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Jan. 4, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:52
ARC OF HISTORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP488
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about the arc of history.
Obama says it bends toward justice, but what does this actually mean?
I'll draw on money manager Ken Fisher's 2023 forecast to talk about what the year is going to look like economically.
Kevin McCarthy will fourth time be a charm.
I'll talk about his prospects for making it to the House speakership.
And Cynthia Hughes of the Patriot Freedom Project joins me to talk about what her group is doing for January 6th families.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I was reading an essay the other day, and I came across the phrase, the arc of history.
Arc here, not arc like in Ark of the Covenant, but ARC, the arc of history here, referring to the shape, the pattern of history.
And it reminded me of Obama's phrase that the arc of history bends toward justice.
And I was thinking to myself, this is actually a very typical Obama thing to say.
It's profoundly stupid, but it has a kind of mask of intelligence.
In other words, it sounds like the arc of history bends toward justice.
Now, let's think about whether that's true.
Is it a fact that there is some automatic pattern in history that moves toward justice?
No. Because if you look at historical epochs or eras, we don't see any such consistent pattern.
In fact, we see progress and regression occurring all the time.
There's progress in Germany.
Then there's a stagnation in Weimar Germany.
Then there's a regression with the Nazis.
Then there's liberation after the Nazis.
So where's the pattern?
Where's the arc of history? And whether or not it's bending toward justice obviously depends upon when you make the measurement.
Things are getting better now, but hey, they could be getting worse later.
And that is true at any particular time.
So what I'm getting at is that there is this sort of idea, and by the way, this is hardly unique with Obama.
In fact, it has deeper roots in Western thought, the notion that history has some kind of built-in pattern.
Modern progressivism is based on the idea of progress and things getting better.
And look, things do get better in some respects, but I would dispute the idea that they get better in all respects.
Materially, if you look long-term, human civilization, things have been getting better.
But even then, there have been huge periods of stagnation.
I mean, by and large, the standard of living in the 15th century—this is around 1450— It was about the same as it was around 450, a thousand years earlier.
So where is the progress? Where is the arc of history bending in any direction?
Things seem to be relatively level.
Now, admittedly, in the Middle Ages, people would say, wait a minute, who says that we are not making progress?
We're making intellectual progress.
We're making theological process of progress.
Look at all the founding of monasteries all over Europe.
So the point I'm trying to make is that we have to distinguish between material progress, which, by the way, we have seen pretty consistently in the modern era.
Life in the 20th and 21st century is better than it was in the 18th century or in the 17th century.
So technologically, materially, we do see progress.
But who would argue that we see moral progress?
Certainly in other respects, look at family structure, for example, look at even crime rates, look at the sense of spiritual anomie or despair.
It seems more widespread in our society now than it's been at least in any time in the recent past and perhaps even in the more ancient past.
I read an interesting article looking at Russian history, and I was thinking about that.
I mean, think about a guy, for example, 120 years ago in the early 20th century.
He lives in Russia.
He supports the Tsar.
Is he on the right side of history?
Well, yeah, depending upon, again, when you look, if it's 1901...
He's on the right side of history all the way till 1917, and then he's on the wrong side of history because the communists come in.
And then you go, well, the communism was obviously on the right side of history.
And that's, of course, what Marx thought, and that's what Lenin thought.
But again... If you're living in 1920 or 1930, it's a Stalin era and communism seems to be doing pretty well.
But then you have the collapse of communism at the end of the 20th century.
So now you're on the wrong side of history.
You used to be on the right side, but now you're on the wrong side.
So there is no pattern here that can be automatically detected.
And so... Hegel, the philosopher, talked about history moving in a kind of inexorable way toward freedom.
A few decades ago, Francis Fukuyama advanced the idea, very Hegelian idea, of the end of history, almost as if we reach some kind of end point in which no...
There can be no ideological change in the direction of civilization because everything is moving toward equal rights.
Everything is moving toward greater freedom.
But I don't think that this pattern is discernible.
The end of history seemed plausible in a brief moment at the end of the Cold War when it looked like everybody wanted to become like America.
Everybody wanted to become like the West.
Now you go to China, you go to India, you go to South America, and you hear phrases like modernization, yes, westernization, no.
In other words, there is a limited endorsement of modernity.
And even then, when people say modernization, they don't mean a lot of the malaises of modernity.
