I would be deeply appreciative if you would share this essay far and wide. To that end, I’m making the audio version of this essay available to all subscribers, paid and unpaid.

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The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, though well known, does not receive the attention it deserves. Let us remind ourselves of the words and ominous cadence of the Declaration’s all-too-neglected opening sentence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The better-known second sentence, the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ” receives most of the attention in any serious discussion of the Declaration’s core philosophic principles. The first sentence is, however, quite extraordinary in that it announces the moral impulse and moral logic that caused the American people to declare their independence from their mouther country and the world’s greatest military power.

The first sentence introduces in abstract form the Declaration’s purpose and the actions that follow therefrom. Its purpose is to identify and “declare” to the world the “causes which impel” the colonists to separate from Great Britain, and its actions are defined by the necessity to dissolve their connection to the mother country. By publicly declaring the “causes” which impel them to the separation and by showing their “respect to the opinions of mankind,” American revolutionaries demonstrated that their actions were to be guided by reasoned discourse and moral principles. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Americans appealed to nature (i.e., to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God) as the standard of moral and political right, and they appealed to man’s reason as the means of knowing and demonstrating those principles.

According to the Declaration’s first sentence, man’s reason is capable of apprehending three important things: first, the evidentiary facts that prove a design on the part of British imperial officials to enslave them; second, the moral standard against which these unjust acts are to be judged; and third, the necessity of separation. The overarching principle of the Declaration’s first sentence is that reason can distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust, freedom and tyranny.

The main burden of the Declaration was to demonstrate that the actions of King George III and the British Parliament necessarily amounted to despotism. From the beginning of the imperial crisis, the most impressive American minds charged British authorities with a “design” to enslave them. As early as 1765, John Adams raised the alarm in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law in response to the Stamp Act: “Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for us, by somebody or other in Great Britain. There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.” Likewise, Thomas Jefferson warned in his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British-America that “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, and pursued, unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” And according to the Declaration, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

To “prove” to a “candid world” the charge that there was indeed a design to impose a tyranny over the American colonies, the Declaration enumerates twenty-seven injuries and usurpations allegedly committed by the king. Each of the charges refers to a specific action taken or not taken by the king. The list of injuries and usurpations can be divided into three main sections.

The first section—counts one through twelve—enumerates the king’s abuse of his executive powers. His offenses include disallowing or suspending colonial legislation, dissolving colonial legislatures, obstructing the colonial system of justice, corrupting the separation of powers by making judges dependent on his will, and keeping standing armies. The second section—counts thirteen through twenty-two—details the king’s collusion with Parliament to subject the colonies “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” His offense here was having not vetoed Parliament’s abuses, such as: quartering British troops in America and putting them above criminal law, restricting American trade, restricting trial by jury and other common law rights, imposing taxes without the consent of the governed, and destroying the colonists’ right to self-government. Of special significance is the charge that Parliament has declared its power to be arbitrary in America through the passage of the Declaratory Act of 1766. The third section—counts twenty-three through twenty-seven—identifies those abuses that amount to an undeclared state of war. The king’s abuses include what might be described as war atrocities: he has initiated the use of physical force by turning his navy and army against the lives and property of the colonists.

In sum, George III had violated the British constitution, the colonial charters, common-law rights and liberties, and, most importantly the colonists’ natural rights to life, liberty, property, and their pursuit of happiness. In response, the Americans did not view these actions as discrete and separate events unconnected from each other. They were not concrete-bound pragmatists. The Americans studied, weighed, and measured the separate actions of king and Parliament (i.e., the evidence of the crime); they integrated the totality of British actions and drew the conclusion that king and Parliament had a “design” (i.e., the motive) to reduce them under absolute despotism (i.e., the ultimate crime itself); and then they contrasted the actions of British imperial officials with their own moral principles (i.e., the standards of natural justice).

In 1768, John Dickinson in his famous Letters from a Farmer described perfectly the Americans’ mode of reasoning: “Ought not the People therefore to watch? to observe facts? to search into causes? to investigate designs? And have they not a right of Judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?” The revolutionaries’ Enlightenment moral principles provided the touchstone by which to judge the actions of king and Parliament, and their principles necessitated the nature of their response.

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The American Spirit of Liberty

Returning now to the Declaration’s first sentence, let us ask: Why in the course of events from 1765 to 1776 did it become “necessary” for the Americans to dissolve their political connection to their king and mother country?

To say that separation is necessary is to say that it must be, but why must it be? Imagine how the meaning of the Declaration would have changed if Jefferson had not written “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . .” but instead substituted “optional,” “possible,” “expedient,” “preferable,” or even “prudent” for the word “necessary.” To repeat: Why was separation said to be necessary?

Our entry point for examining why this was so is a phrase the Americans of the 1760s and 1770s invoked repeatedly: the “spirit of liberty.” The phrase “spirit of liberty” united theory and practice for America revolutionaries; it implied an action in defense of a principle; it was characterized by certain virtues in defense of liberty. The spirit of American liberty is a sentiment, a mindset, a disposition, a virtue. As a sentiment, it loves freedom and hates slavery. As a mindset, it is watchful, suspicious, and skeptical. As a disposition, it is active, jealous, restless, resolute, protective, and, most of all, vigilant. And as a virtue, it is defined by integrity, fortitude, perseverance, courage, and patriotism.

The American spirit of liberty was virtually synonymous with the colonists’ moral constitutions, and it provided them with a worldview through which they interpreted and responded to the cascade of events between 1764 and 1776. No theme ran as broadly or deeply through American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. The colonists’ spirit of liberty served as a kind of moral and psychological tripwire that was first triggered by the passage of the Stamp Act and kept active with the passage of every piece of British legislation aimed at the Americans in the decade leading up to 1776. During these years, American Whigs developed objective standards by which to measure the justice and injustice of British legislation. These standards, when combined with their spirit of liberty, provided the Americans with an early-warning system that alerted them day or night to the abuse or growth of arbitrary power. That early-warning system was most famously expressed in Paul Revere’s galloping words—“The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming!”—during his midnight ride on April 18, 1775, to warn American minutemen of British troop movements before the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Rekindling and stoking the spirit of American liberty became a central theme repeated countlessly in the writings of leading American Patriots. Let us consider just one example of how American revolutionaries thought about the spirit of liberty.

In 1767, John Dickinson penned his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which many historians regard as one of the most influential pamphlets of the Revolutionary period. Dickinson’s Letters present a powerful analysis of the ways in which unchecked power asphyxiates liberty. The letters also provide the best analysis of the American spirit of liberty written during the Revolutionary period.

Dickinson’s primary concern in the Letters was to sound the alarm against the Townshend Acts, particularly the New York Suspending Act and the Townshend duties. The Americans, he warned, must be vigilant and exert “the most watchful attention” against Parliament’s subtle designs; they must prevent a creeping form of slavery under the guise of legalities, otherwise “a new servitude may be slipped upon us, under the sanction of usual and respectable terms.” He goes on to warn against those “artful rulers” who attempt to “extend their power beyond its just limits” by subtly manipulating language and legal technicalities. And with every passing generation the noose tightened just a little bit more. Every usurpation, whether large or small, eventually requires additional usurpations to keep all prior usurpations in force: “A free people therefore can never be too quick in observing, nor too firm in opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality, respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of alteration leads to the last: Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more certain, than that the forms of liberty may be retained, when their substance is gone.” Thus, it was necessary, Dickinson argued, that the people should always be on guard to protect their liberty as they protect their property. He encouraged them to “watch,” “observe facts,” “search into causes,” and “investigate designs,” and of course he insisted that they assert their “right of judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness.” He implored his fellow Americans to be ever vigilant. Quoting from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Dickinson reminded his readers that “slavery is ever preceded by sleep.”

