Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In his book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises, Spencer Klavan has written a modern tour de force that straddles two realms. The first is that the book is a prescient and chilling analysis of the “five essential crises” facing Western civilization today:
- The Crisis of Reality: Is there such a thing as objective truth—and even if there is, can “virtual reality” replace it?
- The Crisis of the Body: Not just the “transgender” insanity, but the push for a “transhumanist” future;
- The Crisis of Meaning: Evolution—both biological and cultural—is a process of endless replication, of copying. But is there an original model that gives us an aspiration to aim for? Do our lives and actions have meaning?
- The Crisis of Religion: Science has not eliminated man’s religious impulse, but rather misdirected it—and wrongly dismissed the profound philosophical plausibility of Judeo-Christian revelation;
- The Crisis of the Regime: Has America reached a point of inevitable collapse? Republican government was meant to end the destructive cycle of regimes rising and falling—but can it?
Second, Spencer Klavan takes us on a whirlwind and in-depth journey through the ideas of Western philosophy, literature, and classical thought both to bring into sharper relief these crises, and also to demonstrate how an application of ancient wisdom can be a plausible panacea to much of the malarkey, willed ignorance, and malice that constitute the crises facing Western civilization today.
I interviewed Spencer Klavan, a Ph.D. in classics from Oxford University and a senior editor at The American Mind, about his most recent book.
Hill: Congratulations on your profound and brilliant book. What method did you use to boil down the plethora of crises facing our civilization to these five fundamentals that you identify?
Klavan: Well, first of all, thanks sincerely for your words of appreciation and your support of the book. I really wanted this to be a project that would speak both to people who have never encountered some of the great works I discuss, and to people like yourself with academic backgrounds. So it means a lot that you’ve benefited from it.
Really the technique that guides all my work is to try and find the first-principle questions at stake. A crisis in the true Greek sense of the term isn’t just this or that particularly vexing event—the way we talk now about “the COVID crisis” or “a supply chain crisis.” Those are problems, to be sure, but “crisis” literally means a decision point, a time for choosing. A crossroads between two fundamentally unreconcilable options. So that’s what I was looking for: first-order questions that bring clarity where the news brings confusion and concatenation of multiple issues.
News items are important, and there’s nothing shallow in caring about day-to-day politics. But the cascade of stories and fragments that flickers past us every day can make it difficult to understand what’s at stake in each new outrage, or even remember what all of them are. To me that’s a major benefit of reading the classics in the first place: when you have what C.S. Lewis called “the clean sea breeze of the centuries” blowing through your mind now and then, you can catch some of the dominant strains that keep recurring and ask why they’re there, what fundamental questions are being raised.
So for example, I talk in the book not just about “trans” issues, but about the relationship between body and soul which those issues are really about. From that perspective you can see that all sorts of other events are related to the same foundational topic—digital avatars, “body positivity” and negativity, even what they call “transhumanism.” It’s a kind of Aristotelian approach: from particular issues, up to primary ideas, and from there back down to particulars.
Hill: Which among the crises you have identified is the most detrimental one to the West? Or are they all really incommensurable?
Klavan: Actually, from my perspective, there’s a sense in which they’re all one crisis. Near the end of the book I begin driving toward this conclusion: we don’t know how to relate to our bodies because we don’t know what’s truly real. We don’t know what’s truly real because we can’t find a stable point of meaning. We can’t find a stable point of meaning because we have blinded ourselves to the divine. And all of this cashes out in political terms as a crisis for our regime.
That said, I do think the “religion crisis” is maybe the most profound, or the one from which all the others emerge. It’s in some sense the climax of the book, and that’s because examining the others gets us to the point where we’re able to face it head-on: once you see where the logic of these crises tends, you realize there’s no getting out of facing up to God.
Hill: What is it about the wisdom of the ancient thinkers that make their ideas so applicable as solutions to something like radical transgender ideology?
Klavan: Well, I think it has to do with that fixation on ultimate questions, that willingness to get to the heart of things. And of course there’s been a winnowing effect! When time and disaster have destroyed so many books, left so many beautiful things in obscurity, what you’re left with is going to be, in part at least, made up of what Matthew Arnold memorably called “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”
And actually the part before that, which people quote less frequently, might be just as important: “culture,” Arnold writes, is “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Culture: from cultus, a Latin word meaning that which we tend to or care for day by day, like a garden. “Perfection”: from perficio, not simply to correct but to complete, to reach the fullness of what we are. It’s a matter of knowing ourselves, and then reaching, as the best of the ancients did, toward the fulfilment of our humanity.