They don't want crime rates.
They don't want... We're good to go.
So I'm not convinced that the arc of history is bending in any direction.
It's another way of saying that the arc of history is up to people who live in historical time.
If you want the arc of history to bend toward justice, you've got to work for justice.
So history is ultimately not something that happens.
It doesn't have a built-in pattern.
History is a product of the free acts of citizens.
If you want history to move in a certain direction, you need to work to make that happen.
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To be the next house speaker?
I don't know.
We're going to have more drama today.
There have been three votes and McCarthy hasn't made it.
That means that there is a solid holdout faction.
And if I'm not mistaken, in the third vote, he even lost an additional vote.
So he went from 19 opponents to 20 opponents.
Now it must be acknowledged at the same time that he does seem to have the support of the vast majority of the Republican group.
And so it is a minority of holdouts, but they are determined holdouts.
And unless they back down, the simple fact is he doesn't have the votes.
Now, what's going on here?
I'm trying to think this through, and the way I do that is by laying out...
As objectively as I can, both sides.
Now, on the one side you have, let's call it the Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Marjorie Taylor Greene view.
And their view is, listen, McCarthy.
McCarthy's got the guy with the most votes.
McCarthy's the best we're going to get.
McCarthy has made a lot of concessions in order to win the speakership.
So let's declare victory.
Let's go with this guy.
Who else is it going to be?
It's not going to be most likely Jim Jordan.
I mean, Jim Jordan himself is the one who nominated McCarthy.
So It seems to be obstructionist.
It seems to be game-playing.
Why don't we just accept the outcome that is there in front of us?
Let's get on with it.
Let's go ahead and defund the IRS agents.
Let's go ahead and begin the investigations.
Let the house get about its business.
And let's do it with the man who has the support of the vast majority of the Republicans, namely Kevin McCarthy.
Trump weighed in. Just a little while ago, essentially, vote for Kevin, close the deal, take the victory, watch crazy Nancy Pelosi fly back home to a very broken California.
And it's possible that Trump's intervention might sway some, although I would predict not most of these holdouts.
Now, Let's turn to the case for the holdouts because their view is this.
It's been business as usual for way too long on the Republican side.
These Republicans are very used to, they've gotten way too comfortable with this kind of transactional model.
That is represented by Kevin McCarthy.
That's represented by Rona McDaniel.
We'll put money into your campaigns in exchange for your loyalty.
You need to kiss the ring.
You need to play the game.
You better vote for McCarthy or you won't get on the right committees.
He holds that over you.
And basically, you've got this little faction, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and others who go, no.
We are going to gum up the works.
We're going to sort of stand athwart history yelling stop, if I can borrow a phrase from William F. Buckley.
You can't intimidate us by telling us that we got to do it now.
In fact, I mean, I myself was chuckling a little bit because I heard someone say, you know, Congress is paralyzed until we have a new speaker.
And I'm thinking, that's a winning argument?
Congress is paralyzed is kind of a good thing.
It's not going to rush anybody into thinking we have to do this immediately.
It's like these stores, you know, sale, going out of business, or you can only get these deals until tomorrow, and so on.
Look... This process of electing a speaker is complicated and it operates by ballot.
And the simple truth of it is if you don't have the votes, you don't have the votes.
The question is, what next?
How does this play out?
There are a couple of ways I think it could play out.
Well, first of all, let me spell out how it's not going to play out.
Some people have been putting forward the idea that somehow there could be a Democratic speaker.
Maybe some Republicans will make a pact with Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat.
I think that this is just fear-mongering.
Republicans are not going to vote for a Democratic speaker.
So I think we can take that one really off the table.
The real question is this.
Is there a way to stop McCarthy?
Answer, yes. Just don't yield.
And McCarthy is done.
There's no way he can get through if these 19 Republicans hold firm or the 20 Republicans hold firm.
It's not going to happen. Now, he could make enough concessions in which they relent, and that, I think, would be an acceptable outcome.
We have McCarthy basically now agreeing to act a little bit more like a fighter and a little bit less like Frank Luntz's roommate.
By the way, McCarthy has a cozy deal by which he rents a This is what we mean when we talk about business as usual in Washington.
This is what the dissidents are trying to stop.
Option two, McCarthy steps aside and Steve Scalise becomes the kind of consensus candidate.