Dickinson equated the American spirit of liberty with jealousy, watchfulness, and vigilance. “A perpetual jealousy, respecting liberty is,” he told the American people, “absolutely, requisite in all free states.” They must keep up the “utmost vigilance,” and they must be “watchful of their liberty.” He went on to remind his fellow colonists of Machiavelli’s famous chapter in Discourses on Livy, which “prove that a state, to be long lived, must be frequently corrected, and reduced to its first principles.” The lesson of all history proves “that every free state should incessantly watch, and instantly take alarm on any addition being made to the power exercised over them.”

Dickinson attacked the Townshend duties precisely because they were so comparatively small. It would be a “fatal error,” he warned, to disregard and therefore to acquiesce in these new duties because of their trifling amount. In fact, the “smallness” of the duties is a trap. No matter how inconsequential the tax, no matter how reasonably and equitably applied, the colonists should regard the act with “abhorrence.” He suggested that the Townshend duties were intentionally designed to be small so that the Americans would not notice or object and a noose-tightening precedent could therefore be established. He went on to posit that the British were testing the moral disposition of the colonists. He then raised the very real possibility that the goal of the British imperial officials in establishing such a small tax was to establish a “precedent, whereupon the future vassalage of these colonies may be established.” Once the precedent was established, Dickinson argued, Parliament might then levy any amount of tax on the colonists. Thus, it was imperative that the colonists resist every attempt to tax them without their consent regardless of the size or amount.

The Townshend Act “is founded,” according to Dickinson, “on the destruction” of the colonists’ “constitutional security.” If members of Parliament “have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us,” Dickinson noted, then “they have a right to levy a million upon us.” What this means, of course, is that the possession and control of American property depended not on the will of the colonists and their rights but on the pleasure of Parliament. The Townshend duties are clearly a tax, Dickinson concluded, and “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—slaves.” The logic of Dickinson’s moral reasoning was simple, compelling, motivating, and explanatory. It’s what made the American revolutionary mind unique and distant from the twenty-first-century way of thinking. This idea of preserving natural liberty in its pristine form and so resisting even one small precedent against it had come close to the center of the American consciousness. This idea is precisely why the colonists viewed the rather trifling stamp tax and Townshend duties so ominously: they viewed each as the entering wedge of a broader campaign to deprive them of rights and liberties.

Like modern historians, British imperial officials never understood the principles, temperament, and character of the American revolutionaries, which meant they never understood their deepest motives. They had no way to know that the revolution’s trigger was embedded in the spirit of American liberty. British officials therefore could never understand why it was necessary for the Americans to dissolve the political bands that had connected them to Britain for over 150 years. Likewise, twenty-first century Americans who still revere the revolutionaries’ spirit of liberty are beckoned to recover the moral impulse and moral logic that drove their ideological ancestors to independence and freedom.

Happy Independence Day!!! Long live the United State of America!

***I’m off to Arizona next week to give eight lectures on “The Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution” for Jordan Peterson’s online education platform, Peterson Academy. If you’re in the Phoenix area and would like to attend, you can sign up here. I may then be off to Canada to visit my parents and when I get back, we launch our two-week “intellectual boot camp,” the John Adams Fellows Program. All of that is to say, my publications for the next month may be less than regular.

The audio recording of “Postmodern Marriage” is at the bottom, and I am making it available to all subscribers, paid and unpaid.

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Now that we’ve examined what marriage is (see here, here, and, most importantly, here), we should consider what marriage is not. There are many pretenders to the throne, but marriage is something definite, something real, and something worth defending. There are those, however, who would use the idea of marriage as a Trojan Horse to corrupt and destroy the meaning, importance, and living reality of what marriage is.

We live in a postmodern age that seeks to change or destroy the core principles and institutions that are at the foundation not just of the West but of all civilizations. Under the long shadow cast by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Herbert Marcuse, we live in a time of nihilistic totalitarianism (nihilism is the means and totalitarianism is the end) that has as its direct goal the dismantling of those ways of living grounded in metaphysical reality.

Let’s begin by putting our concerns in a broader context. Those who seek to destroy marriage, do so in the name of an ideological passion.

When early twentieth-century Marxists realized that there would never be a proletarian revolution of oppressed workers because the working class was the greatest conservator of the bourgeois way of life, they recalibrated their strategy and decided that the values most important to the working class would have to be destroyed first and foremost. This led the twentieth-century Left on its “long march through the institutions” to extinguish those moral values and institutions that were suppressing and holding back the Marxist-Leninist revolution foretold by the laws of dialectical materialism. That’s when the Left discovered Nietzsche and Freud and began to wheedle away at the soul of Western man.

After the Left captured and transformed the universities, schools, media, Hollywood, and various professional associations, etc., they went for civilization’s jugular. The single greatest scalp won by the Left in the last twenty years has been their corruption and transformation of the institution of marriage. The postmodern Left is now giggling as their minions have stripped marriage of its necessary component parts and left it corpse dangling for all to see and mock. (Apologies for mixing my metaphors!)

The postmodern view of marriage is radically different from the reality of metaphysical marriage. They are essentially different things. Indeed, the difference between marriage and all other forms of romantic association (e.g., same-sex, polygamous, polyamorous, inter-species, etc.) is not one of degree but one of kind. They are not identical or even similar kinds of relationships; indeed, postmodern unions are a simulacrum of true marriage. The metaphysical and postmodern views differ over the purpose of marriage as well as its fundamental characteristics and functions.

Let’s take a closer look.

Marriage true and false can be distinguished in two major ways. First, in contrast to the metaphysical view of marriage, the new postmodern definition is thoroughly subjectivist in nature. It is not grounded in the facts of reality. It does not refer to a basic human reality with a defined identity, structure, function, and purpose. Indeed, it is disconnected from the necessary facts of reality that give rise to marriage in the first instance and is thus emptied of the necessary content and meaning that define marriage. Postmodern marriage is infinitely malleable. Its purpose is, according to its most vocal proponents, to serve an ideological-political agenda.

To start with, the postmodern view says that marriage is genderless; that a wedding does not require a bride (which must, by definition, be a woman) and a groom (which must, by definition, be a man), that a husband does not require a wife; that a child does not require a mother (which must, by definition, be a woman) or a father (which must, by definition, be a man). Nor is the postmodern view of marriage defined by the magic number, two. The new understanding defines marriage as the union of one or more consenting adults. (In 2012, a woman married herself in Las Vegas.) Lastly, the postmodern view of marriage regards the old-fashioned characteristics that once defined marriage, such as monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence, as outdated and therefore optional. In fact, according to Elizabeth Brake, a professor at the University of Calgary, a major goal of postmodern marriage is, as she said, to “denormalize heterosexual monogamy as a way of life.” Thus, the postmodern view is open to married “throuples” (a three-person couple), and of course polygamous and polyamorous marriages, “monogamish” couples who limit their marriage to two people but who are permitted to have sexual relations outside their marriage, and limited-term or temporary marriages as defined by “wedleases.”

