Via VoxDay/Alpha Game a post by Of Wolves And Men :

The Three Pillars of The West

Since I’m going to be talking about The West a lot on this blog. I suppose I’d better stop and define what I mean when I’m doing so.
So what is western civilization? And when did it begin? And why was The West unique?
Western civilization developed in western and central Europe during the Middle Ages and was recognizable as a civilization as early as 900 AD. This civilization then prospered and eventually broke through the Malthusian trap and experienced long term per capita economic growth for the first time in human history; The European Miracle.
So what created The West? How do we define it? This is where things get interesting. The facts of the origin of The West are well understood and not in dispute. What is in dispute and open for discussion is the interpretation of those facts and the relative importance of each of those influences.
The West was created by the convergence of three cultural and historical phenomenons which not only act as foundation stones but also as social forces keeping each other in check. In a great paradox these three forces are in superficial opposition to each other but in combination support the weight of western civilization.
The Three Pillars of The West
1:) The Greek and Roman Legacy
2:) Christianity; Specifically the Medieval Catholic Church
3:) The Customs of the Germanic Barbarians
Note that you are under no obligation to like any of these three things but an educated man of The West should have a at least a basic understanding of each. Even men who openly despise two of the three pillars can still be useful defenders of The West if they believe strongly enough in their pillar of choice.
Let’s examine each in turn.
The Greek and Roman Legacy

The great advantage that The West had as it rose as a civilization was the ability to go through the history and writings of a previous great civilization.
Some people try very hard to draw a direct line from Ancient Greece to the modern West. I really don’t think you can do that and instead believe that it’s best to consider The West as a new civilization formed by the barbarians that conquered Rome and who then used Rome’s legacy as a blueprint for bringing themselves out of the Dark Ages.
It’s hard to overstate just how much of a benefit having access to Roman historians and the Classical Greek writers was to the West. The main result was to provide a deep and widely understood intellectual tradition that was not directly tied to the Church or the State or to any one nation within the greater sphere of western civilization.
I’ve been rather anti-Roman in the past and I personally remain convinced that the Roman Empire did just as much to set back human process as anything they did to advance it. However the Romans left excellent records and we can learn a great deal from them. Improving my understanding of the Classical Era is definitely a weakness I need to shore up in my self-education.
Christianity and the Catholic Church

If the growth of The West and The European Miracle began in the Middle Ages then something in the Middle Ages must have caused that. So what about western Europe was unique enough to merit attention? The existence of the Catholic Church; a powerful international church that had it’s own interests which were often contrary to the interests of the secular rulers. This state of affairs acted as a check and balance against tyrannical rulers.
During the rise of Europe there was actual separation and Church and State as in that the two were not one in the same. This was in direct contrast to virtually every other human civilization and even the Late Roman Empire, where the Emperors themselves were gods.
The monasteries also preserved a lot of the old knowledge and writing of the Classical world and would later found the first universities.
I’m not going to go too deep into Christian theology here because mostly I don’t have to. Aspects of the Christian faith are found through Western society, cultures and thought. Why even modern secular atheism is nothing but Christianity heresy if you stop to think about it.
I do find it somewhat interesting that a small but noticeable number of Alt-Right men have converted to Catholicism. Food for thought if nothing else.
The Customs of the Germanic Barbarians

The third pillar of The West and the one that is most difficult to precisely draw a picture of are the customs of the Germanic Tribes; who had very different customs than the conquered and subjugated peoples of the former Roman Empire. Sadly these tribes did not always leave good records (they were barbarians) and trying to study them is often an exercise in frustration.
Still tribes such a the Franks, the Lombards and the Saxons gave their traditions and national character to the emerging Europe and their names to geographic regions. Subtly some of these ridiculous customs linger even until today.
The right to bare arms for example comes from the barbarian custom that owning arms was the sign of a freeman and that at a tribal meeting the men of the tribe would signal their agreement with the chieftain or speaker by clashing their arms together. This became a settled right among the Anglo-Saxon people.
Were they Pagans? Vicious blood thirsty Heathens. Of course! At least at the start of Europe’s formation. The process of creating The West involved slowly converting those tribes into the Christian faith and into the growing civilization spreading across the continent.
The Celts (who weren’t really Germanic) converted very quickly to Catholicism since the new faith almost perfectly fit their cultural needs. Other tribes and barbarians however needed a great deal of persuading; usually of the sharp pointy metal variety before entering into the communion of Rome. Charlemagne was an especially good persuader, in that regard.
What about the Norse? Where do they fit in? Well the Norse were just another set of Germanic tribes, among the last to convert to Christianity. They simply put up one hell of a fight before they did so. We also have better accounts of the Norse customs and beliefs because they were among the last of the Pagans and therefore there was a more developed Europe to chronicle their deeds, or rather their misdeeds. The Viking Age ended once the overwhelm majority of Scandinavians considered themselves Christians but it did make for a couple of exciting centuries.