I think if McCarthy steps aside and Scalise steps forward, there'll be a lot of pressure to sort of go with this guy because it's kind of, well, at least he's not Kevin McCarthy, even though Scalise is much closer to McCarthy than he is, for example, to Jim Jordan.
Now, interestingly, I bet if you had a vote among the Republican base, and this is not how these things are decided, but if you did, I bet you Jim Jordan would win.
He'd beat Scalise.
He'd beat McCarthy.
He seems to have support both in the McCarthy wing of the Republican Party and in the Matt Gaetz, if I can use that term, wing of the Republican Party.
So, Jordan has pretty broad appeal.
But again, Jordan doesn't seem to be willing to challenge McCarthy.
And so I think the likelihood of getting to Jim Jordan, if you got to Jim Jordan, I think we'd actually be better off.
And this campaign against McCarthy would have to be declared a resounding success.
But on the other hand, if you don't get McCarthy and you get Scalise...
Or you end up with McCarthy, then, you know, it was probably a valiant try, not to say that it achieved nothing, but it will not have achieved its full objectives.
We should know soon how all of this, in fact, plays out.
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We're in a new year, of course, and the question is, both for the country and for you and me, what is this year going to look like financially?
I'm talking about the economic prospects, the financial prospects for 2023.
The general view is pretty negative, that we should be looking for a spiral of inflation and higher prices, but at the same time, economic stagnation, and that's a problematic combination, right?
That's in fact reminiscent of the very late 1970s, kind of the Jimmy Carter era stagflation, and certainly in terms of economics and the stock market, doldrums.
And so that is one outlook.
But I don't want you to think it's the only outlook, and I... I just read an article.
This was in the New York Post, but it may be a syndicated article.
It's written by a prominent money manager.
His name is Ken Fisher.
By the way, Ken Fisher had a very successful column in Forbes for many years.
And, uh, basically Ken Fisher says, no, no, it's not 1974.
It's not 1976.
It's actually 1967.
And what he means by that is that in the 1960s, we had a, um, uh, A similar environment in which inflation appeared to be galloping out of control.
There appeared to be a certain degree of political turmoil.
And everyone thought that the stock market was going to go flat or even going to go into a regression.
But, says Ken Fisher, the stock market in fact had a stunning rally instead.
It went against expectation.
And Ken Fisher's point is that very often markets do this.
In other words, markets operate not just based upon what the economy looks like, but also what people expect.
And people's expectation often runs to extremes.
So when the market's going up, people become wildly optimistic.
Everyone starts buying.
They think things are going to keep getting better.
And things do get better, but not all that much better.
And so similarly, when things are looking bad, people tend to go into a kind of funk.
You know, we've seen recently, for example, some prominent figures in the banks, people like...
Jamie Dimon and others saying things like there's going to be a deep recession and things are going to be terrible.
But says Ken Fisher, let's look at the lending activity of the banks.
Does their lending activity match their rhetoric?
No. They seem to be still making loans.
They don't seem to be particularly worried about defaults.
They're expanding, in fact, the scope of their loans.
And so their actions would seem to suggest...
A higher degree of confidence in the fact that the economy will plow ahead than the rhetoric would seem to suggest.
I want to add a factor that Ken Fisher doesn't talk about, but it's the political factor.
He alludes to it, but doesn't really get into it.
And that is that midterms in general, and in particular, you could call it divided government.
is good for the economy.
Now, we saw this, for example, in the Clinton era, where you had a Democratic president, true, by the way, with all kinds of spending schemes up his sleeve.
You remember Hillary, Hillarycare, and so on, but you had a Republican Congress blocking him.
And so the block and tackle of the Republicans paralyzed the political class.
Nothing could really go through.
In fact, the only thing that went through was a pretty good thing, namely welfare reform in the 1990s.
Clinton was kind of drag kicking and screaming into that one.
The point is this, that we can be pretty confident that legislatively the Biden agenda for the next two years is dead.
This is not to say that Biden cannot do harm.
He can continue to do harm at the border.
He can continue to do harm through some executive orders, but the scope of those executive orders is limited.
He can obviously continue to do harm in foreign policy, but economically, which is what we're talking about, Biden now basically has his hands tied behind his back.
And whoever ends up being the Republican speaker, the simple truth of it is that Biden programs are not going to go through.
That's it. In fact, these programs, these bills have to begin in the House.
