The Right Side of History

1. Western Civilization's Success Rests on Judeo-Christian & Greek Foundations.

Those twin notions—those diamonds of spiritual genius—built our civilization, and built us as individuals.

Unprecedented prosperity. For most of human history, life was "nasty, brutish, and short," marked by poverty, disease, and violence. Today, billions live longer, healthier, and freer lives than ever before, with access to technology, comfort, and opportunity unimaginable to our ancestors. This dramatic improvement is not accidental but the product of a unique civilization.

The best world ever. We live in the best world that has ever existed, characterized by declining mortality rates, increased wealth, and expanded freedoms. While not perfect, this reality stands in stark contrast to the dire conditions that prevailed for tens of thousands of years. The question is how this happened and why we seem intent on dismantling it.

Foundations forgotten. This unprecedented success is built upon deep philosophical and religious foundations that we are rapidly forgetting. The core ideas that enabled this flourishing originated in ancient Jerusalem and Athens, providing the framework for values, reason, science, and human rights. Abandoning these roots threatens the very civilization they created.

2. True Happiness Requires Individual & Communal Purpose and Capacity.

Happiness, then, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity.

Beyond pleasure. Happiness is not merely temporary pleasure or the avoidance of pain. Lasting happiness stems from living a life with moral purpose, cultivating both soul and mind. This pursuit requires specific conditions to be possible.

Four crucial elements. For individuals and societies to achieve happiness, four elements are necessary:

• Individual moral purpose: A sense of meaning and duty beyond oneself.
• Individual capacity: The belief and ability to pursue that purpose effectively.
• Communal moral purpose: A shared vision of the good within a community.
• Communal capacity: The social and governmental structures enabling collective pursuit of goals.

A delicate balance. A successful civilization requires a careful balance of these four elements. Lacking any one makes the pursuit of happiness impossible, leading to societal breakdown. Our society was built on recognizing and balancing these needs.

3. Jerusalem Provided Divine Meaning, Moral Standards, and Individual Value.

This is the Jewish and Christian God. This is the Judeo-Christian civilization. This is the foundation for the greatest culture and civilization in world history—the West, the greatest force for material prosperity and freedom in the history of the planet.

A unified, moral God. Before Judaism, religions were largely polytheistic, reflecting a chaotic, arbitrary universe. Judaism introduced a singular, unified God with a master plan and predictable rules, establishing the notion of a moral universe where sin has consequences and God engages with man.

Man made in God's image. Crucially, Judaism declared that all human beings are made in God's image, endowing every individual with inherent value and free will. This was a radical departure from paganism, where only kings or potentates held divine status. This concept of individual worth is foundational to Western rights.

History has purpose. Unlike cyclical pagan views, Judaism presented history as a linear progression with a purpose, moving toward a Messianic era. God is intimately involved in history, choosing individuals and nations to spread His message and act as a "light unto the nations." This belief in progress drives Western civilization.

4. Athens Provided Reason, Natural Law, Science, and the Basis for Self-Governance.

Athens teaches us what we are capable of doing as human beings. Athens teaches us that we have the ability to use our reason to reach beyond ourselves.

Purpose in nature. Greek philosophy, particularly Plato and Aristotle, introduced the concept of telos—that everything in creation is directed toward an end or purpose. Virtue, in this view, means fulfilling one's purpose, which for humans is to reason, judge, and deliberate. This provided a framework for discovering meaning through the natural world.

The birth of science. The Greek belief that the universe operates according to discernible rules, coupled with the imperative to investigate nature to understand its purpose, laid the groundwork for science. Philosophers like Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle championed the use of reason and empirical observation to uncover the universe's underlying logic.

Reason-based government. Greek thinkers applied reason to governance, developing ethical systems tied to citizenship and the polis. While Plato envisioned philosopher-kings, Aristotle favored a mixed regime. Their ideas, particularly Cicero's synthesis, influenced the concept of natural law as the basis for just rule and systems of checks and balances.

