Sublime

But instead of responding to Muslim violence by cracking down on its perpetrators, the British punished its victims by giving the mufti exactly what he was seeking: a reduction in Jewish immigration and a statement by the British high commissioner that the Balfour Declaration was a “colossal blunder.”

Over and over again, however, the British found it possible to justify such brutal war crimes with the quasi-religious reasoning that they were somehow handing out God’s justice on men who were not men, but were instead more like devils. In the eyes of Victorian Evangelicals, mass murder was no longer mass murder, but instead had become divine veng

God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

Indeed, Foucault regarded our conception of “man” – that is, the liberal humanist vision of the individual as the possessor of certain inalienable natural rights – as a very recent invention.

A perhaps unexpected supporter of Lawrence’s plan turned out to be Benjamin Disraeli, who was deeply shocked by the British bloodlust that the Uprising had triggered: “I protest against meeting atrocities with atrocities,” he told the House of Commons. “I have seen things said, and seen written of late, which would make me suppose that…instead of b

But as the social sciences advanced in the twentieth century, their course was altered by two waves of moralism that turned nativism into a moral offense. The first was the horror among anthropologists and others at “social Darwinism”—the idea (raised but not endorsed by Darwin) that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals a

Nowadays, secular people often see the Enlightenment as a battle between two mortal enemies: on one side was science, with its principal weapon, reason, and on the other was religion, with its ancient shield of superstition. Reason defeated superstition, light replaced darkness. But when David Hume was alive, he was fighting a three-way battle. Enl

To Nathan Rothschild, Disraeli had been a champion of the Jewish race and indeed a remarkable friend to his own family, risking his career by supporting the right of Jews to sit in the House of Commons. Paradoxically, Disraeli had based his argument not on the liberal case for tolerance and equality but on the bolder, more controversial claim that

The quality of Free America’s leaders steadily deteriorated—falling from Reagan to Gingrich to Ted Cruz, from William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity—with no bottom.