Rescuing Human Rights from Human Beings

"La Scapagliata," by Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1500

The whole civilized world takes the notion of "human rights" for granted. Ask an American if he or she has rights and a doctor's hammer below the knee couldn't provoke such an instant and reflexive response. “Of course I have rights!” (Why would you even ask?) Probe a little bit deeper and ask one of those obnoxious "why" questions and you may possibly get "It's in the Constitution." Pursue it further and ask if it would be okay if a Constitutional amendment took away a right like the freedom of speech. You'll either get stony silence or, if this pedestrian is unusually clever (or unusually good at parroting his professors), an appeal to "humanity." People have human rights because they're human beings. It's circular, of course, but, then, didn't Plato believe that the circle was the most perfect of shapes?

Fantastic as it sounds, we're supposed to believe that this rights-by-virtue-of-humanity argument is sufficient.The only problem with it is that an individual who is the sole owner of his rights (as opposed to being “endowed” with his rights) can forever give them away if he or she so chooses – and if history is any guide, he or she often so chooses. Rights that can be given away at whim are, in reality, no rights at all. The government may as well have absolute jurisdiction if it only refuses to infringe on its citizens’ rights when it’s convenient. An even more fundamental problem with basing rights in humanity itself is our era’s postmodernism. You’re telling me there’s no such thing as absolute right and wrong, but an African tribesman still has an absolute right to food, water and condoms? The absurdity is self-evident and goes a long way in explaining why nothing akin to individual rights was ever recognized until the coming of Christianity, and has receded whenever and wherever the tides of the Gospel have ebbed.

One would think this would be obvious to anyone who bothered to take the most cursory glance at the historical record. Even ancient Greece and Rome, where conceptions of humanistic individualism reached their zenith, had no such concept as individual rights. Plato spoke of the importance of the polis as the source of a kind of communitarian right. Romans emphasized the freedom granted by a just legal system. One searches ancient laws in vain for anything resembling our modern versions of individual rights. Slavery was never prohibited anywhere in the ancient world; in fact, it served as the fundamental basis of those societies. Plato and Aristotle both believed that certain people were meant to be slaves by their very nature. The rest of the world was even worse. Most non-Western languages don't even have a word for freedom.

Only with the coming of Christianity did people begin to recognize that all of mankind is made in the imago dei – the image of God—and therefore deserving of certain rights. In the words of the Apostle Paul in Colossians 3, “there is no Gentile or Jew…barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” Christians in early Rome shocked their pagan rulers by adopting the children Romans left out in the elements to die. Over the centuries, Christianity persistently eroded the philosophical underpinnings that had allowed slavery to survive. Significantly, the first widespread movement against the slave trade began, not under the auspices of Platonists, but under a Christian queen of France, Bathilda. Charlemagne was opposed to slavery; Pope Callistus himself had been a slave. Abogard, Anselm and Wulfstan and other luminaries of the medieval church all campaigned against the existence of the institution. As Rodney Stark has written, “The theological conclusion that slavery is sinful has been unique to Christianity.”

The Protestant Reformation’s rediscovery of the believer’s direct relationship to God launched a whole new inquiry into individual rights, particularly vis a vis government. If an individual is justified by his or her faith and not by physically going through a sacrament, the logic went, then no person can force salvation on another. This led to the formal enumeration of the right of conscience, and by logical extension, the rights of speech and the press, where conscience was expressed, challenged and forged. Religious thinkers like the Protestant theologian Hugo Grotius applied the principles of Christianity when theorizing about international law. Regardless of culture, government or race, people everywhere possessed certain rights because they possessed a common Creator. In the 17th century, John Locke’s theory of government went so far as to assert that political bodies are instituted for the express purpose of protecting the God-given rights of individuals. From here it was a short step to the Declaration of Independence. The distinctly Christian idea of human rights now also became a part of civic religion, with all the mixed blessings that entailed.

All our modern ideas on this subject can therefore be traced back to Christian theology, which alone has birthed, and can alone sustain, so sweeping an idea as the dignity of the entire human race. It’s all too easy to view this Christian accomplishment in a vacuum, as many American do today. Most people have never considered that humanitarianism, foreign aid, abolition and systematic resistance to tyranny have only ever existed in countries touched by Christianity. As Christianity fizzles out in this country, we should expect to see our ideas of human rights—already so twisted, mutable and vacuous that we call abortion a fundamental right—die out, too.