They're not even going to be getting out of committee, let alone getting to a floor vote.
So that, I think, bodes well for the market.
What do I think?
Look, I'm not a forecaster.
I don't pretend to know.
I certainly take steps in case things go bad to hedge our finances, make sure that we have adequate hedges so that we...
We are diversified, and if we lose money in stocks, we gain money through gold or through real estate and through other ways.
But I also think that there is a case to be made that 2023, financially, economically, will not turn out as bad as people expect.
It's hard to grasp why anyone would keep voting for record inflation, skyrocketing crime, an open border.
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Just go to PatriotMobile.com slash Dinesh or call the U.S.-based customer service team at 972-PATR. Hey guys, I'd really like to welcome back to the podcast our friend Cynthia Hughes.
She's founder and president of the Patriot Freedom Project, a project that has been doing a lot of good for January 6th defendants and January 6th families.
The website is patriotfreedomproject.com.
Cynthia, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
Wow, it looks like we are now closing in on another anniversary of January 6th.
It looks like the Biden regime has expanded the net of people that they've been going after.
The number seems to be somewhere now, I think, around a thousand.
And I'd like to get your thoughts about where this is going.
Now, and whether it is getting better or whether these families are just abandoned by our political process, how do you feel about it looking at it now?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me back, Dinesh.
I really appreciate it.
So I feel like the two-year anniversary is more relevant than the first year anniversary because we still have people in pretrial detention, which is really unheard of and quite disgusting when you think about it.
You know, there are people that are, you know, kind of being worn down mentally, if you will.
You know, I talk to a lot of the families, of course, and I do talk to a lot of the detainees, who some of them are still sitting in the D.C., you know, jail.
You have about 18 men that are left there in the D.C. jail.
Most of the men that were in northern Virginia have now been moved to a prison in Pennsylvania where they say, The conditions are night and day for them.
And we have a lot of families who haven't seen their loved ones in close to two years now that are going to be able to visit with their loved one in Pennsylvania.
We've already seen some visits happening.
So there's...
Good, I guess you could say, in some of this where families are finally connecting.
But two years into this, to have people sitting in pretrial detention with no trial date in sight, no sentencing date in sight, and even sentences that are happening, they're very long.
We had a trial last month, early December, with D.C. detainee Peter Schwartz.
Jeffrey Brown. And there was a third co-defendant.
I can't think of his name right now.
But, you know, they were all found guilty.
Their sentencing is not going to happen until May 5th.
These people can't get on with their lives and get to the other side of this because of this DOJ. It's just horrid.
It's horrid circumstances.
I mean, would it be right to say that, I mean...
What is the argument for keeping someone who has not had a trial, has not been convicted of anything, locked up?
Are these judges making the decision that somehow these people represent some kind of danger to the community?
How else can you justify locking them up when they haven't really had due process of law?
Well, yes. The answer is yes to that.
Now, I've sat in on some of these trials.
I've been to several things.
I don't even know if I have the right words to describe what I'm watching and witnessing.
Nobody can get a fair trial in front of a D.C. resident.
That's the first thing.
During the Peter Schwartz trial, there was a juror who was having a hard time watching the videos that the prosecution was presenting, literally stood up in the juror box and ran out of the courtroom.
I mean, that is unheard of.
There should have been an absolute mistrial right then and there.
And two of the lawyers did ask for that.
They were denied by the judge.
This is what we're seeing.
Nothing about any of this is normal, if you will.
These are not run-of-the-mill criminal charges.
We're seeing nothing but bias.
I mean, I've watched some of these prosecutors.
They're heartless.
They're mean. They're cold.
They're calculated. They treat these defendants, I mean, some of the ones who are not charged with a violent crime, they treat them like they're monsters, like they're garbage.
These are human beings, and they have a right.
They have something that they should be protected by called due process, and we're not seeing it.
And we're beyond due process denied.
We're a due process demanded now.
Cynthia, let's pivot to the families of these January 6th defendants.
The Patriot Freedom Project has been doing a lot to help families and talk a little bit about the holiday season is always particularly difficult.
Talk about your interactions with these families and talk about some of the things that you've been able to do with them and for them through support that you've gotten from all kinds of people.
So, first of all, Dinesh, I must thank you and your beautiful wife, Debbie, for the support you have given these families.
