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Suicide of the West: Ideas Are Not Enough
Jonah Goldberg summarizes the argument of his recent book this way:
It is my argument that capitalism and liberal democracy are unnatural. We stumbled into them in a process of trial and error but also blind luck, contingency, and happenstance a blink of an eye ago. The market system depends on bourgeois values, i.e. principles, ideas, habits, and sentiments that it did not create and cannot restore once lost. These values can only be transmitted two ways: showing and telling… Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude – and the effort that gratitude demands — all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. (p. 277)
Jonah wants to stay away from arguments about God — the very first sentence of the book is “There is no God in this book.” But he does spend considerable time acknowledging the extent to which Christianity is responsible for putting the circumstances in place that allowed the Miracle to occur. (“The Miracle” for Jonah is our modern systems of constitutional democracy and capitalism that have unleashed prosperity since the 18th century.) He even allows that Christianity was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the Miracle to happen:
Despite all this, the case is often made that Christianity gets the credit for the Miracle. And, in broad strokes, I am open to the idea that without Christianity, the Miracle may never have happened. But that is not quite the same argument as Christianity caused the Miracle (and it certainly did not intend it). However, the lesser claim, that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, certainly seems likely. (p. 109)
For Jonah, it is far more important that the Miracle happened than why it happened. But this inclination to avoid drawing conclusions concerning the causal origins of the Miracle has implications for his prescription for sustaining the Miracle. For then the only thing we can do is maintain those circumstances as best we can, as we have no way of knowing what other circumstances might also support the Miracle. That is the price of an ignorance of causal origins. (There is irony here insofar as the hallmark of Western civilization, and perhaps necessary to the Miracle itself, is the Western determination to not remain satisfied with material circumstance but seek and find the causal origins of those circumstances.)
Jonah’s solution for what ails us is:
Just as any civilization that was created by ideas can be destroyed by ideas, so can the conservative movement. That is why the cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment. (p. 344)
The problem is that, unlike our forebears, Jonah is a fideist with respect to liberal principles:
We tell ourselves that humans have natural or God-given rights. Where is the proof — the physical, tangible, visible proof? Don’t tell me a story; show me the evidence. The fact is we have rights because some believe they are in fact God-given, but far more people believe we should act as if they are God-given or in some other way “real.” (p. 83)
and
The simple fact is that the existence of natural rights, like the existence of God Himself, requires a leap of faith. (p. 142)
The Founders did not hold the existence of rights as a matter of faith. They either offered arguments for their existence (that’s the whole point of Locke’s exploration of the state of nature), or took those rights to be self-evidently true (as in the Declaration of Independence). To hold something self-evidently is not to hold it on faith; quite the opposite. It is to hold it as so obviously true that it is in no need of argumentation.
Jonah misunderstands the role of dogma. The object of dogma is not ideas but facts. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” are not proposed as useful ideas to support a liberal dispensation, but as significant facts about the world that must be respected – and from which various ideas about the proper relationship of man to his government may be drawn, among other ideas.
The point is that Jonah’s prescription does not recreate the circumstances under which the Miracle was born: Those circumstances involved holding things like natural rights as facts, not as the useful fictions Jonah proposes. Since Jonah denies knowledge of the causal origins of the Miracle, he owes us an explanation of why the circumstances he proposes will support the Miracle as well as did the original circumstances under which it occurred.
This question extends to the cultural background of the Miracle. Jonah lists many of the cultural legacies of Christianity that contributed to the Miracle:
I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can’t be removed from it. I start the story of the Miracle in the 1700s, because that is where prosperity started to take off like a rocket. But a rocket doesn’t materialize from thin air on a launchpad. The liftoff is actually the climax of a very long story. (p. 331)
Christianity, in other words, introduced the idea that we are born into a state of natural equality (p. 332)
Christianity performed another vital service. It created the idea of the secular. (p. 332)
But Christians do not hold natural equality and the division of the sacred from the secular on the grounds that they are really good ideas. They hold them because God Himself walked this Earth and showed that He is no respecter of persons, and this same God ordered us to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. How will those ideas be sustained absent the convictions that made them historically relevant? Jonah recounts the famous account of Henry IV and his penitential trek to Canossa, but would Henry have submitted if he thought the secular/sacred division merely an historically useful fiction rather than the command of the living God? Jonah calls on us to close our eyes, grit our teeth, and simply believe really hard in liberal principles. It’s unlikely such a will to believe can successfully replace historic Christian faith (or the Deistic faith of the Founders).
