In the late 19th century, the ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof set out to create a language. Unlike other languages, this language would not arise organically from the interplay of God-given faculties and particular culture, but would be the deliberate and methodological invention of one man.

This particular man was “profoundly convinced that every nationalism offers humanity only the greatest unhappiness”, and fervently believed that the broad use of his language was just the antidote. He promoted his linguistic cure-all in a textbook under the name, “Doctor Hope”, and it would be known to his followers as Unua libro or the “First Book”.

Not unrelatedly, he dabbled in inventing new religions. His Homaranismo, or “humanitism”, was in his words, “the object of my whole life. I would give up everything for it”. It is natural therefore to see both his language and his religion, both self-constructed, to be of a common cloth. His convictions were three-fold: “One should treat others as they wish to be treated” or the Golden Rule; a hostility toward the messy particular in contrast to a universal Utopia that would lead to “the spiritual unification of humanity”; and the belief his own creations would realize both. The connection between Zamenhof’s language and his worldview is uncontroversial, at least to himself. In his earlier years, Zamenhof had written a play about the Tower of Babel, and in his later years, he sought to reconstruct it in defiance of God.

The Tower of Babel, Esperanto, and Homaranismo each embody the laborious efforts by human beings to circumvent God’s power and plan in hubris and blasphemy. For the sake of communication, secularists may choose to construe this with some degree of accuracy as man choosing to worship himself and exert his supposed power over eternity. As it turns out, eternity includes other persons, and it is them that we often seek to dominate and control.

By these efforts, God’s commandment that we steward the world is thereby perverted to mean that we ought to steward others, and not to his end, but toward our own sense of goodness. It is a perversion because it is impossible to harmonize the commandment that we love others as ourselves with this level of control, unless we imagine ourselves to seek a life under the worldview and control of another man’s philosophy. To seek such a life is to seek slavery against God’s wishes.

For Zamenhof to love others as we love ourselves is foremost a commandment to other persons. It is not as a commandment to the reader, but a clever line to be propagated to others. This is to say, to the Utopian, love others as we love ourselves and as God loves us has the effect of others should love me as I wish to be loved for I am God. It is supposed that in so doing the others will also be loving themselves, but this is an optional rhetorical tack that may be dispensed with, or an excuse for the gentler-hearted.

C. S. Lewis is referring to this style when he writes that:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

The Esperanto man’s certainty of his own goodness, and therefore the fuel of his tyrannical impulses, cannot be diminished by our own efforts. To believe so is to make his error in the opposite direction. Rather, it is precisely that the Esperanto man, as all of us, is in desperate need of God and his ongoing loving correction and guidance.

It would be uncharitable to claim that this selfish inclination of the heart, even when self-servingly portrayed as selflessness, originated with Zamenhof or other progressives. Rather, it began in that Garden so long ago, when the serpent convinced Original Man that God’s loving commandments were negotiable and inspired to maintain His power rather than preserve goodness. Adam and Eve disobeyed God by heeding their own sense of the good, and by defying the Truth given to them. There was no cartoonish effort on their part to make war with God. Nevertheless, it is precisely what they willingly did under the influence of the serpent.