The Myth of Self-Conscious Tyranny

Watercolor by William Blake, ca. 1795

"And Caiaphas was in his own mind/A benefactor to mankind."      --William Blake, "The Everlasting Gospel"

When most of us think of Hitler, Stalin or Ahmadinejad, we think of a creature who’s fallen so low that he’s become a separation – or, at best, an aberration- from the human race – someone whom we’re not like and could never possibly become.  Like the superstitious, medieval peasant, we see a beast descended from the demonic line of Cain rather than a fellow human being.

But what do we know of the author of evil himself – of Satan? Wasn’t his name once “Lucifer” (which means “light-bearer”)? Wasn’t he the mightiest, most beautiful and most virtuous of the Almighty God’s angels? Wasn’t he presumably exalted above all the others for his righteousness? Here’s what the Bible says:

Ezekiel 28:17:  “Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground; I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you.”

Isaiah 14:12-15: 

“How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’
But you are brought down to Sheol,
to the far reaches of the pit.”

Evil often begins with the pride that comes from doing what’s right. Although we don’t know what exactly it was that Lucifer did that earned him so exalted a position, it was obviously something very good and deserving of reward. When any of us do evil, it’s often not conscious. It begins with a good purpose - like Hitler’s sincere desire to rescue Germany from inflation and foreign dominance, Stalin’s to usher in an egalitarian order, or Ahmadinejad’s to secure Iran from outside aggression – that becomes prideful. Pride then blinds the individual to their selfishness. As they pursue their  noble goal with increasing self-aggrandizement and wickedness -with an increasing philosophy of the ends justifying the means - they tell themselves that it’s for “the public good,” and that makes it okay. This is critical to understand: most egregiously evil individuals honestly believe that they’re doing what’s right.

John Milton’s classic work Paradise Lost brilliantly captures this truth about the nature of evil. Milton portrays Lucifer’s fall as beginning with pride that leads to righteous indignation against a God whom he begins to believe is a tyrant.

"My sentence is for open War; Of Wiles,
More unexpert, I boast not: them let those
Contrive who need, or when they need, not now.
For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,
Millions that stand in Arms, and longing wait
The Signal to ascend, sit ling'ring here,
Heav'n's fugitives, and for their dwelling place
Accept this dark opprobrious Den of shame,
The Prison of his Tyranny who Reigns
By our delay? no, let us rather choose,
Arm'd with Hell flames and fury all at once
O'er Heaven's high Tow'rs to force resistless way,
Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms
Against the Torturer."
--Satan in Paradise Lost, Bk. II

Although this is extra-scriptural, it seems to me to be an accurate depiction of evil. God is seen as "the Torturer," "the Tyrant," and rebelling against him becomes a good, a noble, a laudable act. This is borne out by scripture: Isn't the essence of Adam and Eve's rebellion that the serpent convinced them that God was selfishly holding them back from their full potential? When Milton describes the angelic rebellion Lucifer leads, he portrays it as a kind of democratic revolution against a perceived dictator. Satan and the demons were, indeed, acting from the most base and selfish motives – but they thought they were in the right. Also along these lines is J.R.R. Tolkien’s tale of the king of Numenor who is so seduced and brainwashed by Sauron (Middle-Earth's Satan figure) that he leads his imperial fleet to Valinor (the land of the gods) to wage ware against the perceived injustices of the gods. 

There is a lesson here for all of us.  Whenever we hear that “Obama wants to destroy the country” or “The Christian Right wants to kill homosexuals” or “Ahmadinejad is a madman,”  we should remind ourselves that, tragically, whatever we think of these people, it's quite likely they believe that they’re doing what’s right – even that God is on their side. That’s what makes evil so insidious. The greatest evils are perpetrated when we believe that we can do no wrong. And that’s why we should cringe when people act like they could never become a Hitler or a Stalin. That attitude is the beginning that led to the infamy those two men obtained. Our attitude should rather be “There but for the grace of God go I.”


