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feared that the revolution had done away with the two foundations of Western civilization: “the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.”
Liberty would collapse into moral relativism and then tyranny; fraternity would collapse into nationalistic tribalism; equality would collapse into a new caste system, with all-wise rulers in control of the commanding heights.
“The Revolution, in short, invented not only the nation-state but the modern institution and ideology of national citizenship.”
Despite the internal collapse of the French Revolution, the power of the French military never wavered. Napoleon’s coup merely made clear what had already become obvious: military nationalism was the wave of the future, and other states would have to struggle to respond in kind.
But nationalism can also be a force for evil. Nationalism turns toxic when it fails to reach that moral minimum—when it tyrannizes its own citizens, or locks people out based on immutable characteristics. Nationalism turns poisonous when it becomes imperialism—when 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 “volk.”
Like Paine before him, Marx saw free markets as a system of exploitation. According to Marx, the value of a product could be measured by its “socially necessary labor time”—the average number of work hours needed to create a product.
His philosophy would damn millions to slavery—and haunt the openness and freedom of the post-Enlightenment world with the specter of glorious utopianism.
Individual action outside the rule of the general will would only undercut the general will; individual action outside the nationalistic state could only detract from the power of the state; individual excellence would only undermine the leveling process necessary for transforming man. Unless, that is, individual excellence was yoked to the service of the state.
Comte provided a philosophical basis for bureaucratic oligarchy: atheistic science. Widely considered the father of sociology, Comte believed that human development had begun with religious pseudo-authority—human beings paying attention to obscure moral codes they believed had come from God, thanks to their own superstition.
Continental progressivism—the philosophy of Hegel and Comte, among others—made its way across the Atlantic Ocean in the form of John Dewey (1859–1952), a man that Professor Robert Horwitz described as “the foremost American philosopher of democracy of the twentieth century.” Dewey believed that social science could be used to engineer a new world and a new humanity. Dewey thought that the great ill plaguing the United States was its materialism—like Marx, Dewey said that production and consumption had locked human beings into a
If we were simply smart enough, we could solve all of our problems. As Dewey wrote, “the most direct and effective way out of these evils is steady and systematic effort to develop that effective intelligence named scientific method in the case of human transactions.”
Darwin showed that everything changed and became more complex over time—and that was good. It was our job to facilitate human “growth”: physical growth, emotional growth, intellectual growth. Our “purpose is to set free and to develop the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or economic status.”
Furthermore, the state ought to reeducate children toward the type of growth the intelligent bureaucrats have endorsed; children are, in effect, the property of the state.
Pragmatism is the watchword. Whatever works is moral. Government must use its means to promote empowering rights—things citizens need in order to “grow.”
The philosophy of scientifically based expertise proposed by Hegel and Comte and espoused by Dewey came to fruition in the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson studied Hegel; he was a devotee of Herbert Spencer, himself a fan of Comte and the philosopher who actually coined the term survival of the fittest.
“No doubt we are meant to have liberty; but each generation must form its own conception of what liberty
Wilson’s vision, the community always took precedence over the individual; scientifically minded experts could best run the country; and the president—you know, someone like Woodrow Wilson—could act as the repository of the Rousseauian general will.
From now on, American government would no longer base itself on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. It would base itself on the pragmatic progressivism of Dewey and Wilson—an ever-growing bureaucracy, self-assured and confident in its own scientific expertise, and aware of its own authority to help shape the formation of the American people from the top down.
The philosophy of the American founding represented the apex of a philosophy that could provide all four elements of meaning necessary for the building of a civilization: individual purpose and communal purpose, individual capacity and collective capacity. But
The worst sins of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sprang from various combinations of romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and supposedly scientific governance.
That struggle led Bismarck to crack down in fascistic fashion on German Catholics, whom he saw as a threat to his autocratic
The Nazi regime promulgated the most extreme romantic nationalism in world history—hundreds 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 Führer over their mantels.
And, of course, Marx had concluded his Communist Manifesto with a call to arms: “their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”
“Nearly the entire liberal elite, including much of FDR’s Brain Trust, had made the pilgrimage to Moscow to take admiring notes on the Soviet experiment.”
Today, we hear about the wonders of Chinese central planning—the great strength to be found in organized economies, the rising power in the East. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times regaled readers in 2009 with tales of China’s mastery: “There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, says that Stalin was a “complex figure,” adding that “excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways Russia’s enemies attack it.”58 Even victims of Stalin’s crimes miss the power and glory that came with collectivization of purpose.
Teddy Roosevelt wrote a letter in 1913 stating, “Society 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.”
For her work, Sanger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a staggering thirty-one times—twice as many times as Gandhi.
Despite massive technological improvements—and, in part, because of such improvements—the human race had nearly wiped itself off the planet. Science had not solved the search for purpose. In fact, with the discovery of atomic weaponry, it seemed that the West had come to the brink of its own annihilation.
That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since—a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides us the meaning we seek.
After the catastrophic insanity of not one but two Great Wars, the Biblical warning not to place faith in princes had been proved prescient.
Existentialism truly began in the nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard
Instead, Kierkegaard posited that human beings had to find meaning by looking within. The system
“Subjectivity is the truth,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Objectively there is no infinite decision or commitment, and so it is objectively correct to annul the difference between good and evil as well as the law of noncontradiction and the difference between truth and untruth.” Truth can be found in ourselves.3 To
“teleological suspension of the ethical.”
He hoped, of course, that the passionate leap would be toward the Christian God. But his belief system would lead not to God, in the end, but to worship of subjectivity.
If truth lay in the self, then all moral truth automatically became a matter of subjective interpretation.
But all truth was subjective, according to the existentialists,
It meant mostly deconstructing ancient notions of eternal truths and human reason going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.
Authenticity—the true self, contemplating its own death and the meaninglessness of the universe, “taking hold of itself.”
According to Sartre, unlike both the ancients and the Enlightenment philosophers, existence precedes essence: in other words, we are born, and then constantly remake ourselves in the face of the world, rather than being subject to the dictates of human nature.
Sartre’s belief in an unfixed human nature opens the door to utopian schemes of all sorts—if we can merely change the system, as Marx argued, perhaps the New Man will arrive, cloaked in glory.
The focus on science had radically shifted. Science had begun, in the Francis Bacon philosophy, as an aid toward the betterment of man’s material conditions;
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.
Now, however, a new form of natural law came to fruition: the belief that whatever occurred in nature was “natural,” and therefore
Freud was a charlatan, a phenomenal publicist but a devastatingly terrible practicing psychologist.
He submitted that religion was but a form of “childhood neurosis” 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.
Freud believed that we were all governed by forces we couldn’t understand, absent psychoanalytic intervention.
Kinsey believed, unlike Freud, that human beings could only be freed by throwing off the shackles of Judeo-Christian morality;
Kinsey’s statistics weren’t reflective of reality, because his sample wasn’t reflective of reality: of his original 5,300 white male sample, at least 317 were sexually abused minors, “several hundred” male prostitutes, and hundreds were likely sex offenders in prison when they were interviewed.