There is evidence of this in Suicide of the West itself. Jonah recognizes the benefits of the traditional family:
Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude – and the effort that gratitude demands – all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. Few actually hate the traditional nuclear family or the role it plays. But many are indifferent to it. And indifference alone is enough to invite the rust of human nature back in. (p. 277)
But of what use is Jonah’s gratitude for the traditional nuclear family? His support for gay marriage — “marriage equality” — is well known. But if two mommies are as good as a mommy and a daddy, then fathers are dispensable to the family. And if they are, indifference to the traditional family structure seems entirely appropriate. Jonah’s gratitude for the traditional family offers no resistance to the most basic attacks on that family. How different it is for those who hold that the family, composed of a mother, father, and children, is an institution ordained by God, one that is prior to the state and that does not depend on the fickle will to believe of man for its existence.
Jonah ends the book with a declaration of the choice before us:
Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore. p. 351
I prefer: Principles die when no one believes anymore in the God who sustains them.
Published in General
I agree whole-heartedly with this. I’ve heard stories about what China was like 30 years ago, and I’ve seen how much better it is today. That difference is enough to engender an almost religious belief in the reforms that Deng Xiaoping implemented.
The people I knew in China had never read the Bible or ever heard of Martin Luther. But they knew that “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”
Saint Augustine,
There is no phrase “Separation of Church and State” in the Constitution. The phase is an interpretation of a letter Jefferson wrote long after the Constitution was adopted.
From the Website US Constitution:
“Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 to answer a letter from them written in October 1801. A copy of the Danbury letter is available here. The Danbury Baptists were a religious minority in Connecticut, and they complained that in their state, the religious liberties they enjoyed were not seen as immutable rights, but as privileges granted by the legislature — as “favors granted.” Jefferson’s reply did not address their concerns about problems with state establishment of religion — only of establishment on the national level. The letter contains the phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” which led to the short-hand for the Establishment Clause that we use today: “Separation of church and state.””
Why I object to this phony phrase ” separation of Church and State” is because it has been used to justify the denial of religious practice in public institutions or on public grounds , like the denial of religious groups to assemble and worship on school grounds in clubs for instance, which is a direct contradiction of the Free Exercise Clause : “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Gay marriage need not undermine opposite-sex marriage, though the way it is framed and understood matters a lot.
As a practical matter, same sex marriage was always going to be a very tiny percentage of the marriages that take place. It must and does depend heavily on the existence of heterosexual marriage both as model and for external social supplements and support.
That is, if a lesbian couple raises children, the existence and commitment of uncles and grandfathers becomes even more important. Having been widowed—entering involuntarily into the original alternative family structure—-I can tell you that my children depended heavily on the existence and commitment of those extended family ties too. The extended family ties are, themselves, created almost entirely through traditional marriage. As traditional marriage declines—not because gay and lesbian people enter into it, but because too many straight people can’t be bothered—the original and best safety net is frayed, and more and more children are reared without (especially) fathers.
In my experience, straight people are responsible for far, far more of this nonsense than gays and lesbians, who seem (again, in my experience) much more grateful for what heterosexuals have taken for granted, abused or tossed away.
Indeed. I knew that.
I mean the phrase in the way I defined it, which I’m pretty sure is the way Jefferson meant it, which is the same disestablishment doctrine taught by Locke, the Constitution, and yourself.
Yes. The phrase, with its new leftist meaning, is used to undermine the Constitution itself.
I think we only disagree on whether the phrase itself is legitimate.
Thank you for your thought-provoking post, @jclimacus. I think you’re right about the importance of the traditional family and the rational basis for belief in God. However, I think you undervalue gratitude as an essential ingredient in the Miracle. Advanced civilizations require one all-important element: delayed gratification. Gratitude, which only really makes sense in the context of belief in a benevolent God, allows us to get through the hard times and give back in the good times. Gratitude sustains an advanced civilization like our own.