(Entire nations, too, can fall victim to the blinding effects of pride. Read this article to see how)

Civilization's Prodigal Generation

"The Course of Empire: Consummation," by Thomas Cole, 1836

Hatred of “civilization” is back in vogue. The storm clouds have been gathering for generations, but until recently they were a mere speckling on the horizon, confined to whimsical people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paul Gauguin or Margaret Mead – people who could afford to wile away their lifetimes turning their angst into fashionable theories. Few men and women had that privilege. That changed when the Industrial Revolution radically improved living standards all around the world (but particularly the Western world). Not surprisingly, as each succeeding generation saw their parents do things once thought impossible, they began to see the world in new ways. Their sense of mastery grew. With freedom from economic and governmental constraints came a longing for freedom from morality. Evolution wasn’t new (indeed, the essential tenets would have been familiar to all students of Greek philosophy) but the intellectual climate was. Darwin’s theory would have been universally rejected even fifty years before, but now the academia who ruled the Enlightened world jumped at the thought of boarding their ships like Tolkien’s Numenoreans and taking their grievances to the very shores of God’s country.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re still dealing with the fallout. If there is no Creator, then truth is relative, good and evil are mere conventions and life is meaningless. This new understanding of the world has been behind a relentless degrading of civilization, including the institutions, religion and arts that sustain it. It wasn’t so very long ago that Western Civilization courses were considered one of the brightest ornaments of a liberal education. Now there's an extensive campaign to mitigate them where they aren't discarded entirely. Multiculturalism reigns supreme, imposing its fluency in Ebonics, minority history courses, feminist, gay and lesbian studies on impressionable minds. Whether or not there's any intrinsic worth in such subjects, what's galling is that they're passed off as equally important as the humanities or Greek, Roman and American history. We’re essentially told nowadays that the art, architecture and culture of past civilizations, still magnificent to travelers even in ruin, are really no more remarkable than native huts and whittling. It just depends on how you look at it (And parents and teachers wonder why children are underachievers). Triumphs of science and technology that launched revolutions of the human condition are, by extension of this relativistic worldview, fruitless and vain. Thinkers, philosophers and conquering heroes represent oppression, not innovation. Consequently, where real oppression does happen, like to women in Muslim countries, we can’t be morally indignant because that would be insensitive to the culture or circumstances that produced it.

We must be quite a spectacle. Awash in wealth -even in what’s apparently the fiercest economic downturn since the Great Depression- with hardly a care in the world, yet hating every moment of it. Or is this self-loathing only a pretentious front put up to soothe our guilty consciences? If popular culture of the Avatar sort is the slightest indication, the American is to style himself a sort of Citizen Kane. This time disenchantment in Xanadu isn't confined to doubting whether the love of money can satisfy. It extends to doubting the morality of money and money-making themselves. And "Rosebud" is even more elusive. The neo-hippies of the self-sufficiency variety, the entertainment industry and Occupy Wall Street are all panting for a return to some fantastical, pre-Industrial state. Not that this ever existed, but the idea is that everyone farmed (but wasn’t a serf), ate only their own food (but didn’t die of malnutrition), made everything they needed themselves (including mining, smelting and forging all metal implements, presumably) had no need for society’s institutions (but was perfectly safe from theft, war and other myths), money (that cardinal token of vice whereby people are inspired to make things others want to buy) or banks or loans, and yet had plenty of time leftover for self-expression and writing free verse poetry (with homemade paper and ink?). If our familiarity with civilization has bred contempt, then our unfamiliarity with the lack of it has bred fantasies.

In Praise of Myth

Before God was declared dead in 1882, the European elite had lost their willingness to believe. Nietzsche’s famous statement simply reflected the grave error of thinking that the intelligentsia’s lack of faith had nullified God’s faithfulness. Years before, European academia as a whole, stretched and stressed between rationalism and pantheism for decades, had made the fatal decision to play it safe and discard faith for reason. These Deists, blind to anything but what they could stare at past their own noses, promptly found that the next logical thing to do was to throw out the object of their faith, too.

Yet despite the relentless march of over a century-and-a-half of “progress,” the rocks still haven’t had to cry out (it must be frustrating to be a secular visionary). It seems that faith in something is as fundamentally needed in the human condition - even in its fallen-ness- as breathing. Think about it. It doesn't matter what archaeologists' spades do or don't uncover deep in the English loam. King Arthur held court in Camelot, surrounded by a troop of gallant knights. In the same way, the story of Robin Hood emerging from the shadowy eves of Sherwood Forest to secure justice for the oppressed is every bit as real in our mind's eyes as if he had existed just as the tales say he did. 

