By a strange coincidence, I was halfway through reading my friend R. R. Reno’s Return of the Strong Gods when I went to see A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick’s new movie about the undertows of the Nazi period.
Reno’s book demonstrates how Western society rewrote its own programs in the wake of World War II to prevent a return to authoritarian rule. Reno cites a cross-sample of such contributions, from Karl Popper, Albert Camus, Friederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. He demonstrates how their writings dismantled a culture rooted in strong loyalties—to God, fatherland, nobility, heroism, Being, justice, home—and supplanted them with weak, therapeutic ideals such as diversity, tolerance, equality, and openness, all constructs that inspire nothing but self-interest. According to this postwar consensus, stable convictions and strong passions should be avoided. The West’s leadership class insisted that we be homeless, even as it sheltered itself.
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