— Mortimer J. Adler
World War II was the clash between the worst of Western society and the best: the fight between xenophobic, fascist imperialism against the democratic aspiration for freedom.
Because Hitler embodied the worst of Western civilization the Allies had to become the best. Despite their mixed motives and dirty track records, the United States and Great Britain were forced to truly embrace liberty and justice for all in order to match the idealistic prowess of the Third Reich. History rushed together in those six years in ways that were both horrendous and terrible, but ultimately inevitable. The West could not dually hope for both man’s liberties as well as the subjugation of the globe. We learned that the contradiction was indeed costly.
One had to triumph - and by the fate of history one vanquished the other; hopefully for good. And even though Hitler was defeated he has left a spectral nightmare upon the Western imagination; “what if we are more like him than we realize?” we ask ourselves.
And so we tirelessly hunt all who bear even a cursory semblance to the monster from our nightmares. In the name of freedom, liberty, and tolerance we combat the imagined fascists lurking in our midst who attempt to repress the individual with institutions and traditions. “All liberty is good liberty,” we insist.
Give us sexual liberty and the family will disintegrate.
Give us liberty from responsibility and the economy will collapse.
Give us liberty from society and all hell will break loose.
“Give us liberty and give us death!” we chant, with little awareness that we forge headlong into a new and undreamt nightmare.
“Wait, stop. I’m going to let you think about what you just said before I destroy you.”
— John Wesley
Thanks to Matt Wilcoxen for this article.
At the beginning of this summer I was committed primarily to doing two things: sleeping and reading. While I’ve definitely achieved the first many times over, the second one has proven harder to follow up on. In June alone, I picked up three different books, only to put them down before I’d progressed beyond fifty pages.
However, the book that has successfully kept me hooked since I picked it up has been The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie (currently I’m on page 84). Though I will hold off on writing a full review of the book (as I am still in the thick of it), I can say this with confidence…
Buy it. Seriously. Buy it.
If you are interested in anything like politics, theology, philosophy, art, math, science, (and the list trails on…) and can stomach a lesson in the history of ideas, you will find the book as engaging as it is relevant.
And while I would love to fawn over the way Gallespie has connected the dots of history and ideas in my mind’s eye, the thing that inspired me to kick-off my first post is something a little more foundational.
Gallespie presents history to the reader as a story of ideas. Unlike the sociologist, who looks to demographics and social circumstance to explain modern phenomena, Gallespie couches his thesis in the trans-generational discussion that has dominated Western history since Plato and Abraham. Societies are built and broken on ideas, and Gallespie does an excellent job in demonstrating this to us.
While this view of history might seem boring, or perhaps irrelevant to some of you, I would argue that it should totally transform how we try to make sense of our modern world.
Especially when you’re my age, the world seems confusing, strange, obscure, and yet at the same time very familiar. Society is awash with people who have different ideas, beliefs, and convictions - and I don’t even know what I think about many many things. I have inherited a world I can hardly understand from people I have never met.
And yet, if there is one thing that is most obvious about me, it’s that I have been so very impacted by our modern society. I even use modern terminology to describe my Christian faith. How very sad (In fact, it’s also extremely modern of me to mourn my own self-ignorance).
However, there is hope for those who want to seek understanding - but the path is very hard. In order to truly understand the context of modernity’s crisis, and move forward in the right direction - from the struggle with Islamo-fascism to the moral decay of Western society; from the abounding spread of progress to the abstractness of art - we must return to the origin of ideas, and the dialogue that has occurred since the very beginning in order to properly compartmentalize the myriad of voices we hear in our noisy culture.
For the debates of today are impacted by the conversations of yesteryear.
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