I only realized this when I explained gratitude to my Chinese wife who had never heard of the idea. I realized that I could not explain it to her, except in reference to God. She explained to me (her generalization, not mine) that Chinese people rarely reflect on what they have or the progress they’ve made in life. They only know that they want more. Gratitude, and her first cousin charity, have provided America with social stability and staying power. Other cultures have their own sources of stabilty.
It’s possible that these virtues can survive as extremely useful vestigial organs. After all, the Protestant work ethic has facilitated prosperity in America long after the religious doctrine that originated it was discarded.
I don’t know anyone is. But if the only way to preserve the miracle is belief in God (which seems to be the entire objection to Jonah’s book) then forcing people to believe in God is the only solution that comes readily to mind.
As pointed out in the OP, Jonah does acknowledge most of that.
The point of the God reference in the opening paragraph is (I would argue) Jonah does not rely on the existence of god to make his argument. That is why I say the only alternative is to say “God did it.” You can still say that the miracle happened because of people who believe in God because they believe in God without relying on the existence of God. I don’t know if Jonah would make that explicit argument, but he is clearly receptive to it.
If you can’t get past the first paragraph, you shouldn’t read the book. If the only argument you are willing to accept is one that rely’s on God’s existence, any book that starts out by saying it does not rely on God’s existence is going to be unsatisfying to you.
I am going to do everyone a favor and not hijack this thread by responding to this. If you’re interested in my thoughts on the subject you can search my name and find about 2 years worth of comments and about 2 million words spilled on it. Suffice it to say we disagree.
Well, there’s also persuasion.
But this may be why Climacus said that he sees no solution.
What now? There is an alternative to saying “G-d did it” and saying what Goldberg said. There is the alternative Climacus pushes, which you yourself immediately describe:
Climacus’ point, I think, was that Goldberg should have said that. Instead he said something muddled about people who had fancy philosophical ideas.
Hijack! Hijack!
Also, Laurel vs. Yanny!
And Bigfoot erotica!
I appreciate that and was thinking the same thing when I wrote my ( long) comment. Unlike you, however, I couldn’t resist. Peace.
Deirdre N. McCloskey has much on the hows and whys and whens of the Miracle. Alasdair MacIntyre would say (I suspect) that today not only do we not believe the same things, but we are incapable of believing in the same way.
Jonah’s prescription for pragmatic gratitude seems doomed to me, but (a) I haven’t read his book, and (b) I have no alternative to recommend, so I will stop here.
If you write a book that relies on the existence of God, you necessarily limit your audience to people that already believe in God’s existence.
Basically what all the critics are saying is they wanted Jonah to write a different book, one that explicitly endorsed their belief structure and tells the world the only way to preserve everthing good in this world is to adopt that belief structure. There is nothing wrong with that, I wanted The Force Awakens to be a different movie. But Jonah wrote the book he wrote and I would not have read the book you wanted him to write. If you can’t past the first paragraph, don’t read the book. I think that is why he put that in the first paragraph, so the people who will only accept an argument that relies on Gods existence would know up front that this is not that kind of book.
And for the record, I do not believe that only Christians can enjoy the benefits of democratic capitalism. So we will continue to disagree on that point.
YMMV.
Yeah, either I’m not following you, or I’m not following Climacus, or you’re still missing the point: Climacus never said Goldberg should have written a book relying on G-d’s existence. I think he only said Goldberg should have written a book that recognized that the discoverers of classical liberalism believed in it.
Huh? Are you talking about you and me or you and Climacus? I’m not disagreeing on that.
(Very well-written piece…)
Everything you wrote could be true (I admit that it, indeed, might be), but, to me, currently an atheist, God and Christianity as foundations look just as weak and contingent as you complain that Jonah’s useful fictions are.
So far, I can’t get around this. You simply repeating that they are true is of utterly no use to me.
@andrewklavan is the only believer who’s come anywhere near convincing me of the reality of God and the truth of Christianity (and he has a long way to go to do so), and the way things are going, I’ll probably still not believe, even at the end, when I’m in that metaphoric foxhole. (I’m listening closely to Jordan Peterson, as well….)