Besides the Norse are just fun to study since they were an uncompromisingly masculine culture.
(Come to think of it, so were the Romans at the height of their power.)
Quick reaction to that Reason article and Vox’s Day’s response.
I was about halfway done writing this article (yes I’m a very slow writer) when I run across a Reason.com article on how Donald Trump is against western civilization and also Vox Day’s rather scalding response. Since I’m writing this article from a right-libertarian point of view, I suppose throwing in my two cents on this is a worthwhile endeavour.
Reason Article on how Trump is against Western Civilization by Robby Soave
http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/06/the-alt-right-is-wrong-trump-is-an-enemy
Vox Day’s Response:
http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2016/04/thus-proving-alt-right-right.html
Classical Liberalism is an end result of western civilization not a root cause of it.
As Vox points out there is a matter of centuries between the establishment of western civilization and the rise of Classical Liberalism. I count six or seven centuries between the founding of The West and the first serious writings in the Classical Liberal school of thought. Now I’m a huge fan of Libertarian thinking but I consider liberty to be a universal human value so the questions remains. Why Europe? Why only Europe? Again it was the conditions in western and central Europe that allowed commerce and liberty to flourish.
Western Civilization has at least a 1100 year history; if you only take into account the last two of three centuries (like Mr Soave is) you’re missing out on an enormous part of that history and legacy.
The importance of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment gets vastly overblown by people like Mr. Soave who cannot grasp that the Middle Ages were not the Dark Ages and therefore find themselves having to completely disregard all human history before Adam Smith.
Besides any fan of science fiction author David Weber knows that the industrial revolution actually began in the Middle Ages using waterwheels.
To recap
-The West was fully formed by about 900-950 AD.
-The European Miracle of long term economic growth begins in the Late Middle Ages. Roughly 1300 AD (Long before the timeline suggested by Mr. Soave.)
-The Renaissance was not that interesting (unless you like paintings.)
-Continued economic growth over the centuries lead to the formation of a tax paying middle class.
-That middle class began to demand their political rights.
-Therefore the Enlightenment and rise of Classical Liberalism was a direct result of the Middle Ages.
Horse first, then cart.
Thoughts on Trump
I am not a cheerful supporter of Donald Trump. However the night is dark, the hour is late and it is important to consider all options.
War is the health of the State. Therefore the primary concern of the libertarian activist is to avoid, prevent, or deescalate violent conflict. Intentionally losing a conflict however is not a requirement of Classical Liberal thought. Donald Trump’s ‘isolationist’ policies buys America time to recover from the disasters of the War on Terrorism and gets The West a reprieve, a chance to rediscover itself and push back the cultural Marxist hordes.
There is no true antiwar candidate in the current US presidential race but Donald Trump is the ‘less war” candidate. He is the least likely candidate to get America into another series of wars of choice or push Russia and China into a permanent anti-American Alliance. That ALONE should get him the libertarian vote!
If Walter “Freaking” Block is willing to support Donald Trump then I’m a little confused as to how anyone at Reason could oppose Trump on purely libertarian grounds.
History and The Struggle for Liberty: Part One
https://mises.org/library/1-european-miracle
This is part one of a ten part audio lecture by historian Ralph Raico (From 2004.) This lecture series appears to be where I got many of the concepts that form the core of this article. While the enjoyment of the whole series may be subject to taste I highly recommend part one.
Update: In reaction to the Apr 6^th Robby Soave article I would definitely recommend the listening to at least first two parts of this lecture series if you can find or make time do so.

The Crusades

Via The Thinking Housewife:

LEARN more about this important, much-maligned and misunderstood chapter in Christian history at Nobility.org.

Also Includes:

I. Origin of the Crusades;
II. Foundation of Christian states in the East;
III. First destruction of the Christian states (1144-87);
IV. Attempts to restore the Christian states and the crusade against Saint-Jean d’Acre (1192-98);
V. The crusade against Constantinople (1204);
VI. The thirteenth-century crusades (1217-52);
VII. Final loss of the Christian colonies of the East (1254-91);
VIII. The fourteenth-century crusade and the Ottoman invasion;
IX. THE CRUSADE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Has Christianity held back the progress of science? What about Galileo?

By Wintery Knight :

First, here’s an article from the peer-reviewed journal Nature, probably the best peer-reviewed journal on science in the world.

The article is written by James Hannam. He has a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (published in the UK as God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science).

Excerpt:

Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.

Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.

That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.

Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.