Decades of stressing objectivity, empiricism and rationalism in our schools have failed to erase these pictures, these “forms” that lie somewhere in the back of our minds in a place reason can’t reach. In the process of trying to snuff them out and preach only what we can know with absolute certainty, we've reduced history to a jumble of numbers and equations and proofs. Endless pages of quantitative statistics are needed to establish causality – and even then scientists accept that, at best, we can only know “probabilistic” truth. We've bumped up against the same wall through reason for which we through faith out the window.

And here we are, unable to teach Arthur or Robin Hood in history courses; unable to incorporate our highest aspirations and fears – in short, anything resembling a purposeful story – into scholarship. But why? Are these impressions false? Do they pervert our sense of history simply because they can’t be corroborated by a rock some farmer's plow caught upon by chance? Quite obviously, in the search for absolute meaning, it’s a zero-sum game: science has come up just as short as “myth.” I’m not saying legends should be taught as fact, but I am saying that they would not have been believed in the first place unless they contained a grain of truth. More importantly, in their essence they convey more truth than ten thousand pages of quantitative analysis. Arthur embodied for the Welsh the same kind of hope in a temporal redemption that they had in a spiritual one. Robin Hood will always be a lesson of compassion and justice conquering in the face of unjust rulers. In the words of Winston Churchill, "It is all true, or it ought to be." Which is safer? To accept things that we can't know beyond the shadow of a doubt and risk being wrong once in a while, or to acknowledge that we can't know anything?

Two Wolves and A Sheep

"The Triumph of Representatives," William Hogarth, 1755

The Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin once wrote to Charlemagne, “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.” We of the 21st century can no doubt agree with Alcuin of the 8th. It’s a disturbing thing when the Mubaraks and Gadhafis of the world are unseated, mistreated or killed by the very people who brought them to power years ago. It would be shameful enough if it had been a single person who had offered himself in service to a master only to turn around and stab him in the back. But what are we to say when the instigator of this madness is an entire people? It makes the theorists’ claim that the people are a safer repository for liberty than the prince look specious at best.

One would have divine sanction for these macabre doubts, too. There is no religion in the world so opposed to the Tyranny of the 51% as Christianity. Chapter 23 of the Book of Exodus contains a prescient warning against such mob rule: “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd….” The New Testament continues this theme vividly. Indeed, we Christians have the distinction of being the only religion who can claim God as a casualty of democratic vote. Though he was raised from the dead, this was the work of an autocrat.

My point is not that monarchy or oligarchy is better than good, old “demokratis,” which, as an ideal, has been there right along with us throughout all the summers of Western Civilization. No, I agree too much with Winston Churchill that “…democracy is the worst form of government - except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Christianity recognizes that all men are equal, that they are given rights by their Creator – and this is the foundation of democracy. But it's not the cornerstone. Intimate knowledge of our own sin is. Truly, the only thing that makes the voice of people the voice of God is when the people know they are the farthest things possible from God. When they can acknowledge that they are the silliest, most temperamental and dangerous beings in the universe, then democratic government just may work – fingers crossed.

This knowledge of our fallenness is the vital ingredient missing from democracy across the globe today. It’s why Athens and republican Rome fell thousands of years ago and the French and Bolshevik revolutions created Hell on earth. It’s why the media’s pet Arab revolutions never know what to do but tear themselves apart once Big Brother’s gone. It’s why Occupy Wall Street’s solution is far worse than the problem. We’re no longer democrats because we recognize that we can’t trust ourselves with power over other people. We’re democrats because we think that we deserve whatever anyone else has. The same rights, the same treatment and the same amount of money. Bertrand Russell was right: "Envy is the basis of democracy."

Rousseau, Human Nature and Our Foreign Policy Problem

Put aside for a moment the constitutional arguments (and they are many) against being involved in the internal squabblings of governments overseas. Put aside the pragmatic arguments of finance and sustainability that see these wars for the vacuous black hole that they are. Even put aside the Founding Fathers' warnings against "foreign entanglements." Let's examine the philosophical moorings required to think we can"make the world safe for democracy."

As Christians, it is our duty to not only recognize, but actively live like we believe that sin is something each of us has the choice -the free-will- to indulge in or resist. Furthermore, God tells us in his word that man is fallen, that he delights in sin, just as St. Augustine delighted in stealing an apple, not to eat, but for the pure pleasure of sinning.  How does this reverberate into how we should see man's place in civil society? He is a law-breaker by choice. 

