Birth of a conservative intellectual, Part 2
In my last column, “Birth of a conservative intellectual,” I presented a personal narrative of how I rejected the zeitgeist of Darwinism, liberalism, socialism and hedonism that permeated most American colleges and are zealously embraced by most of my classmates, to become a Reagan conservative during my senior year at DePauw University, leading to the genesis of my first essays 30 years ago. Below is my second essay I published on this long odyssey of becoming a conservative intellectual in America.
What provoked me to write these essays was my vexation at the low level of intellectual rigor of our school newspaper. I grew weary of knowing what the sororities and fraternities did at their parties, who won the football, basketball and baseball games, or what girl would become homecoming queen. I wanted to read something substantive, something intellectually compelling, something that could improve the character, enlighten the mind, yea … even help fulfill the destiny of the reader! As I mused on this and the paradigm shift I was compelled to make during Christmas break 1982, I thought: why not write something myself?
Note that this essay on epistemology and political philosophy is demonstrative of the world’s collective delusion in embracing several perverse Weltanschauung (worldviews) beginning with the secular humanism of the Enlightenment Age (1600s–1700s) promoted by philosophers like Voltaire, Kant, D ‘Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume and Berkeley. The result? The grand finale of the atheist-humanist movement led inexorably to the anti-Christian, anti-cleric genocide of the French Revolution (1789-99) quickly followed by the tyranny of Napoleon (1804-1815).
The Romantic Period gave the world more humanist, atheist, amoral philosophers, like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Georg Hegel, Frederick Engels, Thomas Henry Huxley and Freidrich Nietzsche, leading relentlessly to the 20th century and to the rise of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, political progressivism, scientific and education atheism of men like Charles Peirce, William James, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Spencer, Søren Kierkegaard and many, many others. This paved the ideological foundation for the Golden Age of 20th century genocidal tyrants – the Ottoman Turks, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
The apotheosis of liberalism and its many permutations over the past three centuries reminds me of the famous historical aphorism: Liberal fascism will always fail because it will always collapse upon the weight of its own immorality.
Click here to read the article at World Net Daily
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