If you keep your eyes fixed on that sort of goal, you’ll be drawn to the things that endure—which is why their thought so often still feels fresh even in a more modern context.
Hill: You describe math and science as a new type of religion that is purporting to provide spiritual guidance for human beings today. This phenomenon, I believe, takes a form also known as scientism. You think this state of affairs is untenable. Why? At what point in our history did we turn away from the humanities as moral guides to the good life, and why did this happen in your view?
Klavan: Well, math and science are both noble human pursuits. But you’re right: scientism, as distinct from and often at variance with science, is an effort to crowd out the human field of vision with nothing but material concerns, a doomed attempt to keep from asking or answering questions about our purpose and our souls. Which, since we must ask those questions, ends up not eliminating religion but putting science in the place of religion, which it was never meant to be. Hence “Follow the Science!” with a capital S, as if we had in mind here some imposing deity, proclaiming its pure and objective will. Maybe we do.
Even the word “science” gives a misleading impression that material knowledge just is the only kind of legitimate knowledge, which is what scientia means. It’s a holdover from 19th-century German optimism about Wissenschaft, which etymologically is the same thing. But what we’re really talking about here is natural philosophy, the study of nature or physis (whence our word “physics”). Nature, says Aristotle, is “that which has its principle of change and being at rest within itself.” In more directly modern language it’s the study of what happens spontaneously, according to the set patterns of nature.
And I think very understandably, during the 16th and 17th centuries when the authority of the Catholic Church was falling apart, some people wanted very much to locate a new source of absolute truth, and they thought they could find it in the hard and fast patterns of quantifiable sense data. That’s a major feature of what we now call the “scientific revolution.” But the best practitioners—Newton, for instance, and Kepler—freely acknowledged that material observations and their patterns could get you so far: natural philosophy isn’t the only thing that matters. You need metaphysics too, and theology. That’s what we came to forget as our technology grew so powerful in the wake of the scientific revolution that it overawed us.
Hill: You write a lot about the multiverse and the blending of the digital world with the real world in almost apocalyptic tones. Let’s unpack this a bit. With Artificial Intelligence gaining a stranglehold on almost all facets of human existence, what is the real danger here? What ought we to fear the most about the multiverse as you describe it? You say the collapse between the “real’’ and the “virtual “cannot occur without collapsing distinctions between good and evil. Please elaborate.
Klavan: Well, the wonderful 20th-century Platonist Iris Murdoch wrote that “love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Elsewhere she talked about “unselfing,” the act of psychic generosity that lets us abandon our own concerns for a moment and be really, truly absorbed in other people as distinct from us. I think the technology you bring up here, especially AI when it’s presented as some kind of substitute for or equivalent to humanity, poses an all but diabolical temptation to make unselfing impossible. This notion that AI will become “conscious” or “make art” goes back to Alan Turing’s absurd idea that if something can fool you into believing it can think, then it effectively does.
When we say that a machine is thinking we imagine that we’re imbuing it with a kind of life. But what we’re really doing is emptying out ourselves and those around us, suggesting that they too are no more than a confected set of impressions in our minds. It’s just like the old worshippers of idols: first they imagine that the statues of their gods can think and act, then they end up unable to think and act themselves. “Their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak. Eyes, but cannot see…. They who make them will become like them.” We create a simulacrum of human activity, and then pretend that’s all human activity itself is. But the point of a painting, or a movie, or even a text message, is that there’s another soul on the other end of the line. The art, or the words, or the technology, is just supposed to be a medium for that meeting of soul with soul. That’s what we’ve got to remember, or lose ourselves.
Hill: On one level, your book presupposes that human beings have a desire to apply ancient wisdom to these five crises you have identified. Do you really believe that, say, the majority of Americans are aware of the depth of the crises as you outline them? Do they have the discipline and desire to truly deal with them head on? I have a feeling a great many in the West are living in a state of willed self-deception about the crises you’ve so eloquently diagnosed. Can most human beings step outside their subjective perspectival silos in order to objectively see the nihilism that underlies the crises as you discuss them?