I’m left, so far, holding that there are decent reasons for thinking that the ideas undergirding the West are rationally and secularly derivable. But, the mind of every believer I’ve ever suggested THAT to is derisively closed to the idea as tightly as a bear trap. No help from that quarter.
But he does say that, as Climacus points out in the OP.
Perhaps we disagree with what Jonah means by the opening paragraph. When he says there is no God in this book, I think he means he will not rely on God’s existence. You can admit the benefits of organized religion without relying on the existence of God, and I think that is exactly what Jonah has done.
We obviously disagree.
There is another question here, namely that there exists a culture in which belief in God is robust (and, yes, mandatory) and this culture is present and growing within the U.S. and (especially) Europe. Western secularism has not, so far, proved particularly capable of defending itself or its future.
As with same sex marriage, I don’t think it’s the atheists who are the problem. Gay couples take marriage seriously. Atheists (Sam Harris, et al) take religion seriously.
“The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference” and Western culture as a whole is dangerously indifferent, not to Christianity or Judaism, but to engaging with the questions that intelligent people within religious traditions have long sought to answer. The questions have not disappeared.
In practical terms, they can be summed up as: what matters? What matters most?
Progressivism appears designed to deprive human beings of their ability to creatively, responsibly and effectively answer when these present themselves suddenly and with great urgency.
Morning A-Squared, and Owen,
The question is; why did the beliefs about property and liberty arise in the West and not in China, India, or the Mid East. Or what are the aspects about the West which produced this successful structure of human organization to allow such material success? One would be foolish to imagine that the origins of the laws which govern human transactions and behavior emerged independent of a specific religious background. Jewish and Christian religion are foundational in our understanding of how man is to treat his fellow man and how justice is to be addressed in this material life. The laws which focus on damaged property and repayment for damages goes back to Exodus. Add the aspects of citizenship and voting in the Greek city states and Roman citizenship and the Western mixture of religion and property owning citizens might be unique. It is not unusual that other cultures can adopt capitalism or parts of capitalism and find economic successes, cultures form the beginning of man have adopted the successful pieces of each others culture and by not having to reinvent their own wheel have built on the knowledge and success of other cultures. By leaving God (or the specific nature of the Judeo-Christian God) out of consideration, the question about the miracle becomes a muddle. Capitalism is based on a certain type of morality, so to think about the uniqueness of this type of human organization without thinking about the moral natures of its participants seems a waste of time.
I would back up a bit. Before God, or the Miracle, or enlightenment, or anything. I propose that all advancements made by humans over history have been forced upon them by circumstance. Bad ideas end up threatening our existence, so after exhausting all alternatives, a good choice is made that ends up making life better, far better than imagined.
The problem we face now is that there are no natural limits to our self destructive urges. Or that we haven’t hit them yet. The values of religious or cultural axioms is that the cost of learning the hard lessons each generation are too high.
Marriage wasn’t some bliss from on high. It was an arrangement where women could feed their children. It wasn’t that they loved the brutish and often violent man, nor that he loved the nagging harridan. It was simply that the two together could manage barely to feed the brood they brought forth into the world.
Now we can live our lives without putting up with that nonsense, except that we can’t because the prisons are full and there isn’t enough emotionally stable young people who are capable of keeping the world working. So we see stable families and marriages among the successful.
The same story can be told about sexual morality, homosexuality, etc. We have a massive design margin that we inherited, and we are intent on burning through it as quickly as we can.
It isn’t gratitude that we need, it is desperation. You don’t know you’ve eaten too much of the seed corn until you starve to death a year later. But we can know because someone figured that out a generation or two ago. If it takes watching our starving kids to pay attention to the hard learned lessons in our history, we fully deserve that fate.
I think there is quite a bit of dispute about whether the inventors of classical liberalism believed in Christian doctrine as it was recognized at that time, or believed in God at all.* I have seen more than one post on this site complaining that the Enlightenment was not only inconsistent with Christian doctrine, but was actually responsible for the decline of Christian faith. Personally, I’m mostly in agreement with the former proposition and agnostic about the latter. I am convinced that the Enlightenment was the proximate cause of the Miracle, but it may be that the Miracle itself (especially as it led to higher standards of living, the expansion of science, and the implementation of universal education) was responsible for the decline in religious faith (all religious faith, not just Christian). Whether or not the causation was there, the correlation certainly was.