You saved Christmas last year, and you saved Christmas again this year, and these families are so grateful.
I can tell you right now, the relief in these women who didn't have to choose, do I pay this bill, or do I buy this Christmas present?
Do I buy this birthday present for kids who have birthdays around Christmas time?
It... It's an incredible feeling to be able to see the relief in these families.
We were in D.C. in the month of December.
We had a Christmas fundraiser.
And I brought in a couple of the families with their children to attend this.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, she came and she spoke.
And you had a couple of families who have a loved one still sitting in the D.C. jail for two years.
We're going on two years.
Haven't been able to see their wife.
Haven't been able to see their children.
Yeah. Knowing that their family was in D.C. for four or five days, they were not allowed to visit them at the D.C. jail.
This is the stuff that the American people should know, and this is stuff that the new Congress should be taking up and bringing to whomever they have to, the Biden administration, the DOJ, whoever is going to exact change.
These families should not be kept apart.
They should not be separated like this.
And we need to know why we're not getting these trials underway and why we're staying such a long period of time before sentencing.
It's very hard on these families.
You know, I get letters all the time, you know, Dinesh, and I hear from these guys that are, you know, detained, and they tell me, It's a terrible thing that's happened to us.
We hate being here, but we have a little bit of peace of mind knowing that there is an organization out there that is financially helping our family.
We have, again, for this past two years, we have paid mortgage, we have paid rent, we have paid utility bills.
Families that have lost their health insurance because their husband lost their job.
We help pay COBRA. We help with birthdays.
We help with travel expenses for families that are going for trials and going to the court hearings.
And we want to continue to do that.
A few weeks ago we heard that there were 3,000 new warrants that were going to be executed.
Now this comes from a very reliable source.
And we're hearing from some new people now that are asking for help with a new lawyer, asking for help with, you know, housing.
You know, we're hearing from men that have already taken a plea deal.
They're going to go to jail.
They want to know that their families are cared for.
It's unheard of and it's baffling.
It just blows your mind to see what is going on in this country and that there is no end in sight.
This is going to continue until January of 2025 when Joe Biden is no longer the president and Merrick Garland is no longer the AJ and that is really facts here.
Wow, that's very sobering, Cynthia.
Guys, in the meantime, we can do our part to help.
The website is patriotfreedomproject.com, patriotfreedomproject.com.
Cynthia, thanks for this report and thanks for the good work you're doing under very difficult circumstances.
Thank you. Thank you.
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Don't delay. I don't know if this is slightly perverse on my part, but I'm really chuckling at this guy, George Santos. You know who George Santos is?
He's the Republican who was elected in New York, and it turns out he made up a whole bunch of stuff about himself.
In fact, Pretty much everything he said about himself isn't really true.
He said for example that he was Jewish and he's not.
He said that he graduated from Baruch College He didn't.
I mean, what I find funny about that is why somebody would even make that up.
I graduated from Baruch College.
I mean, is that something really to be proud of?
I mean, this would be like me boasting about having some fictional illegitimate children in India.
Not something I would boast about.
It's not true, of course, but I mean, I'm going with the George Santos business.
He also claimed that his maternal grandparents were European Holocaust refugees, which they're actually from Brazil.
He also claimed to have lost four of his employees in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
I mean, this guy's unbelievably imaginative.
He claimed he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
He didn't. So I think we can now establish that George Santos is a kind of, well, the word is he's a fabulist.
And a fabulist is somebody who just makes stuff up.
But see, my point is that this qualifies him eminently for Congress.
In other words, people are saying, well, you know, maybe he should resign.
Why? Because he's a liar?
My point is, he'll fit right in.
If you had a non-liar requirement in Congress, let's think about that.
Let's assume, for example, that you had a rule that nobody in Congress, in the House or Senate, can lie.
Well, first of all, Richard Blumenthal would have to step down, the senator from Connecticut.
He made up the fact about his Vietnam past.
Elizabeth Warren would have to step down.
She's been lying about her Native American heritage.
Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois has misrepresented his military service.
So on and on you go. I mean, Biden lies daily.
Biden makes up anecdotes, things that happened to him.
He claims he was a professor when he wasn't.
He claims he was arrested with Nelson Mandela when he wasn't.
He said he graduated from the top of his class and he didn't.
So here's the point.
George Santos is in fact fully eligible to be seated.
