JANUARY 12, 2019
Love for Western Civilization Leads to Strong Border Security
By
E. Jeffrey Ludwig
Pres. Donald Trump, speaking in Poland June 6, 2017,
affirmed his belief in defending Western civilization. In that speech, he summed up his views by stressing the love of freedom. He said, "And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom[.] ... Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization[.] ... We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God." It was essentially an updated reiteration of the rights theme of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" found in our Declaration of Independence.
To this writer, the simple sentence that introduced the above remarks was never fully developed, yet it was the key to the entire speech. Trump said, "Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield – it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls." This suggests an additional dimension of inquiry that goes farther than, but includes, the ideas and ideals captured in the Declaration of Independence. Those ideas and ideals grew within a philosophical, legal, theological, and historical framework where mind, soul, and will were understood in such a way that only life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness could satisfy them. To understand the dimension of mind, soul, and will, students of history must understand much more than the Declaration of Independence. That lovely document is but the tip of the iceberg of almost 2,000 years of Western civilization that preceded it. And it is only one of many currents of thought that sustain us.
At the same time as Trump was extolling Western civilization in Poland, many American colleges and universities
have abandoned having a Western civilization course requirement in their curricula. The fascists, the socialists, the communists, and their allies – the atheist existentialists and deconstructionists in philosophy – have been successful in attacking the assumptions and principles of Western civilization and rejecting not only life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the foundational understandings of mind, soul, language, and will upon which they rest. Consider all the amazing and complex threads preceding the Declaration that we are ignoring in much of our education system.
We have lost the glorious picture of the evolution of the fall of Rome; the strengthening of the medieval Catholic Church through many councils that affirmed theological principles that are still accepted by Catholics and Protestants; the struggle against Islam beginning in the 7th century and continuing until this very day, the amazing evolution of medieval philosophy under the auspices of the Catholic Church; the survival of the West through the Black Plague; the heroic defense of the West by Charles ("The Hammer") Martel, the educational reforms and defense of Christendom by Charlemagne and Louis IX; the prolonged struggle between the monarchies of Europe and the papacy for pre-eminence; and the early, middle, and late Renaissance. Would it not be valuable to read Niccolò Machiavelli's
The Prince when evaluating the behavior of Sen. Charles Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Trump mentioned that beautiful symphonies were written in the West (implying that they were not from Asia, Africa, or South America), but he only scratched the surface. In Western civilization, one finds the growth and development of "rights theories" beginning with the Magna Carta and extending in England and later Great Britain to the Declaration of Rights, about 100 years before our Bill of Rights. The West also is the origin of the scientific revolution, which has been a boon to our health, nutrition, transportation, communication, and prosperity.