* Both Hume and Smith stayed away from much reliance on God in their works, and both were suspected of being atheists by their contemporaries. Jefferson also maintained a discreet silence about the details of his religious beliefs, if any. Locke and Rousseau were more explicitly religious. Bentham, though, was a self-identified atheist.
1. For a significant number of people, (the Judeo-Christian) God is no firmer a foundation of Western values than the author considers Jonah’s useful fictions to be. “Capitalism is based on a certain type of morality, so to think about the uniqueness of this type of human organization without thinking about the moral natures of its participants seems a waste of time.” I’m suggesting that we might not need religion to have a morality. But, as I said in my comment about every religious person I’ve suggested this to, your mind seems made up. Won’t you entertain the possibility that my suggestion might be worth further study?
2. Let “<–” mean “is/are based on”.
Western values <– Judeo-Christian values <– belief in God/Jesus.
I’m suggesting that, though Western values WERE derived from those, they MIGHT be derivable via reason in a separate path that does not require a belief in the supernatural. Maybe one of these paths:
Western values <– reason & facts
or
Western values <– Judeo-Christian values <– reason & facts
Morning Owen,
Perhaps you and I are focusing on different parts of this question. If political structure is down stream of culture, what is it about Western culture that produced our sense of individual liberty and our economic freedom with the ability of citizens to own property and build equity. So I take Jonah to be focusing on the larger systems of human interaction, and when he sets aside origins of the rules which shape our view of an individual’s value and an individual’s property, I think a large section of the story has been omitted. Individuals certainly can be moral outside of religion but in the history of human culture there is no secular culture, so I can’t discuss the nature of a moral secular culture in the macro. Also the world of Athens sharpens the world of Jerusalem, as the latter does the former. To me that suggests that reason and revelation have worked together to build a culture where the individual can be imagined to have rights given from God and a world where humans can own property and through trade and innovation become so successful to have the time to engage in art, philosophy, and all the luxuries of economic success. I am not trying to argue against reason, the Judeo-Christian God was/is thought to be a champion of wisdom.
thank you.
…
I attempted to make the OP about a few specific points with respect to Jonah’s case:
First, that Jonah wants to avoid taking a stand on the causal origins of the Miracle. He feels it is much more important that it happened than why it happened. Fair enough. But the price for that it is that it is impossible to distinguish important from unimportant circumstances concerning the origin of the Miracle – such distinctions can only be done in the context of some causal understanding of the origin of the Miracle.
Second, that Jonah proposes as his prescription a form of fideism with respect to natural rights. Actually, I’m still flabbergasted from reading Suicide of the West. The real bombshell from the book is that Jonah does not believe in natural rights. At least, he doesn’t believe in them the way Locke, Washington or Lincoln did. He believes in the idea of natural rights as leading to excellent cultural outcomes, even though, for Jonah, they are entirely fictional. They were definitely not fictional for most Americans until recently and, I thought, were not fictional for mainstream conservatives today. How wrong I was. In all the buzz I’ve read about Suicide, the fact that Jonah thinks natural rights are fictional doesn’t bear mentioning. That seems to indicate that the “useful fiction” view is much more widespread among conservatives than I thought.
But remember the first point. Jonah avoids a causal analysis of the Miracle. He can only recount the circumstances of its occurrence. Well, one of the prominent circumstances was that the Founders believed in the reality of natural rights, not merely the social utility of belief in natural rights. There is all the difference in the world between those two beliefs. Jonah needs to show that gratitude for the social utility of natural rights can substitute for firm conviction in the reality of natural rights. But he hasn’t even attempted to so. Moreover, the fact that he refuses to address the causal origins of the Miracle prevents him from having any basis for making such a case, which is maybe why he doesn’t try. But it makes his whole project incoherent.
I’m open to the idea that natural rights can be proven without recourse to God. In fact, it is part of Catholic doctrine (through the “natural law”) that many moral and social principles can be known through natural reason alone independently of any belief in God. Among these are things like natural rights. That is the real task for secular conservatives. (continued)
The miracle can just as easily trace its origins to Greco-Roman culture as Christian. I think what we have in the enlightenment is a confluence of cultural factors that took over 2000 years to develop and that other societies around the globe lacked.
