Really interesting podcast called The Roots of Everything. The episode below does a brisk walk how enlightenment thinking gave way to egalitarian thinking and how secular discourse always eventually slides into marxism/socialism. Modern politics are all pseudo-religions because they have baked in metaphysical assumptions about man, and all politics have to ultimately answer what is 'the good'.
The enlightenment period is defined by its rejection of the Christian God but still appreciates general Christian ethics. The egalitarian path continues this trend by asserting the Christian belief of radical human dignity but without tying it to Christ and refuses to investigate deeper as to why. This makes it super easy to tip over into socialism and marxism as they are very concerned about the concept of fairness, statism, and the use of force by the state to enforce fairness. Something we've seen in modern america.
But conservativism is bound to embrace the values of liberalism from a generation prior because they both share the same presuppositions about the role of the individual, but conservatives value freedom over equality. And the ranking of freedom vs equality is really the deciding factor of modern right vs left. And that conservativism generally is doomed in the same way that liberalism is: refusing to properly align where freedom and equality both come from (Christ) and that there are limits to freedom just like there are limits to equality.
He has a very consistent point that the modern era of politics can only spring up as a rejection of Christendom first. The pagan world had no concepts of radical human dignity, equality, or personal freedom. These are all distinctly Christian things that modernity enjoys but wants to define without Jesus. And eventually the rejection of Christ is its own undoing.
The enlightenment period is defined by its rejection of the Christian God but still appreciates general Christian ethics. The egalitarian path continues this trend by asserting the Christian belief of radical human dignity but without tying it to Christ and refuses to investigate deeper as to why. This makes it super easy to tip over into socialism and marxism as they are very concerned about the concept of fairness, statism, and the use of force by the state to enforce fairness. Something we've seen in modern america.
But conservativism is bound to embrace the values of liberalism from a generation prior because they both share the same presuppositions about the role of the individual, but conservatives value freedom over equality. And the ranking of freedom vs equality is really the deciding factor of modern right vs left. And that conservativism generally is doomed in the same way that liberalism is: refusing to properly align where freedom and equality both come from (Christ) and that there are limits to freedom just like there are limits to equality.
He has a very consistent point that the modern era of politics can only spring up as a rejection of Christendom first. The pagan world had no concepts of radical human dignity, equality, or personal freedom. These are all distinctly Christian things that modernity enjoys but wants to define without Jesus. And eventually the rejection of Christ is its own undoing.