Klavan: Well, recently there was a study that made the rounds which suggested 30-50% of people don’t have an inner monologue. And I don’t really believe you could possibly test that, but I do notice anecdotally that a lot of people I meet seem to be making an active effort to crowd out their inner lives. We stuff our ears with gunk now—meaningless chatter on podcasts, insanely loud music even in otherwise restrained restaurants. Maybe there’s something to that: maybe we’re afraid of the inner attention required for introspection.
And one of the most chilling features of, say, Plato’s Republic is the idea that you really can deform people educationally. Certainly our chattering classes are doing their best, all the time. It’s also true, though, that the worse this sort of thing gets, the more people—even people with little or no reading life—can sense there’s something wrong. At a certain point you hit up against a wall of nature, something absolute within you that cries out at being drugged and distracted all the time. I suspect people are reaching that point, and that the pain of it makes it surprisingly easy to offer them richer food. That’s what I’ve found on my podcast, at least: there actually are a lot of people out there with a lot of spiritual and intellectual hunger. It’s not that hard to feed them when there’s so little good food around, and the canon offers so much. It’s a draw.
Hill: Who is your favorite classical author and why?
Klavan: Without question, Aristotle is the person I come back to most frequently, in some weird way even the guy I relate to most. I wouldn’t want to be deprived of any great work of literature, but the Nicomachean Ethics is a book that not only changed my life: it continues to inform my idea of what it means to seek excellence in the field of being human.
Hill: The West is growing less religious and, especially in Europe among Europeans, more atheistic. Yet there is an Islamic religiosity within those realms that is, at least in my view, inimical to the Western project of liberty, Enlightenment values, and moral individualism. Is it the goal of the state to promote Christian values and principles in the West?
Klavan: Well, Paul said of the Jewish law that it was a schoolmaster. I think one major implication of both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics is that the whole political environment—not just laws but customs, trends, norms—shapes the souls of those who grow up within it. How could it not? And in that sense, absolutely, I think our laws should foster the ideals on which the country was founded, which absolutely are derived from distinctively Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish teaching. There’s been tons written on this—Tom Holland’s Dominion is a great place to start learning about how deeply, and how distinctively, the values we still take for granted are in fact Christian.
But it’s also a delicate business, and by design, because one of the values that has emerged from Christianity is individual liberty, as you say. The American Founders were aware that Christian sectarianism and mandated statements of this or that denominational belief had riven Europe painfully. They didn’t establish a “wall of separation between church and state”—that’s a misapprehension. But they did in the main believe that true belief is sincere belief, and sincere belief is freely chosen. I’d say the law should guide, but not coerce—I’m thinking here about what we teach in our public schools, what kinds of civic holidays we recognize. It’s a travesty that we’ve basically installed an entire separate liturgical calendar to hallow ideas antithetical to those of our founders, as was glaringly in evidence this Easter when Biden’s twitter handlers were gleefully posting about the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” That sort of should ideally be torn out of our body politic root and branch.
Hill: Explain what you mean by biolibertarianism? Why is it so dangerous a phenomenon?
Klavan: It’s the idea that the body is just a piece of private property like any other, to be manipulated and traded on the free market like you would a house or a book that you own. If you want to see this kind of thinking in action, read Andrea Long Chu’s deranged essay in the “Intelligencer,” which argues that human flesh and hormones are a “biological resource” to be parceled out and redistributed to anyone that thinks he wants to change sex. That’s actually the logic behind a lot of what gets called “gender theory”—that your body has no inherent meaning or structure, that you can just mold it to your will. Luckily I think a lot of European countries, and to a lesser extent the U.S., are realizing how sick it is both physically and spiritually.
Hill: Are you optimistic about the future of the West? Are we in a spiraling declinist trajectory?
Klavan: I often say I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist, because both of those words describe predictions about the future: that things will either go well, or poorly, and you’re the guy that knows. I try to take seriously the thought that I really, genuinely, do not know what’s going to happen in the future. Instead I practice the Christian virtue of hope. And I do have hope—both because of the sound good sense I meet in people every day when I get offline and talk to folks in the world, and because America, though it spirals more readily than other nations into cockamamie moral panics, can also right itself more swiftly than other nations. Everything manmade is doomed to death one day—but my hope is in the name of the Lord, who lives even through and beyond death. Whether we’re the stewards of a sad decline or the architects of a grand revival, our job is the same: seek the good, and work for it as you see it.