Not everyone agrees with what the Bible says, however. In fact, for a couple hundred years now it's been in vogue to take a position that owes more to Jean Jacques Rousseau: that man is born free and decent, and it's society's institutions that corrupt him. Break the back of these institutions and a violent man suddenly finds himself cherubized. Freud agreed. Man is a complex animal without a soul who responds to impulses in his environment. Pavlov believed that his famous discovery of reinforcement and the salivating dog was equally true of human beings: man is mechanical and needs stimuli to provoke the "right" responses. As these theories became mainstream, education shifted from its classical focus on searching for truth and instead began treating children like Pavlov's dog. It became about conditioning children to make the right responses to stimuli in the world.

Once this generation of children became adults, they could be found at the helm of this nation and most others in the Western world. They had a firm belief in the innate goodness of man - if only the harmful stimuli can be removed. Man is perfectible if he can just be given the right environment. Crime was no longer the rebellion of the soul, it was the automatic response to poverty and inner-city decay. Housing projects and the welfare state resulted. But there was something else, too. If this picture of human nature was true, then it was now within the grasp of the government of the United States of America not only to perfect its own citizens, but to perfect the citizens of the world - in effect to create a new world order of peace and prosperity for all. To free them to that natural state that Rousseau had talked about. Remove the evil effects of institutions and governments and you will cure the men under them. Or in more modern terms: "If we only remove the dictators, they will be good people." The French tried it in their Revolution of 1789. We did it in Cuba, in Europe (twice) and all across the third world ever since, and we've seen how it's played out. Iran was one of our first projects in the 1950s. Now it's Iraq and Afghanistan, which, despite all dreams of flag-waving Iraqi children, are not Jeffersonian democracies or anything remotely like. Egypt has been delivered, not to democracy, but to the Muslim Brotherhood. Now there are reports that Libya may be falling under the sway of Al Qaeda.

The problem of our foreign policy is primarily a problem with our view of human nature. Try as we might to export freedom and American ideals, our plans will continue to backfire until we understand that we cannot make men and women desire freedom by getting rid of the evil around them. Correcting our foreign policy starts with understanding that sin is a choice; that any inherent desire for freedom and democracy in the human race is outweighed by an inherent desire to sin. People around the world need to be reached by the Great Commission, not by Operation Odyssey Dawn.

From Burke's "On the Sublime and Beautiful:" the Effects of Tragedy

"IT is thus in real calamities. In imitated distresses the only difference is the pleasure resulting from the effects of imitation; for it is never so perfect, but we can perceive it is imitation, and on that principle are somewhat pleased with it. And indeed in some cases we derive as much or more pleasure from that source than from the thing itself. But then I imagine we shall be much mistaken, if we attribute any considerable part of our satisfaction in tragedy to the consideration that tragedy is a deceit, and its representations no realities. The nearer it approaches the reality, and the farther it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power. But be its power of what kind it will, it never approaches to what it represents. Choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations, unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. I believe that this notion of our having a simple pain in the reality, yet a delight in the representation, arises from hence, that we do not sufficiently distinguish what we would by no means choose to do, from what we should be eager enough to see if it was once done. The delight in seeing things, which, so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed. This noble capital, the pride of England and of Europe, I believe no man is so strangely wicked as to desire to see destroyed by a conflagration or an earthquake, though he should be removed himself to the greatest distance from the danger. But suppose such a fatal accident to have happened, what numbers from all parts would crowd to behold the ruins, and amongst many who would have been content never to have seen London in its glory! Nor is it, either in real or fictitious distresses, our immunity from them which produces our delight; in my own mind I can discover nothing like it. I apprehend that this mistake is owing to a sort of sophism, by which we are frequently imposed upon; it arises from our not distinguishing between what is indeed a necessary condition to our doing or suffering anything in general, and what is the cause of some particular act. If a man kills me with a sword, it is a necessary condition to this that we should have been both of us alive before the fact; and yet it would be absurd to say, that our being both living creatures was the cause of his crime and of my death. So it is certain, that it is absolutely necessary my life should be out of any imminent hazard, before I can take a delight in the sufferings of others, real or imaginary, or indeed in anything else from any cause whatsoever. But then it is a sophism to argue from thence, that this immunity is the cause of my delight either on these or on any occasions. No one can distinguish such a cause of satisfaction in his own mind, I believe; nay, when we do not suffer any very acute pain, nor are exposed to any imminent danger of our lives, we can feel for others, whilst we suffer ourselves; and often then most when we are softened by affliction; we see with pity even distresses which we would accept in the place of our own."

