." The article relates:

    A new survey of wealthy Americans  by Charles Schwab found that almost half of boomers wanted 'to enjoy my money for myself while I'm still alive.'   

    Warren Buffett has also famously said he is not giving all his money to his children. But rather than wanting to spend it himself, he simply wants his kids - who are 66, 70 and 71 -  to give it away to good causes as they have enough money anyway.

    Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are famed for benefiting from great social mobility when house prices were low and labor conditions strong.

    By contrast, only 11 percent of Gen X-ers and 15 percent of millennials said they too wanted to hold on to their own money during their lifetime.

    Both groups were in fact more than twice as likely to choose to share their wealth while alive compared to the Boomers. 

The article tries to soften this bit of news by suggesting that "Boomers listed rising healthcare costs and longer lifespans as reasons to keep hold of their assets." Perhaps. But this is a topic that Vox Day has written about extensively and he notes many sources suggesting more selfish reasons. 

    For instance, in "The Unrepentant Evil of the Boomers," Day quotes extensively from an article about a Boomer couple that not only intends on spending all their money before they die, but are helping other Boomer couples do the same. Day comments:

I don’t call them selfish. I call them a wicked generation that will deservedly burn in Hell as their descendants curse their memory. Remember, the Boomers collectively received the largest inheritance in human history from their parents, and the majority of them are going to leave their children and grandchildren with literally less than nothing, with nothing but their debts.

In another piece, he cites to polling data from Australia that indicates that 7 of 10 Boomers there are unwilling to help financially strapped children if it would compromise their retirement lifestyle to do so. And there is a lot more.

    As a whole, this is an ungodly attitude and a grave sin: "But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." 1 Tim. 5:8.

   Which brings me to the topic of "Ordo Amoris," or rightly ordered love. That is, there is a proper hierarchy of love.  We owe our greatest love to God (this is the greatest commandment), while other loves fall lower. For instance, your love for your spouse should be greater than your love of pizza. In an article at the Reformed Classicist, it relates:

    In his Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas answered the question, “Whether we ought to do good to those rather who are more closely united to us?” along these lines. The reasoning in the affirmative is this:

    “​​Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it … Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us.”

 The American Reformer expands on this, explaining:

    Aquinas then went on to describe how we must begin with a right love of God, moving to a proper love of self, and even that “the affection of our charity [should] be more intense towards those to whom we ought to behave with greater kindness” (II-II, Q. 26, Art. 6).

    For Aquinas this entails that we should love our own families more than the families of others (II-II, Q. 26, Art. 8), as well as our fellow countrymen more than those of other countries: “for some neighbors are connected with us by their natural origin, a connection which cannot be severed, since that origin makes them to be what they are” (II-II, Q. 26, Art. 7).

Thus, our greatest love must be for God, then our self, spouse and close family, and gradually outward through other kith and kin, to our neighbors, countrymen, and, finally, to those outside those circles. Liberals balk at this, of course, arguing that Christ taught us to love all people. But as Michael Clary responds:

    Every Christian would agree that Jesus taught us to love our enemies, but Jesus did not teach that we must love our enemy in exactly the same way and to exactly the same degree. Progressives can’t grasp the most basic idea that we can truly love two different people while also loving one more than the other.

    Anyabwile’s comments are driven by his political commitment to supporting Democrat policies on immigration, but I’ll bet my paycheck that he has a lock on his front door. Doesn’t he want to welcome the sojourner and stranger into his house? Would he be willing to starve his own children in order to feed a stranger’s child?

    Progressives live in a fantasy world of abstractions and ideals that simply have no bearing on reality. This is why you can always count on progressives to make foolish and unrealistic claims while simultaneously claiming the moral high ground. The progressive attitude is “judge us by our intentions, not our outcomes.” And Anyabwile’s social media virtue signal is as hypocritical as it is absurd. False humility may look righteous and pious, but it’s still false.