Its ridiculous to point to one element of 17th century European society and say “this was what allowed the enlightenment to happen”. As conservatives we should all be aware of The way cultural and intellectual traditions are passed down through the centuries. The West is unique because of the blend of cultural traditions that allowed it to flourish. This includes pagan philosophical traditions that birthed democracy and republicanism in Greece and Rome and the Christian tradition that dominated Europe since. The Miracle happened – why it happened is a fun diversion. What matters is preserving it – and the point of SoTW is to pitch that preservation as broadly as possible.
God is not necessary to appreciate the miracle that the englightenment gave to the world. If nonbelievers can remain invested in the miracle then the world is better off.
(continued)
I think Jonah’s attempt to arrest our cultural decline, not in a defense of natural rights proper, but merely in a call for gratitude of their social utility as useful fictions, is doomed from the start. No one goes to the mat for useful fictions.
There is a principle in Christian spirituality that is generalizable as a maxim for life. It is that things like happiness, joy, and peace are only found indirectly. Do what is right and good patiently and dutifully and, eventually, you will discover that you are happy. “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.”
Capitalism and prosperity are like that. It is very hard to defend capitalism because it only occurs as a by-product of other things – respect for property, the rule of law, individual rights among other things. Get those things right and capitalism and prosperity will appear on their own.
And those other things should be pursued as ends in themselves, not merely as instrumental for prosperity. The original settlers from Europe came seeking religious freedom, not prosperity, and the life they lived was harder and poorer than it would have been in Europe, and that for many decades. Abraham Lincoln lead us in a bloody Civil War so that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.” That form of government deserves defending whether or not it happens to lead to prosperity. It is an end in itself and that is how it should be defended.
This defense can be done in natural terms. I’m not sure that it can succeed in transforming our culture when pursued in purely secular (natural) terms, but I support any effort to do so. But the case has to defend the reality of natural rights, not merely their social utility.
Owen: “I’m left, so far, holding that there are decent reasons for thinking that the ideas undergirding the West are rationally and secularly derivable. But, the mind of every believer I’ve ever suggested THAT to is derisively closed to the idea as tightly as a bear trap. No help from that quarter.”
Ancient Greece was a most immoral place. Slavery kept the place running. Sexual promiscuity of all sorts was rampant among the ruling class. Yes, that said, certain ideas that form the western canon of classical liberalism came from that Greece. But not all and not necessarily the most important ones.
I would submit that the governing mindset of what has become western civilization is essentially at it’s core, a Judeo-Christian one, even among most western Atheists. There were no ideas even remotely close to “all men were created equal” in Ancient Greece or any idea of what we call now “Christian charity”.
Even today when you look at other cultures from around the world, a closer inspection reveals a stark contempt for equality and generosity. In China, there are videos of people who after hitting some street urchin while driving their car in a congested street, then back up to run over them again because a dead street urchin is less a liability legally there than horribly injured one. Such is the lack of concern for life. In India, there is terrible caste system that lives on today. The Brahmin class is notoriously ruthless and uncharitable of those beneath them. Then there is Islam, where infidels or thought to be apostates are slaughtered at the drop of a hat.
The Progressive Left wants to lecture us that “all cultures are equal” and seems to think that the rest of the world thinks as we do, with a belief in human rights, democracy and a generous approach to living. The rest of the world clearly does not think that way.
There is no evidence at all that western ideas of human rights and a generous approach to others derived from a secular rationality and indeed it rationally would appear that they were derived from Christ’s ( and Leviticus) ” Love thy neighbor as they self”.
One thing about that – you are just as likely to find “Love thy neighbor as thyself” as the motto and governing philosophy of your local hippy-dippy socialist commune, whose inhabitants have no understanding whatsoever of western civilization or human rights. It’s a phrase that sounds good, but you can only get so much out of it.
Is there? I don’t really understand the difference. Would you mind explaining it to me?
That is a good question. I do not know the answer, but I suspect it will be very difficult to convince people in the modern economy that they should flip burgers for $7.50/hr because it’s God’s plan for them to do so.