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Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
Genesis 1:27: “God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
what makes us “virtuous” is doing our job: look at the world with our reason, discerning the final causes for which things exist.
Christianity solved the dilemma of the polis vs. the individual by suggesting that Jesus’s transformation of the world was essentially spiritual, not material.
What drove Christianity’s spread?
For science and democracy to take hold in the West, reason would have to be elevated once more.
return to our basic framework for happiness, and examine it in light of the dominance of Catholic European thought: individual purpose, individual capacity, communal purpose, and communal capacity.
Machiavelli
Machiavelli believed that those who proclaimed that the state could be governed in accordance with virtue were merely lying for the sake of convenience.
but that they were instead driven by passion.
“Luther offered more than a theory of individual empowerment.
state’s authority did not derive from the authority of the people, but from God Himself:
Similarly, Calvin believed in an aristocracy governed by checks and balances,
devolution of authority down to the individual that would lead to a true transnational movement away from authoritarian government.
It was in making this choice that the notion of human rights was born.
Hobbes is often considered the first rationalist political philosopher.
suggested instead that human passions were the chief motivator for human conduct.
state of nature, in which men harmed one another so far as their self-interest dictated they should do so.
If human beings had individual rights, did those rights end merely with survival? Or, in a state of nature, did human beings enjoy inalienable rights beyond merely breathing and eating and not being murdered?
vision of Adam Smith (1723–1790) of natural liberty
not only are human beings made in God’s image with will and reason, but with the liberty to exercise that will and reason in accordance with the pursuit of virtue.
Voltaire was a deist—he
telos
hedonist.
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.
Burke argued that the French Revolution had failed because it had ignored the lessons of human nature, the morality of Christianity, and the traditions of the past.
two foundations of Western civilization: “the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.”
The new state of France revolutionized war-making.
Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, the most famous military historian of all time, said that this decree accessed the “passions of the people,” and in doing so showed the world that a united citizenry could stand up in the face of overwhelming military odds.
military nationalism was the wave of the future,
Like Paine before him, Marx saw free markets as a system of exploitation.
Then, magically, the ills of modern society would disappear—the
suggested that such suffering would in the end result in a Messianic age of man,
None of it is true over any serious length of time, but the desire for collective purpose and collective capacity runs strong.
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.
“If anybody ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would
“The 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.”
the notion that a universal ethical system could be discerned by human beings was a fool’s errand, the idea that history was an unerring unfolding of Hegelian dialectics far too simplistic.
natural law—the idea of universal purposes discernible in the universe through the use of reason.
Neo-Enlightenment philosophers like to connect religion with slavery, overlooking that the abolitionist movement in the West was almost entirely led by religious Christians—and ignoring that the global movement against slavery was led by the West
Subjectivity rules the day.
Better to destroy reason than to abide by its dictates.
It was a dream of cultural enrichment and common purpose.
Virtue, it turns out, was part of that old-style hierarchy that had kept humanity penned in for millennia.
none of them cares particularly much about “your bliss.”
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.
only thing that counts is whether you are acting virtuously in accordance with right reason.
Freedom—supposedly a tool of the white power structure—itself must be redefined so as to protect the self-realization of intersectional people.
It came from the destruction of a common vision.
1. Your Life Has Purpose.