Hill: Finally, what gives you your greatest joy in the world?
Klavan: Love is the source of all joy, and love grows greater as its object grows more exalted. I love my work enormously, and my family even more, and my God most of all. In each of these things, I am blessed beyond measure, and surpassing in joy.
William says
The interview with Spencer Klavan is excellent. It gives us much to reflect upon. Mr. Klavan’s command of the whole corpus of human wisdom, including drawing upon the classical past of Plato and Aristotle, is also laudable. It produces a much more complete picture of the human condition, that which has transpired, and that which is unfolding. Regarding the “science is settled” crowd, it is amusing there seems violation of two scientific precepts, The first violated precept is that science is never settled; it is always tentative. Why? Because science is always subject to new knowledge, new discovery, so science is never settled. The second violated precept is “scientific rejection” of metaphysics and religious belief. If science is based on empiricism and materialism, then “science” can only conclude “science does not know,” regarding that which may or may not lie beyond empirical observation. Yet pseudo-science today seems to reject metaphysics and religious beliefs ex-cathedra, ironically without empirical evidence. That dogma has impact, consequences, and it can destroy great thoughts, such as that of the Western tradition. Science is of course a great blessing, but it is also but a philosophy and a structured method of inquiry, nothing more.
THX 1138 says
There is rational metaphysics and there is irrational, supernatural, metaphysics.
Rational metaphysics is based on the evidence of the senses perceiving a natural, orderly, lawful, and stable universe of natural laws and absolute facts. Rational metaphysics and it’s product of science rests on the immutable, eternal, natural laws of the Law of Identity and its corollary the Law of Causality.
Irrational and supernatural metaphysics rests on the MAGICAL powers of a Supernatural-consciousness creating and violating the laws of nature and existence with supernatural-miracles at will.
“Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute—and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real—or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer—or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man’s consciousness? Are they what they are—or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish?
The nature of your actions—and of your ambition—will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics—the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—the basic branch of philosophy.” – Ayn Rand
“Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God—and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.
In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from God to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of nature . . . . Men’s operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm—solid, eternal, real in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural.” – Leonard Peikoff
Intrepid says
So is this the steaming pile that will convince us to throw off the “yoke” of religion?
“Maybe if I post something like “being qua being” everyone will think I am smart”
Perhaps you should have written something like “idiot qua idiot” or “THX qua THX”, or “full of sh*t qua full of sh*t”.
Perhaps you should pull your head out of your “a$$ qua a$$”
Cal from Canada says
You’re obsessed with this guy. Take a deep breath and relax.
BZBBAZ says
What is life? Where does it come from? What is it made of?
Explain, please.
David Truman says
Your comment bespeaks a very sad inner nihilism. God help you.
THX 1138 says
There can be no science if we live in a supernatural universe. Science rests upon stable, orderly, immutable, and eternal NATURAL laws and REASON as man’s ONLY and COMPETENT, and EFFICACIOUS, means of knowledge. If reason is defective, i.e., “limited”, there can be no science.
“The Renaissance—the rebirth of man’s mind—blasted the rule of the [mystics] sky-high, setting the earth free of [their] power. The liberation was not total, nor was it immediate: the convulsions lasted for centuries, but the cultural influence of mysticism—of avowed mysticism—was broken. Men could no longer be told to reject their mind as an impotent tool, when the proof of its potency was so magnificently evident that the lowest perceptual-level mentality was not able fully to evade it: men were seeing the achievements of science….
The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man’s mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism—a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom….
Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go. – Ayn Rand
“The Renaissance represented a rebirth of the Aristotelian spirit. The results of that spirit are written across the next two centuries, which men describe, properly, as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. The results include the rise of modern science; the rise of an individualist political philosophy (the work of John Locke and others); the consequent spread of freedom across the civilized world; and the birth of the freest country in history, the United States of America. The great corollary of these results, the product of men who were armed with the knowledge of the scientists and who were free at last to act, was the Industrial Revolution, which turned poverty into abundance and transformed the face of the West. The Aristotelianism released by Aquinas and the Renaissance was sweeping away the [Christian] dogmas and the shackles of the past. Reason, freedom, and production were replacing faith, force, and poverty. The age-old foundations of statism were being challenged and undercut.” – Leonard Peikoff
Alkflaeda says
What if the Supernatural chooses to express itself through nature – or even created nature for this purpose? Is it impossible to conceive of a Supernatural which is more balanced, more stable, more regular than the nature that represents it, so that what we see and hear and feel constitute the edges of the Supernatural? It seems to me that your Supernatural is that which is different from nature, rather than that which is greater and may even contain nature (“In Him we live and move and have our being”, Acts 17:28 citing the philosopher Epimenides).
Alkflaeda says
Postscript – if nature is contained within the Supernatural, this will affect what is empirically perceptible, just as the only colour that a baby in its mother’s womb knows about is black, because that is what can be experienced through its closed eyelids, given that there is no light within the womb. So, if that baby was a scientist, it would be saying that black is the only proven colour. Or even that colour is a meaningless concept. Does that mean that there is no such thing as a rainbow? Of course not.
THX 1138 says
“But there is, and can be, no sensory experience of a dimension beyond this one. More to the point, there is no evidence upon which to establish that the existence and activities of material bodies are wrought by an immaterial cause. (How could spirit or consciousness exist without bodily means, e.g., sense organs, nervous system, brain? How could such a non-bodily ghost create, control, or remotely impact bodily beings?) Theologians, and religionists in general, start with a fantasy premise and then proceed to apply rigorous formal logic to tease out its implications. [Rodney] Stark himself points out that “theology consists of formal reasoning about God.” This is admirably exact. Theologians, beginning with a wished-for creation of their own minds, analyze that creation’s characteristics by rigorous application of the principles of formal—that is, deductive—logic.
But the method of reason, properly understood, is emphatically not the employment of formal logic to explicate the consequences entailed by arbitrary premises. Reasoning consists, first and foremost, in observation and induction therefrom. Deductive logic provides knowledge only when applied to premises rooted ultimately in observational fact.
In the history of philosophy, the term “rationalism” has two distinct meanings. In one sense, it signifies an unbreached commitment to reasoned thought in contrast to any irrationalist rejection of the mind. In this sense, Aristotle and Ayn Rand are preeminent rationalists, opposed to any form of unreason, including faith. In a narrower sense, however, rationalism contrasts with empiricism as regards the false dichotomy between commitment to so-called “pure” reason (i.e., reason detached from perceptual reality) and an exclusive reliance on sense experience (i.e., observation without inference therefrom). Rationalism, in this sense, is a commitment to reason construed as logical deduction from non-observational starting points, and a distrust of sense experience (e.g., the method of Descartes). Empiricism, according to this mistaken dichotomy, is a belief that sense experience provides factual knowledge, but any inference beyond observation is a mere manipulation of words or verbal symbols (e.g., the approach of Hume). Both Aristotle and Ayn Rand reject such a false dichotomy between reason and sense experience; neither are rationalists in this narrow sense. (continued below)
THX 1138 says
Theology is the purest expression of rationalism in the sense of proceeding by logical deduction from premises ungrounded in observable fact—deduction without reference to reality. The so-called “thinking” involved here is purely formal, observationally baseless, devoid of facts, cut off from reality. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was history’s foremost expert regarding the field of “angelology.” No one could match his “knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics.
Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies. Again, these fundamental philosophical points bear heavily against Stark’s argument, yet he simply ignores them.” – Andrew Bernstein, “The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages”
https://theobjectivestandard.com/2006/11/tragedy-of-theology/
Jeff Bargholz says
Rejection of religion is illogical and irrational. There’s nothing supernatural about religion or the physical laws of the universe, which sure as Hell didn’t create themselves. And if the inevitable heat death of the universe turns out to be a real occurrence, there go your immutable and eternal “natural” laws.
“Reason” is not science but Nietzsche and Hitler sure praised it. Nietzsche died in an insane asylum and Hitler committed a sordid suicide in a bunker after a horrific term as “der Fuhrer.” Both of them were “God is dead” dumbasses of “the Gay Science,” which didn’t seem very happy or pro-homosexual to me.
Judaism and Christianity provide a moral system for human culture, atheism doesn’t. It’s nihilism presented as though it were a philosophy.