But if marriage is not between one man and one woman, by what principle can it be defined and limited? Why should it be thought of as something particular, as something with defined characteristics that distinguish it from all other forms of romantic relationships? Postmodern marriage is therefore a fill-in-the-blank institution, and of course it is the loudest voices and government officials who fill in the blanks. Judith Stacey, one of its leading academic proponents, ably summed up the postmodern view of marriage:

If we begin to value the meaning and quality of intimate bonds over their customary forms, there are few limits to the kinds of marriage and kinship patterns people might wish to devise. . . . Two friends might decide to marry without basing their bond on erotic or romantic attachment. . . . Or, more radical still, perhaps some might dare to question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek some of the benefits of extended family life through small-group marriages arranged to share resources, nurturance, and labor.

The postmodern view is grounded on emotional needs, feelings, and desires; its principal function is to satisfy intimacy and commitment; and its ultimate purpose is to promote self-esteem and to acquire social and political status in a world governed by the tastes of the notoriously hip and the congenitally envious.

The postmodern view of marriage was first sanctioned legally in a 1993 opinion of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, which declared, “This court construes marriage as “‘a partnership to which both partners bring their financial resources as well as their individual energies and efforts.’” According to Andrew Sullivan, one of the leading “conservative” proponents of the postmodern view, marriage is nothing more than the vehicle by “which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another.” Marriage in the new dispensation is defined simply as companionship, as an emotional union, as a partnership, or as a super-duper friendship.

Postmodern marriage is about one or more people who love themselves or each other or who share a strong emotional bond formalizing a long-term commitment to one’s self or to one another, a commitment that lasts as long as it suits the feelings and interests of the adults involved. The definition of marriage has changed in Andrew Sullivan’s view: “From being a means to bringing up children” to being “a way in which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another.” Elsewhere, Sullivan has written that “the essence of a good marriage is not breeding or even the romantic love that can blind us while it overwhelms us,” but rather “a unique and profound friendship.” But if companionship is the definition of marriage, then there simply are no limits on what marriage can or should be except that some people should feel a strong emotional union with oneself, with another person, or with many people.

Marriage defined as partnership, friendship, or companionship does not explain, however, the deeper purposes of postmodern marriage. Andrew Sullivan captured the meaning of those deeper purposes when he wrote in Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality that unless gay marriage is legalized “a whole segment of humanity” will be denied “personal dignity.” Sullivan’s argument—hereby dubbed the argument from guilt—received official sanction in 2003 when the Ontario Court of Appeals’ decided in a case that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms required that same-sex couples be issued marriage licenses:

Marriage is, without dispute, one of the most significant forms of personal relationships. . . . Through the institution of marriage, individuals can publicly express their love and commitment to each other. Through this institution, society publicly recognizes expressions of love and commitment between individuals, granting them respect and legitimacy as a couple. This public recognition and sanction of marital relationships reflect society’s approbation of the personal hopes, desires and aspirations that underlie loving, committed conjugal relationships. This can only enhance an individual’s sense of self-worth and dignity.

The new postmodern definition of marriage, then, is about promoting the “self-worth and dignity” of people who engage in a certain kind of partnership, friendship, or companionship. In other words, postmodern marriage is driven by a kind of identity politics, the purpose of which is to elevate the “self-worth and dignity” of a protected class. But surely dignity and self-worth are not defined by social recognition, sanction, and approbation. As much as I wanted to compete in the Olympics when I was a young man, the fact that I didn’t in no way damaged my dignity and self-worth. Finally, as a married man, I can assure you that neither my dignity nor my self-worth is connected to my being married. My wife makes sure of that!

In sum, there is no relationship between marriage and human dignity, nor is marriage a “human right.” Self-esteem is not the basis of marriage, nor should unearned guilt be the means by which a counterfeit concept corrupts a legitimate one.

It should be obvious by now that the argument for same-sex marriage is fundamentally incoherent. If feelings, companionship, love, and self-esteem are the defining ingredients of marriage, if marriage is a fill-in-the-blank institution, on what grounds would you not recognize polygamous, polyamorous, and non-sexual unions as marriage? Other than sheer bigotry, why should marriage be limited to the number 2? Why shouldn’t a bisexual man marry a man and a woman if that’s his and their choice? Why shouldn’t a “throuple” be allowed to adopt children? Other than sheer bigotry, why shouldn’t five men and five women be allowed to marry? Why shouldn’t the ten people of a polyamorous marriage be allowed to adopt children? Other than sheer bigotry, why shouldn’t a man or a woman be allowed to marry his or her sister, brother, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, adult son or daughter, or another married person if they claim to be in love? Other than traditional taboos, why shouldn’t a father and an adult son be allowed to marry and adopt if they love each other? Other than sheer bigotry, why shouldn’t two heterosexual sisters be allowed to marry for the benefits that accrue with marriage? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to adopt? Surely such a prohibition represents discrimination and a violation of the “privileges and immunities,” “due process,” and “equal protection” clauses of the 14th Amendment, according to the proponents of postmodern marriage.

Other than sheer bigotry and old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy taboos, why should we not celebrate such relationships? In fact, why shouldn’t we be required or even forced to celebrate such relationships? Surely it is immoral to state a moral preference for one form of family arrangement over another. If male and female are not immutable characteristics of marriage, why should number, exclusivity, permanence, choice, or even species limit marriage? Presumably the only forbidden form of marriage would be to oneself, but then again, why not? And in fact, such a wedding has, as we’ve seen already, occurred recently. And why should marriage be limited to persons? Why can’t we have interspecies marriages? If we can kill and eat animals, surely a humane society would allow us to love and marry animals? This may sound absurd but there are individuals who want to marry animals and have either done so or attempted to do so. Several years ago, a man in Missouri sought a license to marry his horse. And in 2006, a British woman, Sharon Tendler, married a male dolphin named Cindy. (It is not known if “Cindy” is transgendered.) Tendler made it clear that she did not expect Cindy to be monogamous. And why should marriage be limited to sentient beings? In 2013, a woman in France married a 500-year-old bridge.

Ultimately, the postmodern definition of marriage is open-ended and therefore unintelligible. It has no objective referents other than whims and feelings; in fact, it represents an attempt to rewrite reality. But a concept that means everything means nothing. Ultimately, the argument for same-sex marriage is a case of ideological wish-fulfillment.

Second, if the postmodern view is simply the product of human will, wish, and whim unconnected to any metaphysical realities or necessities, it necessarily follows that the postmodernists see marriage as something created and defined by government (i.e., jus dare), which means it is the creature of force. And of course, that which government has the power to create and define can also be recreated and redefined by government at will. This means that government can change at its pleasure the identity, function, and meaning of marriage, including the sex and number of those marrying as well as the other fundamental characteristics of marriage, e.g., exclusivity, monogamy, and permanence.

In 1648, the 2^nd Earl of Pembroke famously said, “A parliament can do any thing but make a man a woman, and a woman a man.” The postmodern view says nonsense to that, and so has the British Parliament in the twenty-first century. The postmodern view says that marriage is whatever government says it is and therefore that government can declare a man a bride and a woman a husband. And if government can do that, why can’t it define a bridge or a dolphin to be a spouse. The postmodern concept “marriage” is defined by arbitrary human invention.

