REVOLUTION: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World

 A Patriot’s Take on the American Revolution  

History isn’t written by “the winners.”  It’s written by historians and persons of letters.  Thus, what we know about the past depends on the interests and biases of those who compose treatises about the subject.  Eric Metaxas’s number one best seller, Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World provides in its subtitle an unambiguous declaration of the author’s conclusion about events in colonial America that are covered in this scrupulously researched book.  Upon finishing its nearly 600 densely packed pages most readers will likely wonder why so many things delineated therein were neglected or distorted by prior historians.

 

Foremost among those distortions is the assertion that most of America’s founders were deists who rejected the idea of God’s post-creation activity in human affairs.  As Metaxas clearly shows via the words of various patriots, especially John Adams and George Washington, the notion of God’s “providential” acts on behalf of the emergent nation was ubiquitous, a faith indissolubly linked to its adherence to biblical principles as articulated by ministers like George Whitefield.  These “no King but Jesus” convictions spread by the ministerial “Black Robe Regiment” were often derided by British elites who denigrated colonials as, in today’s parlance, bible-bangers.  A practical consequence of this gulf between British and colonial morals is illustrated by the humane treatment Americans typically provided captured troops versus the wretched fate most  patriot soldiers faced who fell into British hands, an estimated 10,000 of whom died in captivity, outpacing the “less than 7,000” killed in combat.

 

Metaxas further illustrates the decadence of Britain’s leadership under George III by providing detailed descriptions of gatherings in England by prominent members of the Hellfire Club who not only embraced hedonism but even mocked Christian beliefs.  Later the author devotes several pages to General William Howe’s lavish farewell party in Philadelphia.  By contrast, Washington is shown stressing the importance of discipline and moral conduct for himself and his troops in view of their “sacred” cause, a cause for which colonials officially beseeched God’s help by declaring days of fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving.

 

Though John Adams is invariably included in any worthy account of America’s founding, the lasting memory history has bequeathed us often features slurs directed toward a “blind, bald, crippled, and querulous” Adams who as President had backed the Alien and Sedition Acts.  Metaxas focuses instead on the biblically schooled, anti-slavery patriot hailed as the “Atlas of American Independence” by contemporaries.  Indeed, Metaxas notes that Thomas Jefferson thought authorship of the Declaration should be given to the indispensable early promoter of American liberty and only agreed to compose the document himself at Adams’s insistence.

 

Metaxas’s total narrative focuses on important players and crucial events from the death of George II in 1760 to the agreement ending the revolution in 1783.  In that effort he employs materials mostly derived from original sources and numerous scholarly works.  His extended description of the Boston Massacre is particularly compelling and makes clear that the colonies had their own share of less-than-pious rowdies.  When perusing the author’s account of this event, one’s sympathy likely falls more with the handful of trapped British soldiers than with the unrelenting mob, including Crispus Attucks, that pelted the longsuffering troops with projectiles – a scene bearing no resemblance to the inaccurate etching of the “massacre” distributed by Paul Revere for propagandistic purposes.  How the scrupulously principled John Adams managed to provide those British soldiers with a partially successful legal defense while still maintaining his strong opposition to their being stationed in Boston is another significant story.  

 

If Adams is Metaxas’s political hero, Washington is his military Cincinnatus. The general’s many challenges are covered extensively, as are battlefield maneuvers that should resonate with aficionados of military strategy.  During those fateful years Washington endured defeats, wretched fighting conditions, assassination attempts, rivalries from within the officer corps, and bleak prospects of success, all with a steadfast equanimity that bore witness to his character and leadership ability.  Following this magnificent and grueling service to the fledgling country, Washington, like Cincinnatus, relinquished power.  

                                                                                     

Metaxas also provides rich portraits of other important individuals including John Hancock, Nathan Hale, Henry Knox, and Samuel Adams.  Among those additional portraits is that of Abigail Adams, whose letters to her husband reveal a strong, biblically grounded spouse who stoically endured the vicissitudes of war for the sake of “justice, truth, and righteousness” -- an image more complete than that of a woman whose primary contribution to history were the words, “Remember the ladies.”  Metaxas’s rendering of General Benedict Arnold also fleshes out what for most folks is an incomplete picture.  Arnold served heroically in the crucial battle of Saratoga during which he suffered a painful injury that doubtless contributed, alongside unquenched ambition, to his act of treachery that could have changed the course of history.  Finally, incidental accounts of the savage treatment meted out by tribal warriors to combat enemies should cause a reassessment of any Disneyesque images of largely civilized and pacific “Native Americans.”           

 

Metaxas’s fine book, I must note, occasionally employs words and foreign phrases that are beyond the vocabulary of average readers who may have to keep a translating computer at hand or guess at meanings.  Also, at times I wished an editor had excised some of the details Metaxas provides that aren’t as critical as those happily included in his account of the Boston Massacre.  For example, Henry Knox’s heroic effort to bring cannons and other weaponry in Fort Ticonderoga to General Washington in Boston was recounted so thoroughly that a reader might feel he was enduring the icy, mountainous 300-mile trek himself, alongside the horses and oxen.

