No New Ideas

In a piece written for his Dispatch column Jonah Goldberg maintains that there have only been two big, new ideas in the history of Western civilization.

The first idea is of particular interest and importance. It is that human beings have inherent dignity and worth:

Basically, there have only been two really new, really big, and really successful ideas in human, or at least Western, history. The first was born of Judaism and Christianity—the idea that the individual has innate moral value and dignity, regardless of class, caste, or tribe.

This idea was entailed by the Divine assertion in the very beginning of the Bible (Genesis 1:27) -"So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them."

If human beings, alone among all created beings, are created in God's image then they have especial worth and value, both corporately and individually.

Apart from this there's no reason whatsoever to assign any particular value to human beings. Every attempt to do so is completely arbitrary. Thus, the atheist and brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking could write that, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

Numerous animal rights activists and others are arguing that human beings are not of any more worth than fish or trees. On atheism, of course, they are correct. Atheism (or naturalism) has no non-arbitrary way to ground human exceptionalism.

Moreover, there's nothing in naturalistic evolution that justifies considering human beings to be equal to each other in the rights they enjoy. Given atheistic evolution those who can impose their will on others are perfectly justified in doing so.

Why would it be wrong?

Nietzsche argued in just this way that morality was an invention of the weak to prevent the strong from doing just that. Morality, in other words, is just a subterfuge to protect the weak from the law of survival of the fittest.

The second idea, Goldberg claims, is based upon this Judeo-Christian notion that individuals have innate dignity and value:

The second, which stands atop the first, is liberal democratic capitalism. This idea subordinates the state by making it a piece of technology that serves the people chiefly by providing a legitimate way of making decisions in a free society.

Plenty of kings and czars cast themselves as servants of their subjects. But the key word there is subjects. Pretty much whenever the principle was tested, the people served the state, personified by a ruler, not the other way around.

The ruler’s interests might get gussied up with all sorts of theological or paternalistic junk, but what won out were the interests of the ruler and the ruling class.

Liberal democratic capitalism, the rule of law, and the sovereignty of individual rights overturned all that. Perhaps not always in practice, but conceptually it was a truly new idea, the only truly new idea in the history of political ideas.

It took over fifteen centuries for these ideas to percolate throughout the various cultures of the West, but once they did they revolutionized how people looked at everything from economics to law to each other.

Tragically, both of these ideas are in danger of falling into desuetude today in a culture that holds their foundation - Judeo-Christian religion - in contempt. To the extent that that foundation is dismantled we will find ourselves living in a culture similar to that of ancient Rome with all its brutality, treachery, inequality and horrors.