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We shouldn't forget where the idea that we are all equal, unique personalities, each possessed of unfathomable dignity and inviolable rights, came from.
The most important lesson that the study of history teaches us is contingency. Things did not have to turn out the way they did. Take, for instance, the answer that our civilization has historically given to the most important question of all: “What does it mean to be a human being?” Ever since the Enlightenment, many people in the West have had the impression that answering this question is easy, that it’s just a matter of observing human behavior empirically across time and space and then abstracting a few universal maxims from the data. This is our modern faith: that we can read the truth about ourselves in the record of nature the way we read a story in a book.
The seminal example of this is the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, written at the high meridian of the Enlightenment by one of its most incandescent minds:
Continued below.
Western Individualism Came from Christianity | National Review
The most important lesson that the study of history teaches us is contingency. Things did not have to turn out the way they did. Take, for instance, the answer that our civilization has historically given to the most important question of all: “What does it mean to be a human being?” Ever since the Enlightenment, many people in the West have had the impression that answering this question is easy, that it’s just a matter of observing human behavior empirically across time and space and then abstracting a few universal maxims from the data. This is our modern faith: that we can read the truth about ourselves in the record of nature the way we read a story in a book.
The seminal example of this is the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, written at the high meridian of the Enlightenment by one of its most incandescent minds:
Continued below.
Western Individualism Came from Christianity | National Review