The Measure of All Things

Human beings have a rare talent for abusing power. For millenia, we've bound ourselves by oaths to protect ourselves and others from our own avarice for just this reason. The oaths follow a common formula. Usually a deity is called upon as a witness and becomes the rule against which the oath-taker's actions and intentions are to be judged by his fellow men. If the promises made are kept, blessings are expected; if the terms are violated, curses divine and human will follow. Either way, justice is done so that life and well-being are secured.

These oaths aren't just for officeholders or magistrates, but for any human being who finds himself faced with the gravity of holding the life or death of another in his hands. Hippocrates of Cos, the ancient Greek physician and “father of medicine”, was in just such a position. Strongly pro-life, his famous “Hippocratic Oath” contains the line “...I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” Because of its harmony with Biblical views on the sanctity of life, this oath was administered unaltered by many western medical colleges until the late twentieth century, when such an antiquated line was tossed aside in favor of feeble advice such as “...tread with care in matters of life and death.” Other cultures across the world have also, by and large, forsaken their commitment to life. Japan's “Seventeen Rules of Enjui” (echoing Hippocrates' oath in its condemnation of abortion) no longer bind its doctors. Nor do Jewish doctors practice under the constraints of anything like their ancient “Code of Asaph”.

One of the more recent oaths required of the medical profession is the Physicians' Oath of 1948. After the physician pledges his life to the “service of humanity”, the oath goes on “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception, even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity.” Defending life from conception was not long possible once mankind had become “the measure of all things” Today, most medical students graduating will take an oath that values human choice more than it does human life -a logical step if mankind is God. They would do well to remember the first time our race abused its freedom of choice and played God. The fruit Satan offers may appear different, but God’s words remain the same – “The moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.”

America and the Freedom to Fail

Our world today has made greater strides in fighting poverty than at any time in its history. Even counting recent struggles and upheavals across the globe, peace and order have reigned like they rarely have before. Then there's the seemingly daily buzz of one frontier of science after another being crossed, or this or that record being broken. Literacy is at rates never fathomed before, college education is almost universal, and standards of living continue to rise. In the midst of so much success, why are we afraid as never before at the thought of failure?

Author Michael Goodwin points out in his video that this fear is inherent in our idea of “social promotion,” that is, giving students who haven't learned their subject a passing grade. As a senior pursuing a bachelor's degree in History, I have seen this philosophy spread to our universities as well. Curved scores are only the most obvious symptom of a teaching rubrik that harms the very students it professes to help. Academic success cannot be achieved by robbing our children of recognition when they succeed, and of the help they need when they don't.

The economist Milton Friedman once observed that “If you are not free to sin, then neither are you free to be virtuous.” How much freedom do we really have when we're only allowed to succeed? Yet this philosophy so pervasive in our school system has been adopted by our government. Rather than letting corporations fail when they can't turn a profit, Congress has voted to rescue them. This sends them the same message that schools send our children: ethical, honest, and diligent behavior doesn't matter. You can do just as well with less work, less honesty and less accountability.

We are created to learn by failure; it's at the very core of what's made us great as a nation. George Washington's celebrated victories at Trenton and Monmouth came only after crushing defeats had taught him what tactics didn't work. Our Founding Fathers never would have proposed the Constitution if they hadn't faced the shortcomings of their Articles of Confederation. The same is true of the new and uniquely American ideas of "capitalism” and the "self-made man.” Would they have been possible in a world like today's when they fundamentally depend on rewarding only the successful? If he had lived in an era of "social promotion,” would Thomas Edison have been inspired to try his lightbulb the 10,000th time?

