And Rightly So

April 21, 2008

We today know exponentially more about the universe than any generation before us. Burgeoning scientific knowledge and technical know-how have enabled us to eradicate diseases, explore outer space, build skyscrapers, squeeze nearly infinite data into infinitesimal spaces, conquer the farthest distances with instantaneous communications, and achieve prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors. We who live in the twenty-first-century can congratulate ourselves on the success of the great project that Francis Bacon recommended to the human race at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution: "the mastery of nature for the relief of man’s estate."

But just because our science has harnessed physical nature for our health, profit, and pleasure, does it necessarily follow that twenty-first-century people know more about everything else than our scientifically primitive ancestors did? More about law and liberty than the eighteenth-century heroes who framed our Constitution? More about human nature than the medieval geniuses who used the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to arrive at a deeper understanding of Christian Revelation? More about marriage and sexual morality than the Apostle Paul?

Pretty obviously not. Our ever-increasing mastery of physical nature sometimes gives people (especially on the Left, but all of us are susceptible to the illusion) the impression of unstoppable progress in all our affairs. But in the knowledge and management of human things (as opposed to merely physical ones), every real improvement seems to be balanced by a corresponding loss. We outlawed slavery in the nineteenth century only to legalize abortion in the twentieth. The last century saw the rise of popular democracies blessed by the rule of law -- and of the bloodiest tyrannies history has ever seen.

Why do our science and technology advance while our morality and politics stagnate, and even deteriorate?

Seeing farther because you stand on the shoulders of giants (Isaac Newton’s recipe for progress in science) only works if you take the trouble to climb up to that higher vantage point. Scientists and engineers have been building cumulatively on the work of their predecessors since the days of Bacon and Newton. Too many philosophers, moralists, and social scientists over the same period have invested their energies in destroying the wisdom of the past rather than building on it.

Machiavelli ignored out of existence the whole of philosophy on justice in government, advising his Prince only on how to get and keep power. Hobbes replaced the Biblical account of man’s creation and fall with a destructive fiction about a prehistoric "state of nature"; Rousseau substituted belief in original goodness for the doctrine of original sin and inspired the French Revolution. Margaret Mead imagined a perfectly natural society free of the tired old sexual conventions; Kinsey sold America on a sexual ethic -- or rather, the abolition of all sexual ethics -- based on (fraudulent) science instead of on any traditional morality or religion.

Sadly, too much of our recent intellectual heritage isn’t much more than slings and arrows aimed at the giants of our previous intellectual heritage. This centuries-long campaign to erase ancient wisdom is the subject of Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (and 5 Others That Didn’t Help). Wiker’s book is a valuable contribution to the most urgent intellectual project of our day: restoring our culture to that healthy state in which the truisms that most people take for granted are actually true. By debunking the underminers -- from Machiavelli to Kinsey -- Wiker uncovers the origins of our current confusion about (among other things) human nature, morality, sex, economics, law, and government. This book will open many eyes.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com