 

That said, those complaints are miniscule compared to the insight achieved by looking at the American Revolution, as Metaxas does, through the eyes of patriots like Washington and John Adams and not through the eyes of a Marxist like Howard Zinn whose People’s History of the United States has sold well over two million copies.      

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer and retired teacher living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

   

SUICIDAL EMPATHY: Dying to be Kind

Rhamell Burke had been arrested four times since February 2^nd for assault, burglary, drugs, and weapons charges.  On May 7^th he was released from New York’s Bellevue Hospital psychiatric facility, and a few hours later he allegedly shoved seventy-six year old Ross Falzone down a flight of subway stairs, resulting in Falzone’s death.  One of the prior assault charges involved a young woman who declined to press charges.  The 23-year-old lady later said, “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail.”  Reportedly, she now regrets her choice whose tragic consequence has been cited as an instance of suicidal empathy, or more accurately in this case, homicidal empathy.

The term “suicidal empathy” was coined by Professor Gad Saad, and his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, revolves around the concept.  Rhamell Burke’s repeated low- or no-consequence legal encounters and the young woman’s confession about her mental disposition constitute two prime examples of the psychic malady in which compassion for ostensibly victimized groups is so overblown that it outweighs social well being.  Saad provides a plethora of additional examples including attitudes toward illegal aliens, drug users, the homeless, transgenders, Hamas terrorists, and even socialism.  These feelings are connected to destructive policies such as open borders, massive benefits for illegals, absurd indulgences for criminals, men in women’s sports, anti-merit DEI programs, and numerous redistribution efforts that reward failure and punish success.    

Saad’s work is a valuable resource for identifying areas where empathy has been weaponized with palpably destructive results.  Billed as an “evolutionary psychologist,” Saad is less focused when it comes to explaining the reasons behind what he frequently calls the “misfiring” (or even “orgiastic misfiring”) of the emotional system, thus linguistically linking suicidal empathy to a cerebral malfunction.  Elsewhere in the book Saad points to a highly theoretical cognitive function:  “The West’s lack of a cultural theory of mind is destroying our societies.”  His primary focus, however, when it comes to the etiology of the affective malady, centers on academic institutions that spawned theories such as cultural relativism and deconstructionism, philosophical perspectives that undermine traditional ideas about truth and natural law.  With intellectuals freed from the pursuit of truth, their endeavors moved toward emotionally driven projects as opposed to rational analysis of moral principles and hard evidence, especially in Saad’s case hard evidence grounded in evolutionary development.   (C.S. Lewis came to a similar conclusion in The Abolition of Man based on the modern rejection of objective truth.)

Thus, it isn’t surprising that Saad cites with approval Thomas Sowell’s idea in The Vision of the Anointed about the intelligentsia espousing “policies that make them feel virtuous for their unlimited compassion while being decoupled from the actual consequences of their policies.”  Unlike Las Vegas, ideas that originate in academia don’t stay there.  The attitude of suicidal empathy, Saad observes, spreads like a contagion, as illustrated by the head-turning pace with which transgenderism infected the whole country bringing with it biological absurdities, the invasion of girls’ sports, and even the mutilation of children’s bodies for the sake of “gender affirmation.”  Of course this contagion wasn’t spread by germs floating in the air; it was spread by educational and media institutions controlled by Democrats, Socialists, and Marxists -- a sociological and political point obscured by Saad’s overreliance on biological and psychological perspectives.

My own term for the largely unscrutinized compassion associated with suicidal empathy is “utopian narcissism.” The policy of unlimited empathy is impractical and thus utopian, but the true reason for demanding compassion toward presumably victimized groups is, as Sowell observes, self-congratulation and not empathy.  Thus, being ignorant of a policy’s negative consequences is essential to bolster one’s sense of moral superiority.  In this regard physical separation from those consequences, combined with political insularity, conspire with media complicity to enforce ignorance of rapes, murders, human trafficking, and drug deaths attributable, for instance, to Biden’s open border policy.  Indeed, in California identifying a criminal as an illegal alien by law enforcement or the media carries a professional stigma akin to use of the n-word.  Better to hide the truth from Hollywood stars and a general public infected with suicidal (or narcissistic) empathy than to risk the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.    

Another explanation I would propose for unlimited compassion is even crasser than the aforementioned ego-inflating rationale, namely, power.  Political players often feign empathy as a cynical tool to gain support from various groups.  In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center their “empathy” secretly funded enemies of “victimized” groups to make it clear how important it was for likeminded folks to support their organization.  If one wishes to add a Messianic savior complex to this cynical power play, that oxymoronic combo can’t be excluded.

