{"id":15627,"date":"2019-05-18T13:38:51","date_gmt":"2019-05-18T05:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.justcharlie.com\/?page_id=15627"},"modified":"2019-05-18T14:15:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-18T06:15:40","slug":"the-right-side-of-history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.justcharlie.com\/highlights\/the-right-side-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Right Side of History&#8221; Highlights"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>These highlights are from the Kindle version of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Right-Side-History-Reason-Purpose-ebook\/dp\/B07CLMXWT9\/\">The Right Side of History<\/a> by Ben Shapiro. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Table of Contents<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-advgb-summary advgb-toc alignnone\"><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-2044a241-4493-4eec-ac42-1ba7bb23727d\">The Modern Era<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-3bd45ef0-e184-4e72-bcbe-810e2e712661\">American Society&#8217;s Twin Pillars<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-30c3f633-0fc4-4575-a5f9-b144f3ce9a2f\">Foundation for Happiness<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-5615620d-009f-4033-acaf-a18ff6a9092b\">Collective Mobilization &amp; Individuality<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-9ea06416-5d7a-4d23-a37d-78643dd53993\">God &amp; Religion<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-b08f08e3-dfcf-49ba-b5bc-2ebf84d11fdf\">Education &amp; Academia<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-54fafd9b-ecd1-49d0-9bde-3c6663200c32\">Greek Philosophy<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-3c4d3958-e3f0-4d36-aec4-59915beb28a1\">Science &amp; Faith<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-ca34c534-7479-476e-b089-021fec6416ba\">Challenging the Church<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-39e8a488-32ab-4c14-a822-17b96d9e78f3\">The Death of God<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-658e227c-f52d-437f-8703-af4438a8b5c1\">Nationalism &amp; Revolution<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-9e94aee6-2ebd-4022-b2d1-f27291e05ec8\">Nazism &amp; Communism<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-12f6b480-f992-4e49-9c74-158375baac69\">Capitalism<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-f1d61978-973d-4883-ab5b-a16b3fbfab5d\">Existentialism &amp;  Human Motivation<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-5f982d76-79f8-4428-8ff8-27ef2f3bfb42\">On Liberty<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-d0fe868a-7420-40f9-bf15-c5654b4319cb\">On Fascism<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-77c4ac80-69aa-4507-bdb7-7f0cbf50e30b\">Marcuse &amp; Self-Realization<\/a><\/li><li class=\"toc-level-1\" style=\"margin-left:20px\"><a href=\"#advgb-toc-5cd61181-62f5-4d39-a09d-afb97a079f3c\">Intersectionality<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-2044a241-4493-4eec-ac42-1ba7bb23727d\">The Modern Era<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>For nearly all of human history, life has been nasty, brutish, and short. In 1900, some 10 percent of all infants died before reaching their first birthday in the United States; in other countries, the number was far higher.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Yet we now live in an era in which mothers can expect to survive pregnancy and childbirth (the mortality rate among pregnant women has dropped 99 percent). Babies can be expected to survive infancy and then live another eight decades; we live in an era in which the vast majority of the American population lives in climate-controlled spaces with plenty of food, a car, and at least one television.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>In July 2017, Pew Research found that 47 percent of self-described liberal Democrats said they\u2019d have a tough time staying friends with those who voted for Trump; 13 percent of conservatives said the same, but it\u2019s difficult to say whether that number might have been reversed if Trump had lost. It\u2019s also worth noting that fully 47 percent of Clinton voters said they didn\u2019t have a single close friend who voted for Trump. A more telling statistic: 68 percent of Democrats said it was \u201cstressful and frustrating\u201d to talk to political opponents; 52 percent of Republicans agreed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Just 27 percent of Americans trust banks; just 20 percent of Americans trust newspapers; just 41 percent of Americans say they trust organized religion; that number is 19 percent for the federal government overall, and 39 percent for the health care system. Only 30 percent of Americans trust the public schools, 18 percent trust big business, and 9 percent trust Congress. We still trust our police, but those numbers have dropped over the past decade, particularly among Democrats. The only thing we still seem to trust is the military\u2014which makes sense, since it provides for our common defense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>As for our democracy, fewer and fewer people like it. An October 2016 poll showed that 40 percent of Americans said they had \u201clost faith in American democracy,\u201d with another 6 percent stating that they never had faith to begin with. No wonder only 31 percent of those polled said they would \u201cdefinitely\u201d accept the results of the election if their candidate lost.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The upper middle class in the United States grew from 12 percent of Americans in 1979 to 30 percent as of 2014. Income mobility hasn\u2019t changed significantly in the United States since the 1970s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>We\u2019re more racially equal than ever before in our history\u2014more equal than any other society in human history. In 1958, just 4 percent of Americans approved of black-white intermarriage; as of 2013, that statistic was 87 percent. In that year, 72 percent of white Americans thought race relations were good, and so did 66 percent of black Americans; that statistic had remained relatively stable from 2001 through 2013.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-3bd45ef0-e184-4e72-bcbe-810e2e712661\">American Society&#8217;s Twin Pillars<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>This book argues that Western civilization, including our modern notions of values and reason and science, was built on deep foundations. And this book argues that we\u2019re tossing away what\u2019s best about our civilization because we\u2019ve forgotten that those foundations even exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in His image, and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God\u2019s world. Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens, respectively.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Jerusalem and Athens built science. The twin ideals of Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law reasoning built human rights. They built prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions spiritual purpose. Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Westphalia; they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s Letter from Birmingham Jail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens, and the tension between them, have collapsed into dust. The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values of the collective and a new utopian vision of \u201csocial justice\u201d\u2014and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings. The Nazis rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and they shoved children into gas chambers. Venezuela rejects Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and citizens of their oil-rich nation have been reduced to eating dogs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring moral subjectivism and the rule of passion. And we are watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism. Make no mistake: we are still living off the prosperity of the world built by Jerusalem and Athens. We believe we can reject Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and satisfy ourselves with intersectionality, or scientific materialism, or progressive politics, or authoritarian governance, or nationalistic solidarity. We can\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-30c3f633-0fc4-4575-a5f9-b144f3ce9a2f\">Foundation for Happiness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can\u2019t provide happiness in and of itself. The Founding Fathers knew that. That\u2019s why Thomas Jefferson didn\u2019t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>To Aristotle, \u201cgood\u201d wasn\u2019t a subjective term, something for each of us to define for ourselves; \u201cgood\u201d was a statement of objective fact. Something was \u201cgood\u201d if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch tells time; a good dog defends its master. What does a good human being do? Acts in accordance with right reason. What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it:<br><br>Happiness isn\u2019t rolling around in the mud at Woodstock, nor is it a nice golf game after a rough week at work. Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>What do we need to generate the moral purpose that provides the foundation for happiness? We need, in my estimate, four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity to pursue that purpose, communal moral purpose, and communal capacity to pursue that purpose. These four elements are crucial; the only foundation for a successful civilization lies in a careful balance of these four elements.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-5615620d-009f-4033-acaf-a18ff6a9092b\">Collective Mobilization &amp; Individuality<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The key phrase\u2014the beginning of Western civilization\u2014lies in Genesis 1:26: we are all made in God\u2019s image. All of us, not just kings or potentates. That means we all have inherent value, and that our mission in life is to draw close to something beyond ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Voltaire famously stated, \u201cI want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often. . . . If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.\u201d In fact, a massive longitudinal Harvard study found that the single best predictor of lifelong happiness was the presence of close relationships: satisfaction with relationships at age fifty was actually more predictive of long-term health than cholesterol level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Like Aristotle, the founders believed in social organizations fostering virtue: a country without such social ties could not survive in freedom. They also agreed that the Judeo-Christian tradition had to provide a basis for sound values for individuals living in a free community: as John Adams stated in a letter to the Massachusetts militia, \u201cWe have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by . . . morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The best countries\u2014and the best societies\u2014are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the \u201cgreater\u201d good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>In 2012, the Democratic National Convention featured a video with the slogan, \u201cGovernment\u2019s the only thing we all belong to.\u201d That belief has been the defining feature of tyrannies the world over: the utopian notion that if we all pull our oars in the same direction, at the behest of a centralized government, we\u2019ll be able to accomplish more together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>It\u2019s tempting to mobilize our ardor for collective mobilization and use it as a state-wielded club to force individual virtue, or to force large-scale change. Tyranny rarely begins with jackboots; it usually begins with ardent wishes for a better future, combined with an unfailing faith in the power of mass mobilization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-9ea06416-5d7a-4d23-a37d-78643dd53993\">God &amp; Religion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Biblical sacrifices aren\u2019t designed merely to appease a higher power. They\u2019re designed to change us, to teach us something.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Perhaps the most important sentence ever penned was this, from Genesis 1:27: \u201cGod created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.\u201d No longer was divine choice restricted to great leaders: in fact, God mocks such pretensions in Genesis 6:2, when He decides to flood the earth after the \u201csons of the gods\u201d\u2014the rulers\u2014begin running roughshod over the rights of commoners, prompting God to scoff at the arrogant humans who \u201care mortal.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The Bible tells us what God expects of us and tells us that we have the duty to fulfill those expectations; it tells us that we are special, and that we are loved by an infinitely good, caring, and powerful Being. It tells us that we have a duty to reach out to Him. The Bible makes God accessible; it brings God down to earth. In doing so, it offers man the opportunity to raise himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The soul with which God endowed man seeks the Divine through reason\u2014the uniquely human quality that lifts human beings above animals, and places us at the foot of God\u2019s throne.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-b08f08e3-dfcf-49ba-b5bc-2ebf84d11fdf\">Education &amp; Academia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>There is a battle currently raging on college campuses regarding the role of the university. Is it to create a safe space for students to \u201cfind themselves\u201d? Is it a place to experience the wonder of a wide variety of thought? Or is it a place to inculcate the basic thought underpinning Western civilization? In the past, the answer was clearly the last option: people went to college to be steeped in the classics. The Founding Fathers were well versed in Latin and Greek; their writing is replete with references to ancient literature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>In 1900, half of all American public high school students were obligated to take Latin classes. But many current scholars and students find the classics trite and boring, old and hackneyed\u2014ethnocentric and culturally stagnating. Jesse Jackson famously marched at Stanford in the 1980s, arm in arm with students, chanting, \u201cHey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.\u201d As of 2010, not a single top university required students to take a course in Western civilization; only sixteen even offered such a course.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Western civilization, in the view of many on the radical Left, was a bastion of imperialism and racism; students should be devoted to learning about those shortcomings, rather than about the glories of ancient philosophy. In fact, study of ancient philosophy and civilization dramatically limits our understanding of the West\u2019s innate evils.