Darrell Castle talks about the rise of Western Civilization and the American ideal, and their descent into a New Dark Age.

THE NEW DARK AGES

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report.  Today is Friday, October 19, 2018, and on this Report I will be talking about the rise to greatness of Western Civilization along with the rise of the American Ideal, and their fall from greatness. ,The decline of the West and especially America is on the minds of a lot of people today but what about their origins and their rise to greatness?

Ayn Rand once said “East minus West equals zero.”  That might be a slight exaggeration, but it is essentially correct.  If you look at what other civilizations have contributed to human society over the centuries you will find that it is not very much.  Even the contributions that other civilizations have made either find their origins in the West or they are an effort to imitate Western success.  Western Civilization has dominated many centuries but today we look at why that is the case.

Western Civilizations had its origins in ancient Greece, but it is not Greek or Roman.  It began to develop in earnest about 500 AD out of the chaos of the collapse of Rome.  It remains unique among the world’s civilizations because it put the individual rather than the collective in the central position.  That statement answers the question of why the West has been so dominant.  The individual was unique in that he was created in the very image of God.  The individual bore the image of God within him and, therefore, he had rights that had to be respected because those rights came from God, not government.  It took a while for those rights to achieve that respect of course, but in 1215 the Magna Charta enshrined the rights of Englishmen in the great contract with the Crown, and it made the King himself subject to the rule of law just like the average person.  The American Constitution, ratified after the Revolution, separated America from England, and also made it clear that the rights of the individual could not lawfully be violated by the collective majority even by majority vote.

Western Civilization, I argue now, was an attempt to spread the Christian Gospel to the world as evidenced by the writings of Christopher Columbus from his voyage to the new world, as well as many others.  However, it enshrined logic and rational thought as opposed to mysticism and superstition as the correct way to deal with the world.  Because of the enshrinement of logic and rational thought we have science, technology, great literature, great art, capitalism and personal freedom, progress and a whole lot more.

I was in Los Angeles last week visiting my daughter and she took me to the Getty Museum where we viewed art from some of the great masters of Western Civilization, such as Monet and Van Gogh.  It was there that I started to form this Castle Report in my mind.  I have had the good fortune to travel the great capitols of the world in my 70 years, and in those travels I have seen its art, read its literature, and listened to its music.  Most of it inspired, at least in its inception, by a belief in the Christian God.

In the early days of the American Republic, the Colonies were made up largely of independent minded, self-reliant people who had a strong work ethic.  These qualities were necessary for people to leave their lives in England or Northern Europe and travel across the ocean to an unknown wilderness.  They had the courage, imagination, and desire to create their own destiny.  These were traits the other residents of Europe did not possess and that is also part of what made America unique.  When Great Britain tried to impose more control over them by use of the British Army, and by increased taxation to pay for that army, the colonials rose in rebellion.

First of all, the American ideal was freedom.  They didn’t want government entitlements or government-funded this and that extracted f...