Thus, the postmodern view of marriage takes a top-down, central planning approach. It says that what was once established and accepted over millennia by innumerable and radically different societies and literally trillions of people should now be redefined by a small elite at one moment in time and enforced by the coercive power of the State (I capitalize this word to capture its Germanic quality). According to four justices on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in its 2003 same-sex marriage ruling, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, “the government creates civil marriage.” Two years later, a federal trial court in Nebraska declared marriage to be a “creature of statute.” As such, the postmodern view of marriage comes in the form of a government dictate. The State now defines what marriage is, which means that the government defines all the rights and responsibilities of marriage, and it is now using its coercive force to uphold its definition of marriage. (I will have more to say on this topic in later essays.)

The result is that marriage is no longer an institution of civil society connected to the metaphysical needs and realities of human life and recognized by government; it is now an institution created by government. And if the State has the authority to create marriage, it shall also have the power to define and create families. Why should families be defined by a mother and father? If government can define what marriage is disconnected from reality, it can certainly define what a family is disconnected from reality. This is the very definition of statism.

The postmodern marriage movement is not and has never been a grassroots movement in the same way that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was or the current homeschool revolution is today. Instead, the postmodern marriage movement is more akin to a top-down ideological putsch promoted by powerful elites in the universities, media, Hollywood, and the courts. It is, we might say, a movement of the 1 percent for the 3 percent. The metaphysical view, by contrast, says that marriage is a naturally and spontaneously evolved social institution that grew from the bottom up in every society known to man. The constituent truth and moral reality of marriage would exist whether it was recognized in the law or not.

In a free society, the law should not create marriage; it should only recognize and sanction it based on metaphysical reality and necessity.

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Conclusion

Metaphysical marriage and postmodern “marriage” are not just different things. They are fundamentally different things. One is naturally grounded in the factual (i.e., biological) requirements of human life; the other is grounded in subjective feelings and desires. One defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman; the other says that marriage is entirely open as to number, sex, gender, species, and duration. One has essential attributes (e.g., monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence) and therefore a fixed definition; the other has open-ended attributes and a fluid definition. One protects the rights of children; the other serves the whims of adults. One serves an objective purpose; the other serves subjective purposes. One is recognized by government; the other is created by government fiat. One derives its autonomy from the natural order and voluntary association; the other derives its authority from the coercive power of the State. One protects the rights of individuals; the other violates individual rights. One requires no government force to be experienced and lived out; the other requires the initiation of physical force to be experienced and lived out. One is logically consistent; the other is logically incoherent.

Given the massive difference between metaphysical and postmodern marriage, the fact that both call for “love” and “commitment” means very little. But why should love and commitment be requirements of postmodern marriage. That metaphysical and postmodern marriage share a few superficial similarities (sometimes) does not change the fact that they are essentially different. They are not the same thing. They are different in kind. And precisely because they are fundamentally different, we need different concepts and definitions to denote and define them.

Ultimately, the postmodern view of marriage is built on two logical errors. The first disconnects the concept marriage from the biological reality on which it necessarily depends. The idea of same-sex marriage, for instance, is based not on perceptual reality and truth but on whim and wish. It has nothing to do with the objective purposes and characteristics of marriage; it has nothing to do with the human problem that marriage seeks to solve; and it has nothing to do with the solution marriage provides for the universal human problem. This is not to say that same-sex, polygamous, and polyamorous relationships are not something real; nor is it to say that they can’t or shouldn’t receive some kind of legal recognition. It is only to say they are not and cannot, by definition, be marriages. They are something else. That they are something else does not diminish what they are (i.e., romantic relationships), it just identifies them correctly.

Second, to expand the definition of marriage disconnected from its metaphysical roots and mixed with various emotional states is to disconnect it from its purpose, function, and characteristics. The proponents of the postmodern marriage must ultimately say that marriage is a relationship between people. It wouldn’t even have to be a romantic relationship. The sex difference, the number, the exclusivity, and the permanence are now all optional or open-ended. Marriage can be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, and innumerable other permutations; marriage can be based on limited-term contracts, and it can be open to multiple sexual partners. Same-sex, polygamous, polyamorous, incestuous, and inter-species “marriages” have now been classified as, and made equal to, traditional marriages. And yes, why shouldn’t a woman’s dignity and self-worth be recognized and celebrated if she wants to marry a dolphin!

It is critically important, however, that we distinguish marriage from companionship. They are different things that deserve different names and definitions. The postmodern view of marriage is a conceptual farrago that is in the process of diluting and destroying a special and vitally important institution. It claims to support and democratize a venerable institution while it ignores and denies the metaphysical foundations on which true marriage is grounded. But there is no good reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

In a free society, men and women will have the freedom to associate with whomever they choose, and they will have the right to form private contracts that define the rights and responsibilities of their particular associations. That’s what a free and just society would do.

Audio Recording: I’m not sure what happened to the nice English gentlemen who usually reads my essays. Instead, we have a very clear and direct American woman reading the essay, and she does a fine job!

Have a great day!

*I hope to be back next week with another essay for my series on marriage. The next proposed essay will be titled “Postmodern Marriage.”

THE GOOD

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO?!?! Scientists Discover Sperm Seem To Bypass a Fundamental Law of Physics.

THIS IS UTTERLY FASCINATING, Fatherhood Dramatically Rewires Your Brain, Scans Reveal, AND IT ALSO CONFIRMS SOMETHING I WROTE IN MY ESSAY—”SOMETHING HAPPENED”—FROM A FEW MONTHS AGO:

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP:

• Scientists Reverse Alzheimer’s Disease in Mice With Impressive New Treatment.

• Groundbreaking New Compound Could Treat the World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease.

• Amazon Scorpion Venom Shows Promise as Next-Generation Breast Cancer Drug.

• Eli Lilly says weight-loss pill a candidate for speedy approval under new US program.

• The “Freshman 15” Isn’t a Myth: Scientists Reveal Why It’s So Common.

I CAN’T SPEAK FOR OTHER PEOPLE, BUT I PREFER SMALL CITIES TO LARGE ONES: The rise of the small city: Population growth in the U.S. has moved beyond urban cores

PETER BERKOWITZ: U.S. Declaration of Independence on anniversary: Challenges and principles

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP:

• 7,000-Year-Old DNA Rewrites the Story of the “Neolithic Revolution.”

• Ancient Bible breakthrough: Hidden pages of St. Paul’s letters revealed after centuries

• A Man Was Walking Through a Field—and Found a Massive Viking Gold Hoard.

• Man’s everyday dog walk uncovers ‘incredible’ relic dating back millennia

WELL, WELL, WELL: Former BLM activist goes scorched earth on ‘scam’ group, insists systemic racism in US isn’t real.

SWEET: In a Groundbreaking First, Scientists Found a Way to Unlock Your Long-Lost Childhood Memories.

PROGRESS—Canadian Style? Alberta will vote in the fall on whether to start legal process for separating from Canada. “The proposed question would ask: ‘Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?’”

MORE FREEDOM IS A GOOD THING:

• Texas Poised To Lead New Natural Gas Pipeline Boom

• Tennessee Leaders Join Campaign To Ban State Property Tax

BEST NEWS I’VE HEARD ALL DAY: Scott Pelley Claims Bari Weiss Is ‘Murdering’ News Program ’60 Minutes’

GOOD ON HER: Adventurer becomes first British woman to cross the Atlantic by hydrogen balloon.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE IS WHAT WE WANT: The thing Anthropic’s repugnant and overbearing “safety controls” on their new model demonstrates, conclusively I think, is that if we allow one or two companies to control all AI research and development, we will also be giving those companies veto power over what thoughts we are allowed to think, what information we are allowed to know, what conversations we are allowed to have. The only solution to this is an open, fiercely competitive market where customers can freely choose to leave when a company behaves like this.

• FOR THOSE WITHOUT X: X-cancel.

EUROPEANS TRAVELING AROUND AMERICA IS JUST WHAT AMERICA NEEDED: Europeans in the US for the World Cup Are Celebrating American Culture—Specifically, Red America’s Culture. I couldn’t help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for.

AGREED: Elon Musk is a Genius — and a Litmus Test.

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THE BAD

NEPO BABIES OF THE WORLD UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your million dollar pacifiers: Hasan Piker Calls Musk a ’F***ing Failure as Leftist Meltdown Over SpaceX IPO Intensifies.

SOCIALISM IS BAD IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. There is nothing noble or laudable about the forced redistribution of wealth: Make of this what you will.

THE FOLLOWING IS AN IRON LAW OF POLITICAL PHYSICS: WHERE THERE IS A WELFARE STATE THERE WILL BE FRAUD:

• New Study Warns Obamacare Enrollment Fraud Could Cost Taxpayers Billions In 2026

THE WELFARE STATE IS IMMORAL AND SHOULD BE ABOLISHED: US Government Overpaid Welfare And Medicare Recipients By $186 Billion Last Year

WHERE THERE IS A WELFARE STATE, THERE WILL BE FRAUD. It’s a political law of nature:

• Virginia Wrote Off $300M In Unemployment Overpayments, Only Recovered $6M

• Nevada Congressional Candidates Call For Fraud Enforcement, Healthcare Aid

• I’m Ohio’s state auditor — Medicaid fraud is not just a Washington problem. Audits found payments to dead people, prison inmates and residents enrolled in multiple states.

IT’S AS THOUGH THE FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS EXIST SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF BEING RAIDED AND RANSACKED. The welfare state will destroy America: SBA Head Says Agency Found $200B In Fraudulent Pandemic Loans

THERE IS ALMOST ALWAYS A PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THESE MASS SHOOTINGS THAT CAN BE SUMMED UP IN ONE WORD: NIHILISM: What the San Diego Mosque Shooters Believed.

ONE WORD . . . WHY? 2 scientists charged with bringing deactivated mpox virus into the US and lying to authorities.

NOT GOOD: ‘Unprecedented Threat:’ Routine Maintenance Found an IED at an Alabama Dam.

I’M STARTING TO GET A BAD FEELING ABOUT HOW THINGS ARE GOING IN THE UNITED STATES. And it’s mostly the things most people don’t see: America stopped building ships. Now it can’t build a navy

CHINA WATCH:

• China-Linked Group’s Socialist ‘Liberation Centers’ Expanding Across The Country

• Satellite Photos Reveal China’s ‘Active Defense Web’ for Nuclear War.

• Unruly teenagers: Small Pacific nation facing the cost after cutting ‘deal’ with Beijing

• ‘Trump’s Donroe Doctrine’: China tries tightening its grip on the Panama Canal

DECLINE AND FALL—ENGLISH SYLE

• Freeborn No More? The Crime and Policing Bill and the Slow Death of English Liberty.

GREAT BRITAIN IS DYING. That it is committing civilizational suicide is self-evidently true. The British ruling class (both Laborites and conservatives) is the most corrupt in the western world (well, except that of Canada, of course). The Henry Nowak story is a symbol of everything that is wrong with western “Progressivism.” Nowak was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa with an eight-inch, ceremonial, Sikh knife. When the police arrived, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of “racism.” Naturally, the police believed Digwa and then arrested and handcuffed Nowak. He bled out and died shortly thereafter.

• Henry Nowak Killing Highlights Two-Tier Standard on Identity, Policing, and Justice in Britain.

• The merciless mistreatment of Henry Nowak.

• How America’s Racial Politics Poisoned Britain.

• Henry Nowak Case: Police Admit DEI Training Shaped Disgraceful Decision to Handcuff Dying Teen.

• Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.

• The Martyrdom of Henry Nowak. And the parallels with St George of Fentanyl.

• What Killed Henry Nowak: One Murderer and All the Malignancy of Collective Self-Hate.

TO PLAY THE “RACE CARD” IS YOUR “GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD.” That seems clear now:

“TAKE THE KNEE” IS NOT MEANT TO BE A SYMBOLIC GESTURE OF SUPPORT. It represents the ideological terms of our surrender.

YOU CAN’T HATE ENGLAND ENOUGH: “I Was Sacked From Police for Questioning Islam.”

HYPOCRITE! Ford flew to Phoenix on a private jet: Harrison Ford urges ASU graduates to prevent ‘mass extinction’ by fighting climate change.

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT’S THE WRONG QUESTION: Who Surrendered Feminism?

I BLAME FEMINISM AND AI. How ‘bout you? US Faces ‘Existential Crisis’ As Fertility Rate Continues To Decline

IS CHINA FUNDING LEFT-WING PROTESTS IN THE UNITED STATES? Inquiring minds want to know: ‘Just stunning’: Kevin O’Leary sounds alarm as he ‘uncovered something far bigger than I ever expected’

OH, OK: Dems call lack of menstrual leave ‘economic violence’ in push for new federal law

PERFORMATIVE IN THE SERVICE OF LEFT-WING IDEOLOGY: MS NOW Host Feels ‘Deep Unease’ About America’s 250th Celebrations, Cites Our ‘Racist Past’.

DISMANTLING THE DEEP STATE: Social Security Administration Fires 7,100 Staffers In Historic Cuts

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THE UGLY

IDEOLOGICALLY/PSYCHOLOGICALLY DRIVEN MURDER AND IT ALMOST ALWAYS STARTS IN THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS: Trans Killer Reveals How Gender Surgery Pushed Her To Execute Parents

PRETTY SURE THIS PEDO IS NOT GOING TO ENJOY HIS TIME IN PRISON: I Love Being A Pedo’: Detroit Doctor Pleads Guilty In Child Porn Case

CRIMINAL PUNISHMENTS IN THIS COUNTRY ARE FAR TOO LIBERAL: Man Gets 33 Years For Sexually Exploiting Over 140 Children

WHAT DO WE SAY OF A NATION WHOSE INTELLECTUAL ELITE SUPPORTS THE DRUGGING AND MUTILATION OF CHILDREN? Detransitioner Outlines Policies To Prevent The Medical Transition Of Minors

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

Mozart’s Lacrimosa from the Requiem in D minor is surely one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. The music represents Mozart’s deepest reflection on, and expression of, grief. If grief is love with no place to go, the Lacrimosa, which translates literally as “tearful” or “weeping,” captures it beautifully.

Have a great week!

I’m deeply saddened—indeed, gutted—to learn about the tragic death of my dissertation advisor, Gordon S. Wood. Professor Wood was America’s greatest living scholar of the America’s revolutionary-founding period and quite possibly the greatest of all time. Even though he was 92, he was still as intellectually active as he was when I met first him 40 years ago. (I will link to a few of his interviews and lectures below.)

When I arrived at Brown University in 1986 to do my Ph.D., I was there for one reason only: to study with Professor Wood. He was already a giant in field. I wanted to study with the best, and he was the best.

Professor Wood’s first and most famous book was The Creation of the American Republic (1969), which revolutionized the study of the American founding. Creation forever changed the way historians and political theorists thought about the founding period. His second book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), was a stunningly original interpretation of the revolution and the ways in which it revolutionized American society. Many wonderful books followed, including a thoroughly charming biography of Benjamin Franklin (The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin), a massive reinterpretation of the politics of the 1790s (Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815), and an extraordinarily elegant dual biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson). And there were many other books.

I could say many things about my personal relationship with Professor Wood, but I shall limit myself to just two stories.

The first involves the writing of my dissertation. Shortly after I’d taken my Ph.D. General Exams, Professor Wood invited me to the Faculty Club to have lunch with him. At a certain point, he said to me: “Thompson, I know you’re not happy here. My advice is to move to Boston, write your dissertation, and send it to me when it’s done.”

That’s exactly what I did. Initially, I was not particularly happy with Professor’s Wood’s advice. It sure seemed as though I had been abandoned. By contrast, he typically worked relatively closely with most of his other graduate students, reading their dissertations chapter by chapter as they were being written and commenting on them.

During my time in Boston (Somerville to be exact), I worked in the bowels of Widener library at Harvard day and night for two years. During those two years, I never spoke to Professor Wood, not even once. When the dissertation was finished, I (snail) mailed him 600 pages, not a word of which he read until he received the rather large package in the post. Several weeks later, the phone in my flat rang. When I answered, the voice at the other end said, “Brad, it’s Gordon Wood. I’ve just read the first 200 pages of your dissertation and it’s brilliant! You don’t need to change anything!”

When we hung up, I was overjoyed, but I was also overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. What I knew but he didn’t was that the last quarter of the dissertation was a critique of him! He never called back to talk about the rest of the dissertation.

But here’s the point: by sending me to Boston, he did the very best thing that he ever could have done for me. He liberated me from his massive influence. Only later did I realize (and then he subsequently told me) that he banished me to Boston because he knew I didn’t need him to write my dissertation. He knew that I could do it on my own. Most importantly, what he really did was to set me free. During those two years in Boston, I developed a kind of intellectual independence that was—and has been—vitally important to my intellectual development. For better or worse, that dissertation was 100% me.

The second thing Professor Wood did for me was to share a piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten. He told me to “think big,” which is precisely what he did in his books. He advised me to write on grand topics—the topics that have scores if not hundreds of books written on them already (e.g., the American Revolution)—but to try and see and say things no one else has seen or said before. In both Creation and Radicalism, Professor Wood completely reconceptualized the way scholars saw and thought about the revolutionary-founding period.

Specifically, he advised me to not engage with other scholars in my books, at least not in the body of text. If you engage with other scholars that means, he said, that you’re letting them set the terms of debate, and, more importantly, it means that you don’t really have anything interesting or original to say. The key is to live with the primary sources and to search for new meaning in them.

He told me once that the key to being a great historian or political theorist was to look for and see the things that other scholars don’t see—to see the unseen. When I think about the meaning and importance of Professor Wood’s books, I’m reminded of what a European diplomat once said of John Adams: “He saw large subjects largely.”

In addition to the senseless tragedy of his untimely death, I’m particularly saddened by the fact that I will never get to have that “last talk” with him in which I was going to ask him all the questions that I’d been storing up for decades.

The truth is, he was supposed to come to Clemson on July 24 to participate in our John Adams Fellows Program. This new program is for graduate students from around the United States who work on the American founding. The plan was for me to have a semi-public conversation with him to be witnessed by a new generation of scholars about to launch their careers. Here a few of the questions I was going to ask him:

• If you could write another book, what would you write on?

• If you were to write a book on a topic other than early American history, what might you work on?

• What are the great unexplored topics in early American history that you would advise graduate students today to work on?

• What do you think is your greatest contribution to scholarship on the American revolutionary-founding period?

• What are the best books on the American revolution and the American founding other than your own?

• How is your work on the American founding similar to and different from the scholarship of political theorists (particularly the students of Leo Strauss) who work on the founding?

• Who were the greatest historians of the American Revolution prior to World War II?

• Which historians would you recommend as models of graceful writing?

• Which scholars have most influenced your work?

• What are the qualities and attributes that make a great historian?

• What advice would you give to graduate students who might want to carry on your legacy?

Unfortunately, I’ll never get to ask these questions, and we’ll never know his answers to them.

Gordon S. Wood was a gentleman and a scholar of the highest order. We will never see the likes of him again.

May his memory be a blessing for all of us. R.I.P.

This essay is the most important in my series on marriage. It states mostly clearly what I think marriage is and why it’s the most important institution ever invented by man. The audio version of this talk is at the bottom of the page, which I’m making free to all subscribers (paid and unpaid) in the hope that you will share this essay with friends, colleagues, and family.

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“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”— George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

Marriage has existed, as we all know, in every society known to man. Its core principles developed spontaneously around the world over millennia free of State control. We also know that its forms and formalities (e.g., wedding ceremonies) have differed from one culture and religion to another, and all have changed over time. The accoutrements of marriage in sixteenth-century Persia were different from those of eighteenth-century Paris and both are different from marriage in twenty-first century Las Vegas.

In times past (and in some places around the world today), marriage was dictated by wealth, status, dynastic considerations, parental fiat, and patriarchy. The major world religions (e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) all have their own marriage rites and traditions. Even within Christendom, the marriage rites and rituals of Catholics and Protestants differ dramatically, and within Protestantism they differ among Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, and every other denomination. Marriage is a sacrament for Catholics, a covenant for Calvinists, and something else for Mormons. And yet, certain basic principles and characteristics remain fixed from place to place over time.

Why is that? Why should the core purposes and functions transcend time and place? The answers to these questions are more important in the twenty-first century than in any other time in world history.

What marriage Is

The first section of this essay peels away the secondary attributes of marriage in order to reveal its essential core. Understanding and defining what marriage is, is the heart of the matter. Rationally understood, marriage is a complex social institution—part moral vow, part legal contract, part political license, part cultural norm—that creates and defines a particular kind of moral-legal relationship between a man and a woman. Marriage takes two unique individuals and creates something new—a married couple—that is now to be treated by the law as a single unit. It formalizes, consummates, integrates, solemnizes, objectifies, and perpetuates the biological necessities and the romantic union of a man and a woman through a public declaration sanctioned by law that this couple shall be henceforth and forever treated as one. Marriage, the most private and intimate of all personal actions, is a public act.

As a concept, marriage has specific referents in reality (i.e., its constituent parts include men and women who become grooms and brides and then husbands and wives to each other), a proximate cause (i.e., the desire to consummate romantic love spiritually and physically), specific characteristics (e.g., monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence), and a central purpose (i.e., the potential bearing and rearing of children who become sons or daughters to their mother and father). The unity of these elements, causes, characteristics, and purposes defines what marriage is.

Put in Aristotelian terms, marriage has a material cause, an efficient cause, a final cause, and a formal cause. Its material cause—the material from which it is made—is one man and one woman; its efficient cause—the motivation and action that put it in motion—is sexual attraction and romantic love; its final cause—the purpose or function for which it exists—is the bearing, rearing, and protection of children as a family; and its formal cause—the form by which it actualizes its purpose—is monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence.

Epistemologically, the concept marriage refers to a certain kind of relationship defined by certain kinds of actions between the institution’s existential referents (i.e., husbands and wives) and their connection to a larger community. The relationship that is marriage and the unique actions that go with it, are, always have been, and must be gender specific and gender connected. The concept marriage necessitates certain ostensive referents that are metaphysically absolute. A marital union without husbands and wives is more than a contradiction in terms; it is disconnected from metaphysical reality; nay, it represents the disintegration (i.e., the destruction) of the concept.

Furthermore, the epistemological meaning of marriage is inseparable from its purpose. This is easily demonstrated. That marriage is directed to one objective end is demonstrated by an irrefutable counterfactual or reverse inference: there is no state in the American union, nor is there any nation in the world that permits biological brothers and sisters (or mothers and sons or fathers and daughters) to marry. And with good reason. Biological siblings typically carry common recessive genes, and any incestuous sexual reproduction often leads to children with serious congenital defects and disorders. The institution of marriage is designed to encourage health families and healthy individuals.

What’s more, imbedded in the concepts “husband” or “wife” are innumerable seen and unseen cultural mores and moral norms that guide the complex and particular functions and actions that define marriage. The specific and unique actions between a married man and a woman are component parts of a special kind of relationship that is distinguished from all other relationships within the broader community in which they live. Moreover, the concept marriage distinguishes this kind of particular relationship from all other male-female relationships. One important purpose of wearing a wedding ring is, for instance, to send a signal to all people outside this particular marriage that the parties are taken and not participants in the romantic or sexual market. To arbitrarily change the definition of marriage and disconnect it from its metaphysical and epistemological foundation would be to introduce conceptual and therefore moral, social, and political anarchy into an institution that encompasses what is probably the most important social-legal relationship known to man.

Let’s turn now to the actions that add up to and define the relationship known as “marriage.”

First, marriage marries. It is a coming together and a kind of reconciliation that unites in one two very different kinds of people, the two great halves of humanity (i.e., a man and a woman with their profound physical and psychological differences), each of whom seeks lasting fulfillment and joy in a life lived together. Epistemologically, marriage encapsulates and defines a specific relationship. Legally, marriage recognizes a new unit out consisting of dissimilar entities. It reconciles biologically distinct and sexually asymmetrical adults, who nonetheless share a sexual complementarity that has the potential to create new human life sharing the DNA of both parents. The primary purpose of marriage brings new life into society and then connects that new life legally with its biological mother and father.

Second, marriage is created by the voluntary actions of a man and a woman in a public ceremony—a wedding, which has various rites and rituals that serve an important social function. It is a rite of passage marking the transition from one moral-social-legal condition to another. Marriage is initiated by a vow—a declaration witnessed by the public and recognized by the government. This vow is part personal, part public. A man and woman promise to each other and declare to their community that they shall be true to each other and forsake all others forever and that they shall care for each other in sickness and in health. (Why do they do this? Why should anyone care?)

Third, the primary actions that define relational parts of marriage are gender specific. Marriage transforms men and women into husbands and wives and then into fathers and mothers. It defines the rights and responsibilities of husbands and wives toward each other and of mothers and fathers toward their children; and it sends cultural signals to the rest of society defining the relationship between married and unmarried men and women.

And finally, the underlying assumption of marriage is that husbands and wives will raise all children born to them. The vow of marriage therefore has a kind of (non-religious) sacred responsibility attached to it. It is much more than a private contract or a negotiated deal of cohabitation. Arguably, it is the most important decision an individual will ever make.

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Marriage Stakeholders

To better understand the full complexity and meaning of marriage, it must also be seen from the perspectives of its four natural stakeholders: 1) the men and women who seek to marry; 2) the children born to a married couple; 3) the community of relatives, friends, and neighbors in which the married couple lives; and 4) the government whose job it is to protect the rights of married couples and any children they might have.

From the perspective of individual men and women, the moral relationship that is marriage begins with a choice—the selfish, moral choice of a man and a woman to protect and perpetuate their romantic relationship as a husband and a wife in the context of civil society. Men and women choose a future spouse from innumerable potential options. They do so for entirely selfish reasons. Person “A” chooses person “B” instead of persons “X,” “Y,” or “Z” because of the pleasures, satisfaction, and joy that “A” receives from “B.” Marriage as a duty is an entirely immoral concept. Marriage is first and foremost a volitional moral bond between a man and a woman, who create for themselves a whole new private universe motivated and held together by their mutually assured love. This means, first, that the self-interest of the husband and the self-interest of the wife have largely, though not entirely, merged as one. Marriage should never involve sacrifice. If one’s spouse is one’s highest value, then giving up all lower values is not and cannot be a sacrifice. It means that both husband and wife elevate the other to a privileged place in his or her life such that each is self-interestedly concerned with the happiness and wellbeing of the other. Legally, men and women seek marriage to protect their rights as a single unit. Marriage is a rights-protecting institution.

Another important angle from which to view marriage is from the all-too-forgotten perspective of children. It bears asking: what do children need and want, and to what do they have a right? In other words, what is owed to children in the context of marriage?

Children have a strong rights-based claim to be raised by their biological parents. This claim is based on one crucial fact: children come into the world as helpless beings dependent entirely on adults to survive. The responsibility to satisfy this right redounds morally to the child’s natural mother and father, who in turn have a self-interested stake in the well-being of their biological child. We also know that children have a powerful desire to be raised by the two people who gave them life and brought them into the world. Virtually all children have a genuine longing to experience the different forms of love and affection expressed by a biological mother and father. Marriage provides the institutional structure by which adult society protects the rights and interests of children, and it protects the natural bond between parents and their children from outside interference.

Marriage is also a social institution. Its vows are witnessed and sanctioned by the community—by our relatives, friends, and neighbors. For better or worse, all societies everywhere have shown a real interest in the institution of marriage, and most people share an interest in the success of other people’s marriage. It is in our self-interest that marriages succeed. Social chaos typically comes with cultures that don’t respect marriage. Social science literature for over fifty years has clearly and unequivocally demonstrates that the break-up of the two-parent family in the United States is the direct and principal cause of crime and social chaos in many American communities.

A decent, civil society begins with marriage and the family. The social function of marriage is to provide an objective structure in which the sometimes-volatile intellectual-emotional-physical union of men and women can find order, stability, and protection. From the perspective of society, marriage encourages men and women to unite sexually in a responsible way so that the community may create a future for itself. Marriage also creates new relationships and actions between the married couple and the community in which they live. It ends the “next of kin” legal connection between an adult son/daughter and his or her parents, and it establishes each married partner as the other’s legal next of kin; it establishes rights and responsibilities relative to joint property, executorship, and the custody and care of children; and it announces to the world that any child born to a married woman is presumed to have been fathered by her husband, who now must assume certain responsibilities. As a social institution, marriage creates millions upon millions of small, private, self-interested, rights-bearing platoons that are protected by the fortress of the law.

Finally, the role of government in marriage is limited but important. The first thing to note is that government should be in the rights-protecting and not in the love-promoting business. Love is and should be invisibilis to government. A rights-protecting government should care not one whit about love. Government’s only proper purpose is to protect individual rights, and that’s its sole function in marriage. From the government’s perspective, the institution of marriage is a rights-enhancing, rights-protecting institution, which means that government has a legitimate role in protecting the individual rights of the various parties involved in marriage. Marriage properly recognizes a constellation of rights that are meant to 1) insure that both parties fulfill their chosen marital obligations; 2) protect married couples and their children from outside interference; and 3) protect children from abuse, neglect, and abandonment. The government’s attitude toward marriage should be one of laissez faire or salutary neglect. (I shall have more to say on this specific topic in a forthcoming essay.)

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Why Marriage?

