But particularly hilarious is that he wrote this exact piece two months ago in the Atlantic[2]. He argued that the Greeks had it right and we all need to be more virtuous again.
As someone who’d describe themselves as a virtue ethicist I’d be inclined to agree. Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. The reality is that we can’t optimize ourselves out of where we are.
[0]: https://www.foodandwine.com/1911-smoke-house-bbq-david-brook...
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/142708/david-brooks-tyranny-...
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-admi...
Can you sketch your reasoning behind these claims? And put forth the most common criticisms against virtue ethics, and defend your position against these criticisms? I don't agree with you, but you have not given me a sufficiently tight argument to convince me or take issue with.
The Ancient Greek model of politics isn't compatible with liberal pluralism. The former assumes a common end and the latter assumes diverse conflicting ends. The Ancient Greek model looks more like modern China than it does like modern America or Europe.
And I think this is tangential to your point, but it has to be said that there are many different approaches to Christianity, many of which have lead (and are actively leading) to terrible violence.
Because I can think of at least a few (Jainism, various Chinese schools of thought, etc) that capture the spirit if not the exact message of "love your enemy".
To me, “Love your enemies”, feels abusive -- or being groomed for abuse. Love those who hurt you. I agree that is more emotionally demanding, mostly in a personally harmful way. I'll take Buddha's approach to Devadatta over the Jesus "love your enemy". I can have compassion and understanding for an enemy, I would even say it's vital to preventing further harm -- understanding them, their motives and having compassion with that understanding. But loving them? That feels more like inviting violence while pleading with them to stop while handing them a stick. Of course there is a fine line of overlap and in the end both can be taken the same way. I simply believe compassion and understanding is more meaningful and less likely to be used to keep one in an abusive situation.
I suggest a look at the Esoterica channel on Youtube for a perspective on Jesus as a historical figure in the context of Judaism at the time[0]
See my other response on eastern thought. “Babylonian Councils of Wisdom” is vague
Turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour, etc, etc, are not something they are keen on.
Biden was closest to a traditional Catholic and they *loathed* him.
This undermines your thesis, because it's not the mystic woo about virgin birth and transubstantiation and resurrection (which they all profess to believe in) that's important - it's the canon - adherence to which is entirely orthogonal to faith.
It can't in large parts of the US because it's a fringe minority, but doesn't it behave in the exact same way in an area where it is the dominant social affiliation?
Its rituals are just as odd and esoteric as the practices of the stranger evangelical churches.
Because this is the case, and because of the hierarchy in place for interpreting scripture and handing down sacred tradition, it becomes less likely that there will be problematic theological dilution or drift.
Christianity may have inspired the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment succeeded because it was able to separate philosophy, ethics, law and science (such as it was, "natural philosophy") from Biblical dogma and the Church.
In its first few centuries Christianity was community-centered, until about the 4th century when it started getting institutionalized in Rome.
>pagans" [...] were routinely harassed and killed
Christianity incorporated a lot of paganism in the medieval era and still maintains it today. You can see it in the old architecture, iconography, and the holidays.
>kings ruled by divine right
Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
>slavery was ubiquitous
The history of Christian abolitionists is well documented.
>women were essentially the property of men
Are you talking about Catholic/Orthodox church doctrine, state-run churches like the church of England, the streak of puritanism in the United States, or something else? Are you referring to the teachings in Leviticus/Deuteronomy? The gospel contains multiple instances where Jesus refused to condemn women accused of adultery.
No. Search for "Alby's crusade", directly from the Romain church, spain crusades, and Bleda's Expulsion of moriscos (it's clearly a catholic priest idea, but it's not the church as an institution here).
Yes, Christianity employed syncretism to more easily convert pagans, but then killed or forcibly converted those who refused. Please don't pretend Christianity had some kind of equitable relationship with non-Christian religions, there are entire cultures laid waste by the Church with little remaining but what revisionist versions of their history and culture they chose to write down.
>Paradoxically, "The Church" was against this idea and it only came about after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years War.