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The promulgators of multiculturalism in education all too often aren\u2019t promoting breadth of learning, but lack of learning. This attitude reaches its apotheosis in the anti-classics movements we see on college campuses like Reed, where one student group lobbies against basic humanities courses because they allegedly \u201cperpetuate white supremacy. . . . The texts that make up the [Humanities 110] syllabus . . . are \u2018Eurocentric,\u2019 \u2018Caucasoid,\u2019 and thus \u2018oppressive.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>This is a dramatic, deliberate misreading of the history of Western civilization\u2014the greatest force for good in world history. That statement is not meant to ignore the myriad evils in which Western civilization has participated. But Western civilization has freed more people than any other, by a long shot; it has reduced poverty, conquered disease, and minimized war. Western civilization is responsible for the economic betterment of the global population, and for the rise in human rights and democracy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-54fafd9b-ecd1-49d0-9bde-3c6663200c32\">Greek Philosophy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The ancient Greeks gave us three foundational principles: first, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world; second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around us by utilizing our reason; and finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for cultivating that reason. In short, the Greeks gave us natural law, science, the basis of secularly constructed government. Jerusalem brought the heavens down to earth; Athens\u2019s elevation of reason would launch mankind toward the stars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Plato and Aristotle both believed in the notion of objective truth as well. But Plato and Aristotle disagreed with regard to what constituted objective truth: the Forms, or knowledge of the physical world. In the end, this disagreement would wind up creating the basis for the scientific method: deduction would present human beings with a scientific hypothesis; facts presented by empirical evidence would become the basis for judging that theory; the hypothesis would then be accepted or rejected or changed. Aristotle\u2019s establishment of logical rigor with regard to empirical observation would provide the basis for all further scientific thought.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The Greek vision of citizenship focused centrally on the place of the individual within the polis, the city-state; Hellenic thought focused heavily on how to shape individuals to best serve as citizens, and how to cultivate virtues that would be useful in such citizens. Judaism, however, had another commitment: the commitment to individual and collective service to Divine law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Christianity universalized the message of Judaism. The Gospels were deliberately written in Greek, not the Aramaic used by the Jews of the period. Jesus\u2019s story was meant to extend to the entire world. Because Jesus was no longer a Jewish figure in the Christian view, but the material incarnation of the divine, that meant that Jewish law could be abandoned in favor of universalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The Middle Ages saw technological revolution in agriculture, the rise of commerce, and the institution of new forms of art ranging from polyphonic music to Gothic architecture; it also saw new developments in the art of war, with technological advances that would allow the West to defeat its enemies in the course of coming centuries. While many historians tout the power of Islamic civilization during this time period\u2014and Islamic civilization did thrive on the Arabian Peninsula particularly\u2014when Islamic civilization came up against Western civilization at the Battle of Tours, Islamic forces were soundly defeated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>If reason supports the notion of an intelligent God who crafts nature and stands behind its ever-present glory, Aquinas posited, then human beings can examine the natural world as a pathway to understanding Him. God made nature; to discover nature is to investigate the works of God. In fact, God wanted man to do this\u2014God wanted man to seek Him everywhere. And God granted human beings the power of free will and reason to do so\u2014as Aquinas celebrates, \u201cman acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought . . . forasmuch as man is rational it is necessary that man have a free-will.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>In Aquinas\u2019s thought, Jerusalem and Athens are reunified. God orders us to use our reason, and reason impels us to discover the natural law\u2014laws designed by God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Aquinas is completely comfortable with the notion of scientific discovery and progress; he openly states that if the astronomers of his day were proved to be wrong, that would not refute any of his metaphysics, since \u201cperhaps the phenomena of the stars are explicable on some other plan not yet discovered by man.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Aquinas\u2019s faith in human reason\u2014and his faith that human reason would not be able to tear down the revelation of God\u2014led to a consonance that would blossom into the scientific revolution. The development of Western science was rooted in the notion that man\u2019s task was to celebrate God through knowledge of His creation. Contrary to the propaganda of a postmodern atheist movement, nearly every great scientist up until the age of Darwinism was religious. The Scholastic movement produced the earliest roots of the scientific method, all the way up through the discovery by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473\u20131543) of a heliocentric solar system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-3c4d3958-e3f0-4d36-aec4-59915beb28a1\">Science &amp; Faith<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Perhaps the greatest exponent of the Scholastic method was Roger Bacon (1219\u20131292), a Franciscan friar who devoted himself to understanding the natural world. Like Aquinas, Bacon was a devoted Aristotelian who suggested gathering facts before coming to conclusions. He wrote fulsomely on optics, alchemy, and astronomy; he suggested revising the Julian calendar, which he found obtuse; he even set down the first European formula for gunpowder. The age of scientific progress didn\u2019t begin with the Enlightenment. It began in the monasteries of Europe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Christianity, like all religions, focuses on the spiritual to the exclusion of the physical. And that failure to take into account the drive for betterment in the physical world would be used as a club wielded against Christianity itself before long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The secularist myth holds that religion held back science for millennia. The reverse is true. Without Judeo-Christian foundations, science simply would not exist as it does in the West.