THX 1138 says
“That said, I do think the “religion crisis” is maybe the most profound, or the one from which all the others emerge. It’s in some sense the climax of the book, and that’s because examining the others gets us to the point where we’re able to face it head-on: once you see where the logic of these crises tends, you realize there’s no getting out of facing up to God.”
Who’s God? Who’s religion? Christianity? For centuries Christians persecuted, imprisoned, excommunicated, burned each other at the stake, and waged bloody wars against each other over exegesis, interpretation, orthodoxy, and the nature and definition of their God.
“The Catholic Church required its adherents to accept a specific religious doctrine. Because this dogma was based on faith, not facts, reason was out as a means of adjudicating theological disputes. For example, the Church decreed that Jesus was God; but Arius (250–336 AD), presbyter of Alexandria, argued that Jesus was a creation of God—divine, but not identical to God the Father. How could one side or the other prove itself right? Given that each side started from the nonobservable claim that there exist spiritual beings independent of bodily means—ghosts—there were no facts to appeal to—merely competing arbitrary faith-based beliefs. American philosopher Ayn Rand states: “When men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion [or] communication . . . are possible. . . . [M]ysticism reduces mankind [to] a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence.” Inevitably, the Church condemned Arius and his supporters as heretics, and the dispute devolved into massive violence where “over three thousand Christians . . . died at the hands of fellow Christians.” – Andrew Bernstein
Christianity’s War Against the Mind – Andrew Bernstein
Intrepid says
Because when I want to wallow in abstract philosophical Randian B.S. I always turn to Bernstein qua Bernstein. And, of course, your obnoxious homework assignments.
BZBBAZ says
Why don’t all you smarter-than-thou pompous mush-minds
just go solve all the world’s problems?
Instead you just aimlessly blather and fade into the abyss.
You know not whence you came nor where you’re bound for.
Rob A says
This is a feel good optimistic read but in reality, where consequences are determined not by words but by actions, it’s nothing more than the latest academic exercise in ideological abstraction.
Wars are won with guns and bullets; not words. The fate and future of our nation will be determined by measurable deeds and actions; not lofty feel good rhetoric.
THX 1138 says
The roots of war are in IDEAS, philosophical ideas and ideas about what is moral and what is immoral. Ideas are communicated through words.
Why does a devout Muslim Jihadist kill infidels and even commits suicide? Because he devoutly believes in his religious, supernatural, mystical, fantastical, and irrational ideas. Inside his mind a Muslim Jihadist is convinced, wrongly of course, that he is actually acting morally by the standard of his irrational mystical and religious ideas.
Secular or religious ideas inside a man’s mind are what motivate and inspire his actions. Before you take action you have an idea in your head about what action is moral and right for you to take.
“Just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period.”
“The Roots of War” – Ayn Rand
Intrepid says
Thank God you aren’t in charge.
Rob A says
Huh…! Silly me.! And all this time I thought “I’m mad as hell and I ain’t gonna take it anymore” was enough to go to war. Gee, what did I miss about going to war?
Over thinking the reasons for going to war is a sure way to lose. You’re thinking while you’re enemy is shooting… at you! The outcome of that scenario is self evident!!
Rob A says
While we sit around pondering ideological concepts, American is being steadily consumed. The time to do something is now or there won’t be an America left to save.
Doing nothing of any real consequence is fine for some people, but not for with me. I’d rather stand like a man and fight for something than be cowed by fear and do nothing and watch America disappear. It’s fidelity to an oath I once swore to defend this country and it’s Constitution against all enemies both foreign and domestic. That oath had no expiration date.
External enemies aside, America’s immediate existential threat is posed by the uniparty and their self-serving illiberal globalist ideology and policies which in my humble opinion, is fascism under the veneer of globalism.
Chaya says
I agree with you. Theres a time for philosophy and a time for action. Of course, If we lose consensus about our underlying values we lose motivation and reason for action. But, if we don’t act and act soon we lose it all. And philosophy will be lost too.
Rob A says
In my humble opinion, the consensus all Americans should rally around and support is the preservation of the US Constitution as written and all that it embodies. Things need not be anymore complicated than that.
The US Constitution is the 2nd greatest document every written in the history of humankind.
john blackman says
hope springs eternal in the minds of the feeble . the west cant be saved , it is under judicial judgement from god and has been inflicted with a reprobate mind . there will be only one outcome and its not pretty .