Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break,
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we were deep in the weeds
of describing and discussing
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the English and the
French enlightenment leaders,
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and trying to help our readers
see in this an explanation
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as to why the England
and then the United States
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went to different
direction from France
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and other parts of Europe
at the time of Revolution.
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Yes, it's very
important to understand
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that 19th century background
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if we want to
understand where we are today
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because as I said
in the previous segment
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while the America and
Britain were experiencing
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a religious awakening,
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in Europe, they were
having all these philosophies,
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secular philosophies,
secular religions actually
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if we want to be precise,
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it is those secular
religions or philosophies
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that came to America
after the Second World War
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and dominated the
American universities.
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Now why did they come
to America after the war?
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After the war?
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Good question.
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America has always, again,
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it had that great
Christian influence.
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American philosophy was
not big in building systems,
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you know, big philosophies.
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And there was also a
large Christian influence,
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so they were really attracted
to this very powerful and deep,
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you know, anybody
who read the Germans,
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they are very, very deep.
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And so those really
fascinating Heidegger
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and Friedrich Nietzschehe,
he speaks about those things.
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And basically,
Nietzschehe... I think...
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Good question, I
think, I get my point.
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Nietzschehe basically is the guy
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who said God is dead.
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Yeah.
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So you cannot have
the rule of the experts.
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You cannot have the
intellectuals dominant
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if God is there.
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So in a way, they
attracted to that.
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And that's my personal view.
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They attracted to the theories
of Heidegger and Nietzschehe
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because Nietzschehe
basically says, "God is dead.
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We human beings, we
have got to be God."
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Yeah. With a Superman.
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Yes, so during this...
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After the Second World War,
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we have all this
social engineering
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and who is
engineering the society,
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is the academics,
the intellectuals,
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basically, they have
taken the place of who?
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The place of God.
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And so to me, those
theories are very attractive,
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and that's why,
even French philosophers,
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that's why they supported
this totalitarian regimes.
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Many, many,
they support Marxism.
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Why do they like Marxism?
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Because Marxism,
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it's a religion
of the intellectuals.
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I'll tell you why I
asked you the question.
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Maybe...
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I don't know
whether I answered it.
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Because it's a sad
reality that after America
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as a liberal democracy
entered the war in Europe late,
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there's a whole story why late,
you know, people like to say,
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"The greatest generation
that defeated Hitler."
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Well, they did,
but it's sort of crazy
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that America stayed out of it
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and actually was very
sympathetic to Germany
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through much of the war.
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And we only entered
when Japan forced our hand.
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But when the war was over,
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when the Nazi
excesses came to light,
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they were not
really known before then,
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amazingly, the US government,
at least parts of it,
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brought many of the...
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even the medical experts had
been experimenting on inmates,
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brought them across.
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They brought the
scientists across.
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And Wernher von
Braun, demonstrably,
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a war criminal, has
became one of the great heroes
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of American space endeavors.
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So there was a lot going
on where we sort of absolved.
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We thought the best but with it,
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perhaps the worst of
what was going on in Germany.
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So why at that same time
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did we take their
philosophical thought?
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Yes, you know, the
German universities,
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we've got to
recognize one thing.
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They were the leading
universities in the world.
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You know, they led in
the sciences and the like.
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They were the
cutting-edge in the sciences
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and in the philosophy also.
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And so many of
them, of course, they ran.
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They ran away from Hitler.
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We had a lot of
this that came over here.
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Yeah. That could be that simple.
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So they came also with
their problems, of course,
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you cannot
separate your thoughts,
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your philosophy
from your background.
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And it was
influenced by the problems
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that were first in Germany
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which were different
from the problems in America.
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In America,
religion and politics
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were not really at war.
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That's why people
did not have a problem,
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for example, with prayer
in schools before the 60s
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because it has
always been like that.
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But there was the culture war,
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you know, with
Bismarck and some wars,
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theological-political
conflicts in France,
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basically, they imported
those problems into America.
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Yeah, now you answered it.
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It was clearly the
exodus of the academics
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at the same time that came here.
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And actually, you
can see the decomposition
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of American culture
begins actually in the '70s.
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That's where we actually had...
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It's mid '60s, '66.
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Yes, '66, I know that
you like '66, '66, for me,
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I think that the last '60s
was so much the sowing time
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in the universities.
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But really, the whole thing
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about identity,
feminism, and all that,
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it actually
permeates the broader culture
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in the '70s.
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And today, we're actually...
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If it was sowing time, I would
say that America, right now,
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is harvesting that
radical liberalism,
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the radical individualism.
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And we should know that
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the idea of an
individual your liberty,
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we get that from the Bible.
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All the other religions...
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I once mentioned to somebody,
and people are not aware that
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when we speak of the individual
as separate from the group...
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In my African tradition,
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it's not the
individual who is important.
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It is the group. That's right.
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And in all societies,
they've always believed,
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they have always
operated in this group identity.
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And we're having the
same thing, tribalism.
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The idea of the individual,
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it first comes with early
Christianity within the gospel.
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Yes, Christianity.
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That's not as obvious in
the Old Testament, I think.
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Yes, yes, but in
the New Testament...