5. The Fusion of Jerusalem and Athens Built the Modern West.

The founding ideology was the basis for the greatest experiment in human progress and liberty ever devised by the mind of man.

Bridging two worlds. For centuries, Jewish revelation and Greek reason seemed irreconcilable. Christianity attempted a synthesis, universalizing Jewish concepts but initially demoting reason. Scholasticism, particularly through Thomas Aquinas, later sought to unify faith and reason, arguing that knowing God's creation brings us closer to Him and that reason supports faith.

Science and liberty. This renewed consonance fueled the scientific revolution, as religious men saw examining God's universe as a duty. Simultaneously, skepticism of centralized religious and political power grew, leading to the rise of classical liberalism. Thinkers like Locke combined natural law (Athens) with God-given rights (Jerusalem), arguing for individual sovereignty and limited government.

The American culmination. The United States was the first nation explicitly founded on this fusion. The Declaration of Independence invokes "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," asserting self-evident truths about equal creation, unalienable rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness), and government by consent. The founders, steeped in both traditions, believed individual virtue and strong social institutions were essential for the republic's survival.

6. Attempts to Discard Foundations Led to Disastrous Ideologies.

The worst sins of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sprang from various combinations of romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and supposedly scientific governance.

The darker Enlightenment. While the American Enlightenment built upon the Jerusalem-Athens fusion, a strain of the European Enlightenment sought to discard religion and teleology entirely. Philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza questioned divine morality and free will, reducing human motivation to passion and self-interest. Hume declared reason the "slave of the passions."

Reason alone fails. Attempts to build universal morality solely on reason (Kant, Bentham) resulted in conflicting systems. The rejection of inherent purpose and divine order left a vacuum. If reason couldn't provide objective meaning, what could? This opened the door to darker forces.

Seeds of destruction. Unmoored from transcendent values and the concept of inherent individual worth, new ideologies emerged promising purpose through the collective or through science. These ideas, born from discarding the West's foundations, would fuel the most destructive movements in human history.

7. Romantic Nationalism Prioritized the Collective Over the Individual.

Romantic nationalism is not patriotism.

The nation as deity. The French Revolution, rejecting God and tradition, elevated the nation-state as the embodiment of the "general will." Citizenship shifted from subjects to individuals with equal stake, but quickly devolved into subservience to the state. This romantic nationalism made the collective the primary source of identity and purpose.

Total war. This new ideology revolutionized warfare, leading to mass conscription and total war, blurring the lines between civilian and military. The state became the ultimate historical tool, demanding absolute loyalty and sacrifice from its citizens for the sake of national glory and historical progress.

Toxic tribalism. While patriotism can be a force for good (like American creedal nationalism), romantic nationalism often turns toxic. When based on ethnicity or blood, it leads to tyranny against minorities and imperialism against other nations. This tribal appeal, unchecked by transcendent morality, fueled conflicts like those leading to World War I.

8. Collectivist Redistributionism Promised Utopia Through State Control.

Marx offered a transformative vision of humanity, a system of meaning and purpose.

Critique of capitalism. Philosophers like Thomas Paine and Karl Marx viewed free markets as systems of exploitation, arguing that private property and class distinctions alienated individuals and prevented true happiness. They saw society's ills stemming from economic structures, not individual choices or lack of virtue.

The promise of a new man. Marx believed that overthrowing capitalism and abolishing private property would end alienation and create a new, perfected human being. He offered a secular, materialist vision of history progressing inevitably toward a communist utopia where individuals find freedom and meaning only through the collective.

Revolutionary terror. Achieving this utopia required radical action, including violent revolution and the centralization of all production in the state. This ideology, embraced by Lenin and Mao, led to the murder and enslavement of tens of millions, demonstrating the horrific consequences of seeking collective purpose through totalitarian control and discarding individual rights.

9. Scientism and Bureaucracy Sought to Engineer Society Without Morality.

Comte provided a philosophical basis for bureaucratic oligarchy: atheistic science.