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Contrary to popular opinion, new discoveries weren\u2019t invariably seen as heretical or dangerous to the dominion of the Church; in fact, the Church often supported scientific investigation. Nicole Oresme (1320\u20131382), the discoverer of the Earth\u2019s rotation about its axis, was a bishop of Lisieux and a graduate of the University of Paris. Nicholas of Cusa (1401\u20131464), cardinal of Brixen, theorized that the Earth was not stationary, but moved through space. Nicolaus Copernicus studied in parochial school and served the church of Warmia as medical adviser; his publication of De revolutionibus, his theory that the Earth moved around the sun and not the other way around, in March 1543, included a letter to Pope Paul III.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Eventually, the backlash to the inclusion of secular knowledge in the Christian worldview\u2014a backlash led by thinkers like Martin Luther (1483\u20131546) and John Calvin (1509\u20131564)\u2014led to the Church\u2019s famous persecution of Galileo. Galileo Galilei (1564\u20131642) famously posited that the Earth moves around the sun, and was forced to recant by the Church for his failure to state that his theory was not fact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Despite his differences with the Church, Galileo never abandoned his own faith that science could be a pathway to God. He wrote, \u201cI say that as to the truth of the knowledge which is given by mathematical proofs, this is the same that Divine wisdom recognizes, [although] our understanding . . . is infinitely surpassed by the Divine. [Yet] when I consider what marvelous things and how many of them men have understood, inquired into, and contrived, I recognize and understand only too clearly that the human mind is a work of God\u2019s, and one of the most excellent.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Galileo was no exception. He was a representative of the rule: religious men saw a duty to examine the universe, and to do so with the best possible methodology. This philosophy permeated the wisdom of the Enlightenment\u2019s greatest scientists. Johannes Kepler (1571\u20131630), the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, explained: \u201cThe chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Kepler\u2019s philosophy was also that of Isaac Newton (1642\u20131726): \u201cOpposite to God is Atheism in profession &amp; Idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless &amp; odious to mankind that it never had many professors.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-ca34c534-7479-476e-b089-021fec6416ba\">Challenging the Church<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The rise of science was coincident with the simultaneous rise of human freedom. The dominance of the Catholic Church over the course of the Middle Ages and Renaissance led some to rebel against the notion of centralized authority altogether. One of the first to do so was Marsilius of Padua (1275\u20131342), who fought against the notion of papal plenitude of power\u2014the notion that the Church ought to rule in the City of Man as well as the City of God. Marsilius saw that the Catholic Church\u2019s power could threaten secular authorities\u2014and that those secular authorities could then turn on the Church. Instead of theocracy, Marsilius proposed sovereignty of citizens. His philosophy actually bordered on calls for democracy\u2014he suggested that freedom to worship God itself prohibited theocracy. No wonder Pope Clement VI stated that he had almost never read a worse heretic than Marsilius.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The rise of Lutheranism challenged both the spiritual and temporal power of the Church. Luther, in his ardent attempt to reclaim the Bible from what he deemed the thoroughgoing corruption of the papacy, worked to decimate the hierarchy of believers, leaving merely individuals before God, capable of comprehending God\u2019s direct word: \u201cA shoemaker, a smith, a farmer, each has his manual occupation and work; and, yet, at the same time, all are eligible to act as priests and bishops.\u201d In pursuit of that egalitarian vision, Luther discarded the notion of sanctuary from the secular law: \u201cIt is intolerable that in canon law, the freedom, person, and goods of the clergy should be given this exemption, as if the layman were not exactly as spiritual, and as good Christians, as they, or did not equally belong to the church.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The horrors of religious conflict from the mid-sixteenth century culminated in the Thirty Years\u2019 War (1618\u20131648)\u2014a war that resulted in some eight million deaths\u2014and forced the choice of religious toleration or mass carnage. It was in making this choice that the notion of human rights was born.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>This long philosophical journey would come to fruition in the first country in history to be crafted based on philosophy: the United States of America. The Founding Fathers were devotees of Cicero and Locke, of the Bible and Aristotle. They\u2019d done their reading. And they based their new national philosophy on the lessons garnered from that reading: natural law, rooted in reason and enshrined by religion; individual natural rights, balanced by corresponding duties; a limited government of checks and balances designed to protect those rights in accordance with natural law; and inculcation of virtue, to be pursued by individuals and communities, again in accordance with the dictates of natural law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>No better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise. That virtue took the form of prudence\u2014the practical wisdom of The Federalist Papers has not yet been surpassed in political thought. And that virtue took the form of justice\u2014the rule of law, not of men, and the creation of a system where each receives his due.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The evils of their time did not leave our founders unaffected. The founding was rife with self-contradiction: that great exponent of liberty, Jefferson, a man who called slavery \u201ca cruel war against human nature,\u201d was a slaveholder and the father of six children by a slave, Sally Hemings; Madison, another slaveholder, said that slavery based on \u201cmere distinction of colour\u201d was \u201cthe most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-39e8a488-32ab-4c14-a822-17b96d9e78f3\">The Death of God<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Charles Darwin\u2019s On the Origin of Species (1859) provided the first scientific grounding to the notion of a world without God, and a world beyond the mind of man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Darwinism was seen by the intelligentsia of the time as a final permission to break with the ways of the ancients. Finally, at long last, the superstitions of religion could be put aside; finally, at long last, the legacy of the ancient Greeks could be escaped.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821\u20131881) worried deeply about mankind unbound from moral obligation. He saw in the rise of an atheistic world the face of the Marquis de Sade (1740\u20131814), the famed French sadist, rapist, and pedophile who embraced passion, discounted human responsibility, and saw in his own pleasure the highest good. De Sade infamously dismissed God and added, \u201cWe rail against the passions, but never think that it is from their flame that philosophy lights its torch.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Dostoyevsky feared the materialism that had come to dominate European thought. In the famous \u201cGrand Inquisitor\u201d chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan Karamazov tells his tale of a Spanish inquisitor grilling Jesus, Dostoyevsky suggested that the day had come when human beings would give up on meaning in favor of worldly goods: \u201cDost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger?\u201d Dostoyevsky suggested the cure for hunger would be the dictator\u2014the man who satiates hunger will be worshipped as a deity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The search for meaning, untrammeled by Judeo-Christian values and Greek telos, freed from moral responsibility by scientific determinism, would burst forth in a conflagration that will set the whole world on fire, Dostoyevsky predicted. The result would be blood and suffering, a maelstrom of horror, followed by an epoch of emptiness. God\u2019s death, Dostoyevsky thought, was man\u2019s death as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844\u20131900) saw, left no room for purpose through reason. Like Hume, Nietzsche believed that morality through reason alone was a lie, a cover for instinct wearing the costume of reason: \u201cYour decision, \u2018this is right,\u2019 has a previous history in your impulses, your likes and dislikes.\u201d30 Nietzsche, in other words, had consolidated the lessons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and ripped the mask of nicety from the face of the Enlightenment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Nietzsche knew that the only answer to scientific materialism was radical subjectivity, and with it would come the death of morals. He celebrated that fact, and reveled in the power of the will.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-658e227c-f52d-437f-8703-af4438a8b5c1\">Nationalism &amp; Revolution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The French Revolution was bloody, vicious, and awful. Tens of thousands of people were murdered by the regime between 1793 and 1794, with another quarter million dead in a civil war over a draft designed to fight foreign invasion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Where, exactly, did the French Revolution\u2014born with dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity\u2014go so wrong? It went wrong because the Enlightenment of the French Revolution rejected the lessons of the past; it saw in the history of the West mere repression and brutality, and longed for a tomorrow full of visions and dreams based on vague notions of human goodness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>It was the French Revolution that made romantic nationalism a driving force in history. The very definition of citizenship changed in Revolutionary France, from subjects at the beck and call of more powerful actors to citizens with an equal stake in the formation of the general will. But that definition of citizenship quickly devolved into a new form of subject status: in France, citizens owed their rights to the state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Nationalism turns toxic when it fails to reach that moral minimum\u2014when it tyrannizes its own citizens, or locks people out based on immutable characteristics. Nationalism turns poisonous when it becomes imperialism\u2014when it suggests that it represents a universalism that can override the legitimate rights of other states, or when it uses national interest as an excuse for conquest on behalf of a \u201cvolk.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The Bible contended that man could not live by bread alone; the French Revolution contended that without bread, nothing else mattered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The term bureaucracy is a mashup of the French word bureau, meaning the material used to cover desks, and the Greek term kratos, meaning power. So the term itself literally meant \u201cdesk power\u201d or \u201coffice rule.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Didn\u2019t individual rights come into direct conflict with a small clique of all-knowing experts, ruling from above? The man who solved this conundrum was Auguste Comte (1798\u20131857).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>In 1822, Comte wrote his Plan for the Scientific Work Necessary to Reorganize Society\u2014his suggestion then, as it was throughout his career, is that human knowledge could lead to the imposition of rational laws that could reorganize all of humanity. Expertise was the basis of governance. And all inquiries into transcendental values were worthless, except insofar as they served man. Science was philosophy was religion. All were the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-9e94aee6-2ebd-4022-b2d1-f27291e05ec8\">Nazism &amp; Communism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The worst sins of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sprang from various combinations of romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and supposedly scientific governance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The most obvious example, of course, came in Germany. The regime of Otto von Bismarck was characterized by its embrace of romantic nationalism, which culminated in the unification of Germany\u2014and Bismarck\u2019s subsequent focus on Kulturkampf, the \u201ccultural struggle\u201d for German solidarity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>When Germany surrendered after World War I and the Kaiser was ousted in a coup, romantic nationalism did not dissipate: it was buried lightly under the soil, where it festered. In the aftermath of World War I, the German national myth of the \u201cback-stabbing\u201d outsiders who had given away a battle victory spread far and wide. Germany had been betrayed, the logic went, and only a united Germany, beyond democracy and liberalism, could rise again to defeat its enemies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The Nazi regime promulgated the most extreme romantic nationalism in world history\u2014hundreds of thousands of Germans united in lockstep, cheering wildly at the sight of a dictator, greeting each other by hailing Hitler, hanging pictures of the F\u00fchrer over their mantels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The appeal of such ideals may be confusing, but George Orwell brilliantly summed them up in a 1940 essay on Hitler\u2019s Mein Kampf: \u201cHitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don\u2019t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Meanwhile, concurrent with the rise of romantic nationalism in Germany, the ideals of collectivist redistributionism took precedence in the East. The end of World War I marked the final breath of the tsarist regime in Russia\u2014and with it, the rise of Marxism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Sounding a lot like Bernie Sanders, Lenin wrote in 1917, \u201cDemocracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich\u2014that is the democracy of capitalist society.\u201d Instead, Lenin sought on the one hand \u201cimmense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags,\u201d and on the other hand, \u201ca series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Stalin would carry Lenin\u2019s bloody legacy further, of course\u2014by the end of his life, Stalin was responsible for the murder of tens of millions of people under his rule, including five million people during the forcible starvation of Ukraine for agricultural collectivization from 1931 to 1934 alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Mao openly bragged about \u201cburying alive 46,000 scholars.