Frankly, there's no law that says you have to be honest with your constituents.
It's up to the voters to decide if they want you or not.
Now, this issue, by the way, came up before the courts.
There's a case called United States v.
Alvarez, in which this guy Alvarez claimed that he had served with distinction in the Vietnam War, I believe, and he was accused of violating something called the Stolen Valor Act.
And basically, the court goes, listen, they struck down the Stolen Valor Act.
They said there's no such thing as a Stolen Valor Act.
You cannot criminalize someone for making false claims even about being in the military.
So, in other words, our political process does not protect people against liars.
And in fact, if you think about it, it really couldn't.
Because if you say, okay, listen, in political campaigns, no one can engage in lying.
The question is, who decides what's a lie?
How do you enforce that kind of a standard?
Can one party enforce it against, my opponent is lying, he needs to step down, he can't run for office, even though he's leading in the polls?
None of this really makes any sense.
Some people say, well, he's, you know, Santos has already violated the code of official conduct for a congressman.
No, he hasn't. The code of official conduct applies to people who are already in Congress.
Santos hasn't even really been officially sworn in, so he couldn't have violated the ethical code of conduct because he's not yet in Congress.
The simple truth of it is this guy simply has to be seated.
He was duly elected.
Now, there was an interesting scene, a little vignette I saw on social media, a clip where Santos was sitting, and this was during the Kevin McCarthy speakership debate, and basically he was sitting all by himself and no one wants to talk to him.
So, that's okay.
He's probably happy to be in Congress, even if no one wants to talk to him.
And they'll get over it.
Santos has a vote, and quite honestly, I believe right now, probably all sides are lobbying for his vote on the House Speakership issue.
Look, I don't obviously approve of people misrepresenting who they are, misrepresenting their record, but I do think that this guy has kind of, you may say, by hook or by crook, made his way into Congress, and now he gets to join all the other dissemblers, prevaricators, and downright liars in that august profession.
I'm continuing my discussion of the impact of Christianity on fundamental ethical, moral, and political doctrines that are crucial in America and in Western civilization.
So I want to talk today about two, the doctrine of human rights, and second, the doctrine, the modern doctrine of freedom.
So let's talk about human rights.
We have a document, it's called the UN Charter of Human Rights, the Declaration of Human Rights, by the way, adopted in 1948.
And this is accepted now worldwide, and it declares the rights of people to freedom of conscience.
It says that governments derive their authority from the people.
It says that adults have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex through free consent and to form families.
It says no one shall be subjected to torture or inhuman punishment.
Everyone is equal before the law.
Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and property.
People deserve to be paid for the work they do.
So these are sort of ringing declarations.
Now, I'm not saying that they're always followed.
There are governments, authoritarian, tyrannical, and so on, that...
That don't obey these principles of the UN Charter, but they acknowledge them.
They pay lip service to them.
They pretend to be following them.
So, in other words, what I'm getting at is the UN Charter supplies a standard that pretty much everyone goes along with.
And yet you might ask, well, where do the principles of this UN Charter come from?
The doctrine of human rights.
Where can you find that?
For example, in the Chinese tradition.
Does it exist in the Communist tradition?
Did the Manchus have it or the Ming Dynasty or the Confucians before that?
No. You don't see it in China.
You don't see it in India.
You don't see it in Africa. There's no intellectual root for it except...
In Western civilization, and the root comes from Christianity.
Now, this seems really odd.
How can a particular religion, Christianity, that is not accepted all over the world, even though it's the largest religion in the world, it's not accepted in all cultures.
Nevertheless, it forms the basis for a human rights framework that is universal.
And so it may seem odd that the particular faith of Christianity creates this universal doctrine, and yet one has to remember that although Christianity is particular, it is also universal.
Let's remember, for example, that Christ comes not just for you or me or us.
Christ comes for everyone.
The sacrifice of Christ is for all men.
The particular God of the Old Testament is universalized in the New Testament to be the God of all.
So in that sense, it seems kind of appropriate that we have a Christian doctrine providing a universal foundation for human rights.
Let's remember, here's Paul in Galatians 3.28.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
So here, you may say that Christian individualism or Christian particularism is combined with Christian universalism, and the two are responsible for this global agreement on human rights, certain rights that are held to be inviolable.
Now, I want to talk about the impact of Christianity on the modern idea of freedom, but it's important to realize that the modern idea of freedom is different, even in Western civilization, from the ancient idea of freedom.