The Manhattan Purchase and Multiculturalism

Who hasn't heard the story of the infamous Manhattan Purchase? It goes something like this: In 1626, a group of West India Company merchants led by Peter Minuit swindled Manhattan out of the hands of its natives for a mere $24. Like the legends of George Washington and the cherry tree, the glories of the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Kennedy family, this story has been subsumed into our Western consciousness in all its misinterpreted glory. The next time someone tells it the way you've heard it before, keep these facts in mind:

The Dutch currency of the 17th century was the guilder. To estimate the value of what Minuit was offering the natives for their land in contemporary terms, a New York historian converted guilders into dollars and came up with the figure $24. The problem is that this was calculated 165 years ago. Since then, the value of your dollar has gone down more than 99%, and what was $24 then would now be worth almost $2400. Add to this the extreme cheapness of unsettled land in a continent still bursting with it, and you may begin wondering who was swindling whom. It gets better. The natives of the northeast were known to make bead-like pieces out of seashells to use as jewelry and currency.The time and labour involved in carving and filing the shells into these decorative pieces was immense. As a result, each individual “bead” was worth a small fortune. When the Dutch offered hundreds of beads as part of their payment for the land, the natives suddenly found themselves exorbitantly enriched. If I were faced with the choice of either continuing to squat on my undeveloped land, or moving into the vast interior with overflowing coffers, I would have done just like the natives did. Maybe that's just me.

The irony of this story isn't only how it's been misconstrued, it's what it says about our multiculturalist mentality. In the name of protecting oppressed minorities we presume to think for them. We know what's in their best interest, whether it's what they want or not. In this case, we assume that the natives must have been extremely gullible to willingly sell the Dutch their land, when in fact they were making a rational decision to "get rich quick." Similarly, we don't think that Jews who vote Republican can be true Jews. Female politicians can't be touched - unless they're pro-life. Blacks who frequent tea parties have been misled by conservatives. Clarence Thomas, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes and other African-Americans can't have made an intelligent decision to embrace free markets, they must have been beguiled by the white establishment. The multiculturalists insist that all these exceptions to their heavy-handed rule are simply naive individuals. In the end, who's truly naïve? At least the arrogance of the “white man's burden” vilified the native cultures alone. In its contemptuous disdain for universal truth, postmodernity vilifies both the white man's culture and the native's intelligence.

The Story of the Parthenon

Built in 15 years (447-432 B.C.) at the height of the Athenian golden age under Pericles, the Parthenon was the fruit of Greece’s finest craftsmen. Its symmetry, harmony with its surroundings, and gracefully commanding air testify to the faith the Greeks had in human perfectibility. At 469 silver talents, the building was costly enough, but if it drained the Athenian purse, it bankrupted their moral purity. The funds had been illegally seized from the treasury of the Delian League, a confederation of Greek states allied to take the offensive against the Persians who had been pushed out of Greece in 479 B.C. This money had been intended for defending member states against the enemy. The Athenian demagogue Pericles, however, was more concerned at the moment with flattering his fellow citizens. His city had recently come under a firestorm of criticism for its growing abuse of power as head city in the League. Athenians needed reassurance of their leading role. Mumbling something about the silver not being “theirs that give it, but theirs that receive it, if… they perform the conditions upon which they receive it.”, Pericles lavished the money on the beautification of Athens in a move of vain defiance that shocked the classical world. Part of this project included setting aside 469 talents for a monument to grace the Acropolis -the Parthenon. This symbol, ostensibly to honor Athena Parthenos, was in reality an in-your-face display of Athenian pride and supremacy.

Athens paid a horrible price for going to such lengths to assert its vanishing reputation and appease its citizens.  Two years after the Parthenon’s completion, Pericles and 1/3 of the Athenian populace died during a plague as the Greek world rent itself in two. This was the beginning of the Peloponnesian War -a war caused by Sparta’s indignation at Athens’ growing wealth and usurpation of power. Athens would never regain the glorious position it had held for so brief a time, but it did leave us a monument whose story became complete 2117 years later: In 1689 Venetian warships bombarded the temple (now an ammunition dump for Turkish cannons), sculpting it more decisively than any chisel ever could have into the symbol of ancient Greece that we know today. It’s a symbol not only of the consummate skill of the ancient Athenians, but of their excessive egotism. When men try to make a lasting name for themselves, they're faced with a dilemma. A symbol grand enough to overshadow their neighbors and startle their foes requires more skill and more resources than is native to anyone. They find that to create such an edifice they must betray their own laws, their own consciences, and exploit their fellow men. This is a theme common to many of the monuments we're familiar with. The Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Solomon's Temple, and the Coliseum all became showcases for their patrons; all were built by slave labor. These monuments' stories were similar to the Parthenon's, whose friezes and sculptures had been bought with stolen money. While these exorbitant ornaments may have depicted Athena, in reality they were meant to honor their own craftsmen.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley