Uh Some sixty odd years thinking, studying, debating, and writing. about the great questions of human existence. I consider this the calling God has placed on my life. And yet, The questions I've spent my lifetime wrestling with have never been more urgent than right now. I believe that we are at a civilizational moment.
The period of crisis. When a civilization, our civilization, completely loses touch with the inspiration that made it what it is. It is at this point like all the other civilizations that have come and gone before us, that we face three clear options. renew the original inspiration? replace it with something equally solid?
or decline. That's Oz Guinness in Truth Rising, a new groundbreaking documentary film from the Coulson Center and Focus on the Family. As Oz says, we're living in a civilizational moment. We know museums and history books are full of artifacts of once dominant civilizations that have been long ago reduced to ruins. And that's the inevitable future of the West if we are detached from the essential truths that rooted and nourished it.
Christians are not victims of civilizational decline. We've been put in this time, in this place, on purpose by God. Truth Rising helps Christians see how critical this civilizational moment is. and understand the role that they have to play in it. by embracing their calling to be agents of renewal wherever God has placed them.
The film premieres globally September the 5th. Sign up for updates at truthrising.com slash Colson. That's truthrising.com slash Colson. Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.
There's a meme on social media that quotes my colleague Glenn Sunshine as saying this: If I had a gun with two bullets and I was in a room with Hitler, bin Laden, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I'd shoot Rousseau twice.
Well, Glenn insists that he never said that, but then he quietly admits. He kind of wishes he had. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the last 500 years. He was a defining figure of the Enlightenment. His ideas.
have especially infected the arenas of philosophy, education, and politics, and not in a good way. Another colleague of mine insists that the world deserves a real life version of its A Wonderful Life about Rousseau. Only in this version we'd learn how much better history would have been without Rousseau, and we'd never want to go back. Rousseau's idea of the natural innocence of children, for example, has shaped modern notions of being child-centric. In this view, parents and teachers should never restrain children or push them toward any particular views.
Rather, children should be encouraged to discover their own truth through their own experiences. Rousseau, by the way, left all five of his kids at an orphanage. And he also advocated another idea, a related one that's come to be known as the Noble Savage. In this view, evil does not originate within the human heart, it comes from society. Thus, the further people are able to get from civilization the better they will be.
In his book, Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau imagined prehistoric and tribal peoples living in a Utopia with no marriage, no government, no property, and no morality.
Now of course all of his musings came from the comfort of the salons of Western Europe. The explorers who actually discovered tribal people and witnessed how they lived told a very different story. Men like Francis Drake or Walter Raleigh and Charles Darwin all described the brutal worlds of poverty, famine, and slavery, despite these people being without the negative influence of so called civilization. Really, the most dangerous ingredient in all of Rousseau's ideas was his unbounded confidence in human ability. He scoffed at formal religion, assuming that through unaided reason humans could discover all truth.
In his view, all we needed was to be freed from the chains of superstition and government authority. Ideas have consequences bad ideas have victims. Rousseau's ideas were very bad and left a long trail of victims throughout history. His legacy includes the failed Utopian visions of the French Revolution, where tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in less than forty years, as well as Karl Marx, whose legacy led to the deaths of ten times that many people in just the twentieth century alone. And without Rousseau, we may very well have avoided the twisted anthropology of thinkers like Margaret Mead and their appeals for so called sexual liberty.
Even Alfred Kinsey might have remained an unknown pseudo-scientific and perverted crackpot. rather than the seminal researcher of the sexual revolution.
Now, of course, Rousseau is not responsible for the evil of others, but his ideas did provide justification for some of the worst villains. In human history. And that's why it's important that we understand ideas, including bad ones. A Great Place to Start is a wonderfully titled book by Benjamin Weicker. ten books that screwed up the world, and five others that didn't help.
According to Weik, and I quote, the The best cure, the only cure, once the really harmful books have multiplied like viruses through endless editions. is to read them. know them forward and backward, seize each one by its malignant heart, and expose it to the light of day.
Now if he sounds dramatic, consider these words from nineteenth century scholar Thomas Carlyle There once was a man called Rousseau, who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first. Yes, world view matters, and that's because ideas matter, and for no other reason than the misguiding musings of philosophers like Rousseau, Never just stay in the study. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr.
Timothy Padgett. Before I go, I want to say thanks to Donna of Corning, New York. Thanks for being a Cornerstone Monthly partner of the Colson Center. You helped make this episode of Breakpoint possible. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
And for a version of this commentary that you can print out or share with others, go to breakpoint.org.