Now, there are hints of this modern idea in Socrates, in the Hebrew prophets.
But this notion of individual freedom, of the individual having space to live your life and make your own choices, this is actually a very modern idea.
It has ancient, as I say, hints, but you don't find it as widespread in the ancient world.
There's a very interesting essay that I'm going to talk about in the next segment.
It's by Benjamin Constant.
It's called The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns.
And basically what Benjamin Constant argues is that the ancients had an idea of liberty, but it was completely different than the modern idea of individual liberty that we cherish.
when we come back I'll tell you more about how the liberty of the ancients differs from that of the moderns.
I'm talking about the way in which Christianity shaped the modern idea of individual freedom, but to understand individual freedom and why it is a modern idea, we have to distinguish it from ancient freedom, and we're doing this with the help of an essay by Benjamin Constant called The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns. Now Constant argues that in the
ancient world, and he uses ancient Athens but also ancient Sparta as an example, he goes they had freedom but it wasn't what we consider freedom.
This was their freedom. The freedom was the freedom of the citizens to show up in the public square.
Debate with each other issues of war and peace, wealth and poverty, taxation, and make decisions in which the individual, the citizen, had real power.
Why? Because a small number of citizens, typically a few thousand, were making decisions for their whole society.
And they were doing it directly, not through elected representatives.
They themselves made those decisions and they made them through casting ballots, by voting.
Should we have war? Yes or no. Should we have higher taxes?
Yes or no. Should we make this or that sacrifice? Yes or no. But, says Benjamin Constant, at the same time, there was no such thing as private freedom in the ancient world. Private life was subjected to constant surveillance and scrutiny. Nobody cared about whether you have an individual right to your own opinion, except of course as expressed in the public square, in the agora.
You certainly didn't have freedom of labor.
You were certainly confined in what kinds of professions that you could follow.
Typically, if your parent was a craftsman, you became a craftsman.
You certainly had no freedom of religion.
By and large, the Greeks and the Romans had their own gods, and you're expected to obey and to make sacrifices to the gods of the state.
So all these freedoms of conscience and religious freedom that we consider sacrosanct were considered a crime and a sacrilege in the ancient world.
In fact, there was hardly any aspect of life that the laws didn't regulate.
So Constance says that freedom...
Freedom has a very particular meaning in the ancient world, and it does not mean freedom in your individual or private capacity.
Now, there was a little more freedom in Athens than there was in Sparta, but even in Athens, you had the practice of mass slavery.
You had a common practice known as ostracism, which is basically the citizens could get together and decide that someone...
Basically, should be banished from society.
And they could cast a vote to get rid of a guy and basically say, listen, you've got to leave Athens.
We just don't like you. No reason even needed to be given for these decisions to ostracize someone.
Now, this is not what we mean by freedom in the modern era.
When we talk about freedom, what we mean is that, first of all, we don't mean so much political freedom because although we have political freedom, our political freedom is much less than that of an ancient Athenian.
First of all, we're, you know, 300 million of us and about 150 30 million cast a vote.
So what is the value of your vote?
Which, by the way, you cast only every two years and every four years.
But that's it.
Your freedom is much greater in ordinary life.
The freedom to move around.
The freedom to assemble. The freedom to think what you want.
the freedom of conscience, the freedom to travel where you want to go, to pick the career that you want for yourself, to live your own life.
So that's modern freedom.
And the point I want to make is that this modern freedom comes from the Christian idea that we are each of us moral agents.
So God created us and he created us as individuals and he creates us free.
He creates us in his own image.
And so just as God is a creator, God, in a sense, makes things in his own image.
And according to his own creativity, he gives us a little bit of himself so we can then chart our own lives in the same spirit.
We are architects of our own destiny.
And the only limitation on that in the modern world, by and large, is that we have to respect the equal freedom of others to do the same.
So this is, of course, the famous doctrine of John Stuart Mill.
I have the right to swing my arm as long as it doesn't make a connection with your jaw.
Now, some people, of course, are going to say, well, John Stuart Mildenash was not, he wasn't really an Orthodox Christian.
His views are the product of the Enlightenment.
And my point is that all of this kind of mistakes the fact that the Enlightenment itself, like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, these are developments that, to some degree, Have an independent spirit,
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