In short, Saad is to be commended for delineating the large number of cases where empathy for supposedly victimized groups has suicidal consequences.  His diagnosis of the academic origin of the contagion also has merit, though additional and simpler explanations are available as well.  Saad’s heavy reliance on biological and psychiatric analytical tools, however, sometimes obscures motives that aren’t all that murky -- self-aggrandizement, cynical manipulation, self-hatred, power, and even the thrill (and benefits) of blindly identifying with an elite in-group under the guise of compassion.  

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge

PANDEMIC OF LUNACY: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy

The chance of finding a philosophy professor like J. Budziszewski is about as rare as finding a teenage student who doesn’t believe that right and wrong, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.  In Pandemic of Lunacy Professor Budziszewski makes a compelling case for the opposite view, one seldom embraced nowadays even by members of his own profession, namely, that right and wrong are objective categories and not, in general, “vague and equivocal.”  Nor are they “different for everyone.” 

If the reader immediately objects that different cultures have different notions about what is right and wrong, the former nihilist and Nietzsche aficionado  who has ruffled many feathers at the University of Texas has a logical answer for you, one that distinguishes what right and wrong actually are from what any person or culture asserts they are.  Beyond that currently heretical belief, Budziszewski provides scholarly evidence that the moral elements in the Ten Commandments are, in some form, embedded in all cultures.  You’ll have to buy the book to get a reasoned and likely convincing reply to your objections, but be warned that Margaret Mead’s conclusion about South Sea Islander sexual license (precursors to those now extant in America) has been debunked.  

Budziszewski’s analysis concerning basic concepts of right and wrong serves as a foundation for the other topics he addresses in this short, six-part tour de force, written for “laymen” and employing a bare minimum of philosophical terminology.  Part one, “Delusions about Virtue and Happiness” is followed by topics that concern politics, sexuality, being human, reality, and lastly, God and religion.  That final category shouldn’t mislead folks into thinking the book is based on religious dogma.  It is not.  Aristotle is the philosopher Budziszewski relies on most, even in the final section about God.  Accordingly, when speaking about happiness, the professor points readers toward Aristotle’s definition of the term that concerns an activity, living well, not merely a feeling of pleasure.     

Natural law and human nature are two concepts that comprise the measuring rods by which the author exposes our contemporary lunacy.  For example, the “natural” function of human sexuality, Budziszewski argues, is procreation, just as the “natural” function of eating is body nourishment.  When that natural function is ignored, a host of negative consequences follow.  If pleasure is considered sex’s primary purpose (as students are inclined to tell the professor) its “natural” connection to procreation and family formation is suppressed, thus leading to promiscuity, STDs, pornography, and the severance of marriage itself from procreation and the family.  Needless to say, the sixties-initiated revolution in sexual mores has been a disaster for children, a quarter of whose fathers aren’t in the home and whose mothers likely believe that nurturing them at home is an inferior vocation compared to the feminist ideal of income equality with men.

The preceding paragraph provides an example of Budziszewski’s warning: “Just as lies beget lies, self-deceptions beget new self-deceptions.”  Stated otherwise, when one violates natural law, the negative consequences have a cascading quality.  So in addition to the harmful effects listed above about sex-related delusions, one must add millions of abortions, legislation expanding abortion’s scope, and in recent years even abortion’s celebration.  The taking of human life in utero also cheapens human life itself and makes suicide and euthanasia more common.  (I offer as additional evidence this article about Canada’s MAiD program that now accounts for one in twenty deaths in that country.)

Of course none of these things are moral problems, at least intellectually, for those who insist that natural law is a social fiction.  But Budziszewski argues persuasively that conscience exacts a cost for violating its moral parameters.  Sometimes that price is compulsive repetition of the immoral behavior, often leading to addiction.  Sometimes the penalty is destruction of the ability to truly love another person sexually.  And for some individuals unacknowledged guilt compels them to recruit others into sharing and celebrating their ruling vice -- a form of confession without contrition.  Of course we all pay the price of living in a disordered world brought about by disordered loves and beliefs.

Budziszewski’s penultimate lunacy (#29) deals with the popular proscription against “judging,” an incoherent dogma encapsulated in the verbal challenge, “Who’s to say?” As the professor observes, this rejection of judgment amounts in point of fact to a judgment against something else, usually traditional beliefs such as the definition of marriage or the humanity of an unborn child.  After confounding his imagined interlocutor by asking, “Who is to say that tolerance is right?” Budziszewski concludes his lesson by noting that nonjudgmentalism isn’t what it seems to be. “It is always a disguise for imposing a moral judgment without having to give reasons for it, just by pretending not to be making one.”

Some of the more traditional philosophical delusions that Budziszewski addresses include the belief that everything is material, that humans are naturally good or bad, that humans have no “nature” at all, and the belief that humans are merely animals.  Whatever the topic, the professor writes clearly and cogently, employing logic, experience, and common sense to support conclusions that are sure to confound and possibly infuriate persons tied to the unexamined delusions that underpin the lunacy of our time.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer and a retired philosophy and religion instructor.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.