Expert rule. The rise of nationalism and collectivism required practical implementation. This led to the elevation of bureaucracy and "scientific" governance, where supposed experts would manage society based on rational laws, often without democratic consent. Hegel saw bureaucrats as the "universal class" fulfilling the general will.

Science as religion. Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, proposed a "religion of humanity" based on atheistic science. He believed human development progressed from religious superstition to scientific positivism, where expertise could reorganize society. This view dismissed transcendental values and individual rights as obstacles to state power and progress.

Social engineering. This philosophy influenced American progressivism, particularly thinkers like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson. They rejected the founders' ideas of fixed rights and limited government, advocating for an ever-growing bureaucracy guided by social science to engineer societal "growth" and shape citizens from the top down, leading to dark outcomes like the eugenics movement.

10. The Post-War West Suffers a Crisis of Meaning from Abandoning its Roots.

By the end of World War II, European optimism was dead and buried beneath six feet of human ash.

Ideologies in ruins. The horrors of World War II, fueled by nationalism, collectivism, and scientism, exposed the catastrophic failure of ideologies that discarded the West's foundations. Millions died, and the specter of atomic annihilation loomed. The Enlightenment hope in collective human perfectibility collapsed.

God is gone, man is alone. Despite the failure of these utopian schemes, God did not return to the center of Western life. Religious observance plummeted, particularly in Europe. Faith in collective human reason also waned after the wars. Without God and without the collective, individuals were left adrift, leading to the rise of existentialism.

Subjectivity reigns. Existentialism, beginning with Kierkegaard and culminating in Sartre, argued that existence precedes essence. There is no inherent human nature or objective purpose; meaning must be created subjectively through individual choice. While emphasizing freedom, this philosophy left individuals without external guideposts, contributing to a sense of isolation and meaninglessness.

11. Modern Subjectivism and Victimhood Culture Undermine Reason and Capacity.

Intersectional thinking promotes a victim mentality entirely at odds with the pursuit of fulfillment and success.

The death of reason. The post-war rejection of objective truth and inherent purpose has led to a decline in the value of reason itself. Subjectivity is prioritized over facts, and differing perspectives are seen as insults rather than points for debate. Reason is dismissed as intolerant or a tool of oppression.

Science under attack. Even science, once seen as the path to objective truth, is now questioned when its findings challenge subjective feelings or identity-based narratives. Concepts like biological sex differences or group disparities are dismissed as constructs of oppressive systems, leading to censorship and the prioritization of "diversity" over merit in scientific fields.

Victimhood as identity. Modern identity politics, particularly intersectionality, encourages individuals to define themselves by their membership in victimized groups. This promotes a victim mentality, undermines individual capacity by blaming systemic oppression for all disparities, and fuels polarization by pitting groups against each other based on perceived levels of disadvantage.

12. Restoring Western Civilization Requires Returning to its Foundational Values.

It is our job to reconnect with both the word of God and with the philosophy of reason and individual liberty—two ideas that are, after all, inextricably intertwined.

The crisis of meaning. The West is currently struggling with a crisis of meaning, leading to anger, division, and a loss of common vision. This stems from abandoning the Judeo-Christian and Greek foundations that provided individual and communal purpose and capacity.

Rebuilding the foundations. To regain happiness and strengthen civilization, we must return to these roots. This requires teaching fundamental truths:

• Life has purpose, guided by higher meaning and discoverable through reason and history.
• Individuals have capacity and are responsible for their choices in a free society.
• Western civilization is unique and valuable, built on Jerusalem and Athens, and must be defended.
• We are united by a common cause—a civilization of purpose and capacity—and must work together.

Passing the torch. Defending these truths requires boldness and sacrifice, particularly in teaching them to our children. We must equip them to understand and defend the foundations of our civilization, recognizing the risks involved but accepting the duty to pass on the flame of liberty and virtue.

Last updated: July 15, 2025