\u201d During the Cultural Revolution, Mao\u2019s forces committed atrocities upon intellectuals\u2014and mirroring the USSR\u2019s gulags, Mao built a system of laogai that housed tens of millions of dissidents over the decades. Today, the North Korean gulag state mirrors the glorious heritage of its communist predecessors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Until the USSR\u2019s fall, many on the mainstream Left believed it to represent a viable ideology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Despite the fall of the USSR, the desire to find a new meaning in the collective remains, both in the United States and abroad. The romanticism about communism has never truly died on the American Left\u2014in 2017, the New York Times ran op-eds about why \u201cwomen had better sex under socialism,\u201d \u201cwhen Communism inspired Americans,\u201d and why \u201csocialism\u2019s future may be its past.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-12f6b480-f992-4e49-9c74-158375baac69\">Capitalism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>During the FDR administration, economic policy was set from the top; ignoring the injunction by economically laissez-faire thinkers that no set of individuals can know more than the entire market at large, FDR and his cadre of geniuses lengthened the Great Depression by nearly a decade by manipulating the currency, setting wages and prices, and bullying those who objected into silence. As Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA concluded, \u201cThe economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.\u201d Those misguided policies included FDR setting the price of gold based on his lucky number. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wrote in his diary, \u201cIf anybody ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Ironically, as Cole points out, \u201cThe fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and lawmakers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Teddy Roosevelt wrote a letter in 1913 stating, \u201cSociety has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. . . . Some day we will realize that the prime duty the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Magna Carta, the first great charter of Western liberties, was signed by King John in 1215, and set limits to monarchic powers based on \u201cregard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honour of God and the advancement of his holy Church.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-f1d61978-973d-4883-ab5b-a16b3fbfab5d\">Existentialism &amp;  Human Motivation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Existentialism truly began in the nineteenth century with S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard (1813\u20131855), a Danish philosopher bothered by the problem of Enlightenment reason, which he saw as arrogant\u2014the notion that a universal ethical system could be discerned by human beings was a fool\u2019s errand, the idea that history was an unerring unfolding of Hegelian dialectics far too simplistic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>All truth was subjective, according to the existentialists, not merely moral truth. This was the view of Karl Jaspers (1883\u20131969), a German philosopher who wrote, \u201cAll knowledge is interpretation.\u201d6 It was also the view of Martin Heidegger (1889\u20131976), who suggested that the essence of being human was being\u2014not reason or passion, but existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Science had begun, in the Francis Bacon philosophy, as an aid toward the betterment of man\u2019s material conditions; it had morphed over time into an aid toward the betterment of man\u2019s moral condition, though not the source of morality itself. But now, with God out of the picture and the collective implicated in the worst crimes in human history, science was handed the task of creating a new morality, a new law. The existentialists had reduced human purpose to creation of subjective truth; science provided the last remnant of objective truth in Western thought.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The first serious advocate of the position that human beings were no longer rational, free actors came from Sigmund Freud (1856\u20131939). Freud was a charlatan, a phenomenal publicist but a devastatingly terrible practicing psychologist. He was a quack who routinely prescribed measures damaging to patients, then wrote fictional papers bragging about his phenomenal results. In one 1896 lecture, he claimed that by uncovering childhood sexual trauma he had healed some eighteen patients; he later admitted he hadn\u2019t cured anyone. Freud himself stated, \u201cI am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador\u2014an adventurer, if you want it translated\u2014with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>But Freud\u2019s radical theories about human nature became world famous. He submitted that religion was but a form of \u201cchildhood neurosis\u201d from which the world had to recover. He suggested that the roots of religion lay in an ancient event during which a group of prehistoric brothers had killed their father. Dreams were a form of wish fulfillment, behavior was a manifestation of unconscious desires; in general, people were governed by forces beyond their control. Mirroring Plato, Freud posited a tripartite soul\u2014Plato suggested reason, spirit, and appetite, while Freud suggested superego (moral reason), ego (life experience militating between appetite and reason), and id (appetite).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>But where Plato suggested that man should work to ally spirit with reason to overcome appetite, Freud suggested that working to uncover unconscious forces shaping our id would be the best possible solution. In other words, Freud believed that we were all governed by forces we couldn\u2019t understand, absent psychoanalytic intervention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-5f982d76-79f8-4428-8ff8-27ef2f3bfb42\">On Liberty<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Neo-Enlightenment philosophers like to connect religion with slavery, overlooking that the abolitionist movement in the West was almost entirely led by religious Christians\u2014and ignoring that the global movement against slavery was led by the West (slavery was only legally abolished in China in 1909, and slavery was only legally ended in Saudi Arabia in 1962).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The same holds true of the movement against Jim Crow. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the Bible far more than he quoted David Hume\u2014and with good reason. It was the prophet Amos\u2019s dream that animated King\u2019s: \u201cI have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; \u2018and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The traditions of individual liberty didn\u2019t spring into being in the West miraculously, from nothing. They sprang from the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. Western civilization is a bridge suspended over the waters of chaos. Removing that tension collapses that bridge into the roiling river below.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>I agree with a lot of Enlightenment ideals, particularly regarding individual liberty and natural rights, as we\u2019ve discussed. But the new scientific Athenians will have to make common cause with the devotees of Jerusalem, rather than making war on them. The same holds true in reverse. For, as it turns out, there are larger philosophical threats to Western civilization that require our attention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Unfortunately, reason is no longer in vogue. That\u2019s why when I visited Berkeley to speak, protesters outside chanted \u201cSPEECH IS VIOLENCE!