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The dignity of the individual
is there, but still the...
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There was a story
of the Jewish people
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and of the believers as a group.
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Yes, Christ comes and says that,
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"I did not come to bring peace,
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to separate the men
from His wife and children."
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And so it is from that idea.
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They were told
to leave everything
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when He called the disciples,
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they were called to
leave everything, their family,
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and to stand as individuals.
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You're talking about,
it comes with Christianity
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or say even it's
says in the Old Testament
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because the
prophets were lonely men.
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They were
individuals against the group.
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So the idea of an individual
is not just ending alone.
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This is most important.
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Whether in the Old Testament
or in the New Testament,
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individual is
not standing alone.
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As Kierkegaard says is that,
"An individual before God."
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So it was not a
radical liberalism
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where you just do what you want.
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The radical individualism,
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it's not just an
individual without any laws.
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And so what has happened
with this radical thought
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that we have in the
American universities
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that assess the individual
who is a God-like figure
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that comes from nature
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within the
Newton, Locke tradition
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is an individual and the God.
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And so what we're having today,
we've got to ask ourselves,
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"How do we solve these problems
of radical individualism?"
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And to me, I don't think they
can be solved by legislation.
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I think...
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Let me throw
something wild in it.
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The time is running out.
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I know you're very
partial to Dostoyevsky.
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Yes.
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I'm trying to think
of which of his work...
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There's one where this guy
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that became fixated
on understanding God
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or understanding freedom.
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And he believed that
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the ultimate act
was to commit suicide.
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Thereby, he would become God
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because he was such
an opposition to God.
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Yes, that was in the Demons.
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His book, in the Demons.
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So that basically, he actually
shows some of his characters,
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for example,
Shatov, he believed in God,
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but the other one
did not believe in God.
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And he believed
that if he kills himself
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in order to serve the...
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In that act, he becomes God.
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He becomes God, but he was
actually an imitation of Christ
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because you remember,
Christ dies to save mankind.
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And he believes that
if he commits suicide,
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in terms of the
Russian ideology,
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he'll be able
to serve humankind.
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But I think, I want to return...
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We're in a sort of a cultural
suicide right now, I think.
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Yes. Yes, yes.
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So sometimes,
elements of our society
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are so determined
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to shake loose from
an acknowledgment of God
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that it's almost
on a suicidal path
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thinking that
this cuts us loose,
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but it's a dead-end road.
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That's my point. Yes, yes.
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I think that part,
we should recognize.
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I think you're very, very right,
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but I think one
of the things that
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we need to recognize is that
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the problems that we're
facing today, they're not new.
00:09:06.68\00:09:10.15
The 19th century...
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Well, nothing new under the sun.
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Yes.
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They faced the same problem,
the same crisis of modernity,
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the same crisis of
liberalism, how do you reconcile
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individual liberty with society?
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Those problems were
there in the 19th century.
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There were different solutions.
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The nature represented
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a whole different
solution to those problems.
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And to me, the solutions
that have been given by nature
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are the ones
that have been adopted
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by the American universities,
the American intellectuals.
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And I think what is needed today
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is to ask
ourselves as Christians,
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"Is this the right response
to our civilizational crisis?"
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And I don't think
that the solution,
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according to many Christians,
is through legislation.
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The problem runs
much deeper than that.
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I believe what is
needed is a religious revival
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just as there was
a religious revival
00:10:01.30\00:10:03.47
in the 19th century,
00:10:03.50\00:10:04.87
we need a genuine
religious revival.
00:10:04.90\00:10:07.70
That's the only one I
believe that can solve
00:10:07.74\00:10:10.34
the fraying of the
religious of the social fabric,
00:10:10.37\00:10:13.34
the fraying of our societies.
00:10:13.38\00:10:15.68
The only solution I believe
is a genuine religious revival.
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Without it, we're doomed.
00:10:21.65\00:10:23.12
The casual
visitor to Washington, DC,
00:10:26.32\00:10:28.86
after doing the rounds
of a few of the monuments
00:10:28.89\00:10:31.63
and noticing the
Masonic influence
00:10:31.66\00:10:36.87
in design and layout
might be tempted to think
00:10:36.90\00:10:40.17
that it was most
influenced by masonry.
00:10:40.20\00:10:43.57
And of course,
that's an undeniable thing.
00:10:43.61\00:10:46.04
But as we illustrated,
on the back of Liberty once
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with a picture of John Locke
00:10:48.91\00:10:50.95
shining like the sun down
on the American experiment,
00:10:50.98\00:10:54.25
the ideas of Locke and other
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Christian-influenced
English philosophers had much,
00:10:56.32\00:11:00.66
if not most, to do
with the logic and founding
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and framework of
the American republic.
00:11:04.79\00:11:08.16
I think it is a providential
development of history
00:11:08.20\00:11:12.07
that the truth
of Christian faith
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and the
sensibilities that go with that
00:11:15.40\00:11:18.07
had so informed a new republic.
00:11:18.11\00:11:21.18
And even today, with all of
the secularism, the globalism,
00:11:21.21\00:11:26.15
the constraints that we have,
Christianity shines through.
00:11:26.18\00:11:31.19
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:11:31.22\00:11:34.62