The belief that kings ruled through divine blessing and were given authority over people by God comes directly from the Bible. It certainly existed prior to Protestantism, even if it wasn't explicitly codified as such. And the Church disagreed because they believed the authority claimed by kings belonged to the Pope, not because they believed in separation of church and state.
>The history of Christian abolitionists is well documented.
And yet slavery was ubiquitous and firmly justified by Biblical principles. Both are true, but the principle that freedom and dignity were universal and inherent to all human beings, and should not be explicitly tied to or contingent upon religious belief, is a secular ideal. When Paul wrote that "in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free," he was talking about equality among Christians, not a universal principle that applied to all people.
>The gospel contains multiple instances where Jesus refused to condemn women accused of adultery.
I would argue that Christianity is more influenced by Paul than Jesus. I understand that's controversial but the history of womens' rights and law (based on Christian principles) around marriage, property rights, sex and womens' sufferage seems to bear it out. You can argue certain things shouldn't have been Christian values, but I would argue that Christianity is what Christians do more so than what they say.
He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.
The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.
The problem with meaning is the problem with the words. Get rid of them and their agentic curse that lowballs meaning. There are glyphs, movies, Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Chorti/Yucatec etc., Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
We use landfill for communication. Western languages are terrible hacks of sense-emotion-syntax. That got hacked in Gutenberg, ASCII, web now AI. It's dead.
It's almost as if he's trying to prevent those looking for help from considering religion.
"You don't want those gold bars over there, they're just painted rocks". But are they?
Before Christianity took off there was plenty of “bad press,” to put mildly. Yet here we are.
I guess another way I might restate my point is to invoke the Streisand effect, or note the haters “doth protest too much” or similar notions. YMMV but repeated cathedral burnings and church and synagogue massacres had a remarkable effect on my perception of good and evil. Shooting toddlers at their morning mass; if that ain’t evil then nothing else makes any sense to me.
Say what you will of "wokeism" but it is an ethic that asks plenty of people. It constantly demands one to evaluate virtuous action or inaction. I don't think people are turning away from religion because it takes work. Because it requires real moral deliberation, it's actually more work than mere obedience to scripture.
My mileage does vary. Countless crimes of abuse and co-option of moral authority enabled by religion has proven to me that evil does exist and the presence of religion or the lack thereof is orthogonal to building a moral society.
Many religions today have this feature because they out-competed religions that didn't, but it's not a universal feature of religions by a long shot. If anything, religions that have this feature are inextricably connected to social coping mechanisms(evidently due the persecution).
So I’ll grant them the title. But the stronger claim, that God won’t save us from nihilism, I disagree with entirely.
That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis.
The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity.
We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising.
Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town.
If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it.
Good job. We have only ourselves to blame.
The irony of the whole thing is that Humanism is a religion too, though many people won't recognize it as such. This makes the author's argument doubly misguided.
The third alternative, the difficult way, is social engagement on a path to social democracy, to limiting the reach of autocrats and robber barons, and to defetishizing the first two amendments.
But that path requires lifting one's eyes, abandoning one's out groups, working with all, and foregoing at least some comfort and self advantage.
It is the only way. I doubt I will see it (entered 7th decade recently, feel pretty confident about that).
Also, in some religions the temples are places for job searching, business networking... nothing wrong with that.
I wish I could have faith, a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that. But mystical moments still happen without all of the religious trappings, in conversation or nature.
I just don't know. Here in the US, Christian ethics still predominate, usually, and without organized religious participation, will that continue? Is it too much work to agonize over decisions without it?
As Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.” The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ. And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich.
And no, there was no city gate called "The Eye of the Needle". That was made up by people trying to convince themselves they could hoard money and still go to heaven.
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:25–26, ESV)
Think of nihilism like all the colors in the visible spectrum, but instead of creating white, they create black because they're physically constrained, not metaphorically.
As such, every figure associated with every religion once disassociative will _never_ be anything but an anchor for nihilism because of the natural deviations of man's desire to align god's intentions with one's actions, ad hoc.
Surely if "he" is real, atleast one of them has figured it out.