\u201d It\u2019s why I\u2014an Orthodox Jew, and the leading antagonist of the racist alt-right\u2014have been routinely castigated as a Nazi. Subjectivity rules the day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-d0fe868a-7420-40f9-bf15-c5654b4319cb\">On Fascism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Europe had been devastated by war; Europe had discarded religion long ago. But in the United States, the post\u2013World War II situation looked bright. Unlike in Europe, religious practice remained incredibly strong. As of 1950, about three-quarters of Americans were members of a church, synagogue, or mosque; in 1954, almost half of all Americans said they had attended church, synagogue, or mosque in the last seven days. Over nine in ten Americans identified as Christian.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>in the aftermath of World War II, the American dream was still very much alive. And that dream was never merely a white picket fence, a dog, and two kids out in suburbia. It was a dream of cultural enrichment and common purpose. As Fred Siegel reports, between 1940 and 1955, local symphony orchestras increased 250 percent; in 1955, thirty-five million people paid to attend symphonies as opposed to fifteen million paying to attend baseball games. Even early television became part of the cultural education of the public: NBC presented a three-hour production of Laurence Olivier\u2019s Richard III; as of 1951, there were twenty-five thousand members of the Great Books discussion groups, with \u201c50,000 Americans a year . . . buying collections of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Founding Fathers, and Hegel\u201d at serious cost to themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Nazism didn\u2019t arise from consumerism. It arose from communal purpose overriding individual purpose, and individual capacity abandoned in favor of worship of the communal capacity of the state. Nazism, in other words, lay a lot closer to Marxism than capitalism did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>But Fromm and thinkers like him suggested that the solution to the supposedly inevitable slide from dull consumerist conformity to horrible fascism lay in complete rebellion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-77c4ac80-69aa-4507-bdb7-7f0cbf50e30b\">Marcuse &amp; Self-Realization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The leading advocate of that rebellion was Herbert Marcuse (1898\u20131979). Marcuse, one of the progenitors of the so-called New Left, preached that the prevailing order had to be torn out root and branch. In 1955, coincident with the rise of Kinsey\u2019s thought, Marcuse penned Eros and Civilization, in which he argued that repressive sexuality had damaged mankind, and that only freeing man of his Victorian mentality regarding sex could build a better world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>No wonder Marcuse\u2019s popular slogan ran \u201cMake love, not war.\u201d Students in Paris during the 1968 revolt carried banners reading MARX, MAO, AND MARCUSE.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The capstone to his theory came in the form of censorship\u2014what he called, in Orwellian fashion, \u201crepressive tolerance.\u201d Marcuse suggested that certain forms of speech had to be barred so that they could not emerge victorious, toppling critical theory itself. According to Marcuse, \u201cthe objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.\u201d Freedom, Marcuse said, was \u201cserving the cause of oppression\u201d; oppression, therefore, could serve the cause of freedom. Speech could be labeled violence\u2014Marcuse called to \u201creexamine the issue of violence and the traditional distinction between violent and non-violent action\u201d\u2014and violence speech. In essence, \u201cLiberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left . . . it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Religion, Greek teleology, and capitalism all have something in common: none of them cares particularly much about \u201cyour bliss.\u201d Religion suggests that your self-realization lies in consonance with God, and that any attempt to placate your ego through pursuit of personally defined happiness is bound to fail. Religion suggests that \u201cyour bliss\u201d does not exist: only God\u2019s bliss does. Greek teleology is utterly unconcerned with your personal definition of self-realization; the only thing that counts is whether you are acting virtuously in accordance with right reason. And capitalism cares far less about how you\u2019re feeling than about your ability to create products and services someone else wants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>By calling self-realization the highest good, then, the New Left had cast out the specter of the roots of Western civilization and replaced them with a call to action. What was that call to action? Forming alliances directed at tearing down the system. The theory went like this: self-esteem is the key good. But self-esteem cannot be achieved while there are structural impediments to that self-esteem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Those structural impediments came in the form of sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry. Such bigotry didn\u2019t have to be expressed outwardly\u2014the structures of society themselves were institutionally biased against victim groups. And members of those victim groups couldn\u2019t achieve self-realization so long as those institutions remained standing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The only way for members of these victimized groups to restore their self-esteem would come by banding together to tear down the system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"advgb-toc-5cd61181-62f5-4d39-a09d-afb97a079f3c\">Intersectionality<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Professor Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw of Columbia University came up with a term to describe this coalition of victims: intersectionality. According to Crenshaw, human beings are members of various groups: racial groups, gender groups, religious groups, sexual orientation groups. And we can describe their \u201clived realities\u201d by referring to the intersection between those groups. Thus, a black female lesbian Muslim has a different lived reality than a white male heterosexual Christian. Furthermore, we can identify the level of difficulty someone has experienced in life simply by referencing the various groups of which she is a member. The more minority groups to which you are a member, the more you have been victimized; the more you have been victimized, the more your opinion about the innate institutional bigotry of the United States ought to carry weight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Those who refuse to abide by tribal dictates of intersectionality\u2014people who insist that they are not victims of American society simply by dint of their skin color\u2014are deemed sell-outs, Uncle Toms. Thus Clarence Thomas is not legitimately black because he doesn\u2019t vote Democrat; Nikki Haley isn\u2019t legitimately a woman because she is a pro-life Republican. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, when black people call for individualistic thinking that strays from traditional Democratic ideology, that means supporting \u201cwhite freedom\u201d: \u201cfreedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>In order to promote discussions about intersectionality, systems of oppression must be curbed\u2014including the speech of others. Discussions must end. Reason must be thrown out the window since, owing to our different life experiences, we cannot understand one another.