I hope this will set the record straight – Judeo-Christian monotheism created the enterprise of experimental science.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory

The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities

The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life

The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information

The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion

Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones

Irreducible complexity in molecular machines

The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation

Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason

Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason

William Lane Craig’s moral argument

The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

Arguments and scientific evidence for non-physical minds

Discrimination

Kristor at VFR writes at this post:

I would like to enter a word of support for discrimination. You can't run your life without it. The doctrine that we should not ever discriminate among people would entail that it is offensive and biased for a woman to withhold her sexual favors from anyone at all, or to favor her own children over those of other women. Likewise, it would be offensive and biased for her to prevent anyone who wants to from staying in her house and eating her food. These are absurd examples, to be sure, but they serve to illustrate the general principle that it is not possible to organize social activity except by discriminating among people.

If it is wicked to treat some people as citizens because they were born here, and others as aliens because they were not, then in order to avoid that wickedness a nation would have to treat everyone in the world as its citizens, entitled to vote in its elections, reap all its civil benefits, etc. But then "citizen" and "nation" would become empty terms, and that society would vanish along with the lines and definitions and distinctions that had differentiated it from its neighbours. Thus suspicion and distrust of abnormal people, inclining us all to discriminate against them and favor those we recognize as fellows, is the only way societies survive.

To have a nation, a society, a firm, a church, any organization at all, you have to draw lines. Furthermore, you have to empower people differently, or dignify them differently. For example, if there is to be any leadership whatsoever, leaders must be somehow disproportionately empowered. Ditto for citizenship, or membership in a group or club: one must pay one's dues, the membership cannot be free or it is void. In the world as it is actually constituted, nothing is free (with the exception of God's love for creation, which, being infinite, can be provided to creatures without any cost to God). Ditto also for mate selection, which is an act of discrimination for one person, and against all others.

One of the inescapable elements of discrimination is a moral or aesthetic judgement that some people or things are better than others, in at least some important respect. It would be perverse to dignify someone as a leader if you thought he was not likely to do better at it than the average bear. It would be stupid to turn for counsel to the village idiot. The same holds on the playground when boys are picking sides, and in triage on the battlefield. Discrimination can really hurt. But you can't run a society without it. And it does work in practice, too, because some people really are better than others, at job x, or in terms of characteristic y.

So it is a fantasy to think that we can make life equally nice for everyone. The world doesn't work that way.

Note that none of this is to say that in deciding someone is not right for citizenship, or for cohabitation, or for our soccer team, we are deciding also that they are ipso facto actively bad, and that we are justified in persecuting them. That inference is not justified; that only one runner wins the race does not entail that his competitors should henceforth be kept off the track. To decide that a person or class of people are actively bad, or dangerous, requires a further determination. But we can't shrink from making that determination, either, if we are to survive. For some people truly are bad or dangerous, and if we are to survive we must harass and persecute them: the serial killer, the enemy in wartime, and so forth.

Many members of this community are either Christians, or used to be, or are sort of Christian, or something; at any rate, they hold in high esteem Jesus' injunction that we should love our neighbour as ourselves. This saying at the core of the faith, and thus at the core of our civilization, had always been a stumbling block for me, because it seemed as though it contravened the whole order of the universe, which operates on gradations in value and worthiness, on differences; and that it contradicted also the entirety of Biblical religion, in which God is (among other things) a Judge discriminating the relative merit of everything that happens, right up to the differences among the choirs of angels.

The best interpretation I could come up with was that Jesus' first great commandment that we should love God with all our being meant that I should have no love left over for myself. This would not be the death of me, because in loving God I should also love his will for me, which provides for my best good. That is, I should be more inclined to do His will, and so to prosper. Loving God instead of myself would be good for me. How then should I love my neighbour? Just as I should love myself: not at all. If I love God with my whole being, then I will do what is best for me, and I will also do what is best for my neighbour, because God wills what is best for both myself and my neighbour.

I recently read a comment by a fellow named Sage McLaughlin that, "When we are told to love our enemies as ourselves, this does not mean we are to treat them the same way we treat ourselves--Christ did not say, "Don't have enemies." He takes for granted that we shall have foes, but demands that we love them as human beings and that we hate the disfiguring effects of sin on their immortal souls, just as we hate them in ourselves. We must do this, and we must forgive all those who ask our forgiveness--but we do not have to outdo God, who abandons to eternal damnation all those who turn from Him and walk in darkness." I.e., we are to love the good and hate the bad in other people just as we love the good and hate the bad in ourselves. In order to do that--in order to move closer to goodness and further from wickedness in ourselves, and in our society, and in the creation at large--we must discriminate between good and bad, and choose goodness. That we forgive the wickedness of our enemies does not automatically make them friends; and if they cannot let go of their deadly hatred of us, then in order to control the risk to us of their hatred, we must perforce destroy them with it. In that case, we cannot survive to forgive them except by defending ourselves, and working their destruction, however that may grieve us.