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Science, too, must take a backseat. Science might undercut the intersectional argument by providing evidence that not all suffering springs from institutional discrimination. Say, for example, that social science shows a high correlation between single motherhood and crime\u2014and that single motherhood is especially predominant among American blacks. Or say that there are group differences in IQ, and that those differences may be at least partially heritable. Or say that men and women are biologically different, and that this difference explains differences in pay\u2014since women choose different types of jobs than men and make different decisions with regard to the number of hours worked, their pay tends to be lower on average than that of men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>These basic facts become subject to scrutiny since science itself is a construct of the system. That\u2019s the argument of Donna Hughes in the Women\u2019s Studies International Forum, who explains, \u201cThe scientific method is a tool for the construction and justification of dominance in the world . . . the new methodological techniques were invented by men who were interested in explaining the inheritance of traits in order to support their political ideology of natural human superiority and inferiority.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Ire has met Sam Harris, who dared to point out that IQ differentials between groups exist. He did not say they were entirely genetic; he did not draw any policy inferences from IQ studies (for the record, Harris was a Hillary Clinton supporter). Nonetheless, Ezra Klein\u2019s Vox chided him for citing studies, with scientists Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard Nisbett suggesting that Harris had engaged in \u201cpseudoscientific racialist speculation.\u201d When confronted by Harris about this, Klein immediately retreated to the confines of identity politics: \u201cThese hypotheses about biological racial difference are now, and have always been, used to advance clear political agendas.\u201d Thus, these hypotheses must never be discussed, since they fall afoul of identity politics considerations. And even engaging in scientific discussion is a form of identity politics, according to Klein\u2014citing studies and fighting back against attempts to censor those studies is merely engaging in a tribalism of white scientists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The National Science Foundation, a federal funding agency for science, says that it wants to pursue a \u201cdiverse STEM workforce\u201d\u2014not the best scientists of all races, but a specifically diverse group. To that end, the NSF spent millions funding projects on implicit bias research, one of the least-verified, most-hyped attempts to ferret out secret racism ever attempted, as well as $500,000 on studying intersectionality. Science departments around the country are seeking not those with the highest scores or the best credentials, but those with special \u201ccontributions to diversity.\u201d As Heather Mac Donald points out, the American Astronomical Society has now asked PhD programs to stop using the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in physics for applicants, since too few women were doing well. The same is happening in medicine, where schools have been encouraged to stop using the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) for ethnic minorities. The impact: \u201cFrom 2013 to 2016, medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores, according to Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch.\u201d How it helps patients to have less qualified but more ethnically diverse heart surgeons remains unexplained.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Professor Heather Heying when she pointed out that men are taller than women. Heying\u2019s husband, Professor Bret Weinstein, lost his job at Evergreen when he refused to leave campus after black students demanded that white teachers not teach on a particular day; students called him a racist and led a takeover of campus buildings. College speakers ranging from Charles Murray to Heather Mac Donald to Christina Hoff Sommers have been run off campus, usually following violent protests, for the sin of citing statistics. Better false statistics and bad social science than to violate someone\u2019s sense of self-esteem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>All of this is deeply damaging to precisely the people who are supposed to be freed by it. Intersectional thinking promotes a victim mentality entirely at odds with the pursuit of fulfillment and success. If you are told repeatedly that your self-esteem is threatened by the system and the structure, and that even statistics and science must not offend you\u2014if you are taught that your bliss matters more than objective truth\u2014you become weak and fragile, unable to cope in the real world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Focusing on right-able wrongs is worthwhile; blaming all disparities on discrimination leads to more political polarization and individual failure. Studies show that perceived discrimination is heavily connected with \u201clower grades, less academic motivation . . . and less persistence when encountering an academic challenge.\u201d That\u2019s certainly a case for fighting discrimination. It\u2019s also a case for not exaggerating its extent, or silencing conversations in order to pander to sensitivities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Individual capacity has been abandoned in this worldview\u2014individuals, after all, are mere creations of the systems into which they have been born. Collective purpose, too, has gone by the wayside\u2014after all, it\u2019s the system keeping you down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Perhaps the most polarizing and puzzling story in the Bible is the story of Abraham\u2019s binding of Isaac. It\u2019s a deceptively simple story: God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham acquiesces without argument, Abraham takes Isaac to the top of a mountain to slaughter him, an angel intervenes and stops the killing, and Abraham substitutes a ram for Isaac rather than killing his son. But the story raises serious questions, obviously. Is God barbaric? Richard Dawkins says yes: \u201cBy the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relations, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: \u2018I was only obeying orders.\u2019\u201d Dawkins says that the story can\u2019t be an allegory for anything praiseworthy. And it can\u2019t teach anything moral: \u201cwhat kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>As Ronald Reagan put it, \u201cFreedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn\u2019t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children\u2019s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These highlights are from the Kindle version of The Right [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":15162,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&quot;The Right Side of History&quot; Highlights<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.justcharlie.com\/highlights\/the-right-side-of-history\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;The Right Side of History&quot; 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