Morally, socially, and institutionally, marriage captures a core human truth that distinguishes it from all other human relationships. It is rooted in the sexual difference, complementarity, and asymmetry of men and women and in the experience that all societies have with reconciling the complex but necessary sexual relations between men and women. Marriage universally was, is, and will forever be society’s macro-solution to the problem of human generation and survival. (While it is true that the socio-legal institution of marriage was and is organized for ordered reproduction as a central, organizing purpose, procreation is not a necessary pre-condition of any particular marriage. Infertile couples and those who choose not to have children are in fact married. Still, we must never forget that marriage was, is, and must be rooted metaphysically, epistemologically, morally, sociologically, and culturally on a model of partnership that is nonetheless connected to human procreation. But for that fact, the difference between marriage and all other kinds of partnerships would be one of degree only rather than one of kind.)

Anthropologists and the ancient philosophers tell us that marriage developed historically as a natural, pre-political form of association. Aristotle, for instance, suggests in the Nicomachean Ethics that the “friendship between a husband and a wife seems to be in accord with nature.” Moreover, marriage is “earlier and more necessary than a city.” Put somewhat differently, procreation is an objective, metaphysical necessity of human survival. The fundamental question is, how will this necessity be promoted and achieved by men and women in a social context?

As a natural, pre-political institution, marriage arose in response to certain observably immutable facts of reality: 1) that men and women are sexually attracted to one another; 2) that sex between men and women sometimes creates new human beings; 3) that only women carry and bear children; and 4) that children are entirely dependent on adults for their survival and for their physical, intellectual, and moral maturation. These are necessary, absolute, and observable facts of reality—facts that are true about human nature regardless of what anyone feels, wants, prays, or chooses—facts that ground marriage in the requirements of human life.

Anthropologically, we know these immutable facts of human nature led to a series of persistent and pervasive social problems in all societies. Imagine a world before the rise of marriage, a world in which men and women engaged in indiscriminate (and often forced) sexual relations that often resulted in pregnancy and the bearing of children. In such a state, the central problem was this: men and women have sexual relations but only women get pregnant and bear children. This is what we mean by the sexual asymmetry between men and women. Women are biologically connected to children, and every time a child is born a mother is always present. These natural and sociological facts are, however, confronted by one massive counterfactual: fathers are not always present when children are born and raised. In other words, there is no similar biological necessity, however, connecting fathers to childbirth, and hence to babies and their mothers.

Every culture known to man has understood that a society of husbandless mothers and fatherless children is a formula for disaster. For instance, if men did not know that the child born to the woman with whom they’d had sexual relations was theirs, they would typically either abandon mother and child to fend for themselves or they would engage in potentially deadly competition with other men to claim their paternal rights and authority. Neither outcome was salutary for the immediate parties involved, nor for the larger community. Moreover, when men engaged in promiscuous sexual relations and impregnated more than one woman (as some were—and are—want to do), their economic resources were either centralized in one family and thereby impoverishing the others, or the resources were dispersed and diluted among several families. It also led to polygamous sexual relations, wherein dominant males would monopolize multiple women and leave male outcasts sexless and childless. Eventually, the sexual aristocracy would face an upheaval from the sexually impoverished, who would revolt and fight for their right to procreate. In other words, a society defined by non-marital, non-monogamous sexual relations often led to social disruption, anarchy, and barbarism.

These basic facts of human nature also lead inexorably to certain sociological facts: 1) that the well-being of mothers and their children is promoted by the presence of fathers; and 2) that raising children in stable family units promotes the interests of children and the perpetuation and wellbeing of society. The discovery, development, and institutionalization of marriage in all places around the world was therefore a response to the challenges and requirements of human life. Marriage attaches husbands to wives and fathers to their biological children in order to protect mothers and their children and to provide stability in society at large.

Marriage was and is therefore the universal solution to a series of ineradicable human problems. It was developed and institutionalized by freely associating individuals to 1) enable women to avoid becoming husbandless mothers of fatherless children; 2) tame and channel sexual jealousy; 3) pool, manage, and protect limited economic resources; 4) transfer property from one generation to another; and, 5) establish a safe and stable environment for men and women to create families and to raise and educate their children free of outside interference.

In promising monogamy, married couples make a commitment to each other (and to their community) that they would only have children with and through each other. The exclusivity of marriage insured that men would know who their biological children are to eliminate competing paternity claims and the social conflict that goes with them. The permanence of marriage protected the vulnerability of women during pregnancy and during the years in which they are rearing dependent children. As a social institution, exclusivity and permanence ensured that children were raised by their natural parents throughout their minority.

In sum, marriage is the institution that creates, orders, and protects family life primarily for the benefit of children. Without this primary purpose or final cause guiding what marriage is, two of its fundamental characteristics (i.e., exclusivity and permanence) would not be necessary (or at least they would be optional) and they might not even be desirable. In fact, if humans reproduced asexually, or if newborns and young children were somehow not dependent on adults for their survival, marriage would be an unnecessary institution, at least from the perspective of society and government.

Every civilization known to man has understood the need to recognize that human reproduction and its claims are an irreducible feature of the human experience. This is how and why I say that marriage is grounded in the metaphysical reality. Put slightly differently, marriage is the moral-socio-legal institution that recognizes and supports the metaphysical necessities of human life. It acknowledges and secures the relation between a child and a particular set of parents. It is the foundational pro-life institution that every society has recognized to secure a future for itself. No decent or free society has ever treated the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as optional or as a matter to be decided by government fiat. Unless a particular civilization has an explicit death-wish (e.g., the Jim Jones “Jonestown” commune in Guyana), every society known to man has recognized that its future is dependent on its ability to successfully organize a healthy marriage culture.

Marriage as a Socio-Moral Institution

As a socio-moral institution, marriage is different from all other human relationships. It is naturally ordered to procreation and to the rearing of children, and, as such, it is a natural extension of biological reality. Put differently, it attaches men and women to each other in a permanent legal bond and then to their children. That’s what the institution of marriage does; that’s what its forms and formalities do. Moreover, virtually every human society has discovered and instituted marriage as the most salutary and orderly way to create a future for itself. It is a life-serving institution. It is the only form of human association rooted in the self-preservation of the species. Were it not for this fact, marriage would be just another form of partnership or friendship. Marriage provides a moral and legal structure that serves as the primary building block for creating stable families, and thus it is the means by which society not only perpetuates itself but builds a truly civil society. Marital unions reflect and identify a basic and necessary truth about human life, providing an objective good to society in ways that other kinds of relationships could not. Marriage is, therefore, the necessary and foundational building block of any civil society.

Indeed, a strong marriage culture is a sine qua non of a free and decent society. Civilized societies depend on parents educating their children to become rational, self-governing, rights-respecting, virtuous, productive citizens, which in turn requires mothers and fathers to commit their lives to each other and to the education of their children. Marriage makes this possible. Parenting is a long, costly, difficult, and delicate process of ongoing care and supervision that requires a deep and abiding commitment of both parents. Biological mothers and fathers working as a team do this better than anyone. We all benefit—including free-riding unmarried individuals—from those who create, support, and educate children to sustain our civilization. Most people know incompetent and rotten parents, but we have not invented a better way to raise children. The alternatives (e.g., the government raising children) are considerably worse.

The argument for marriage may be summed up with this simple syllogism: Procreation is a necessary precondition for the existence and survival of human life; marriage is fundamental to responsible procreation and parenting; therefore, the existence and wellbeing of a civil society is dependent on marriage. Historically and cross-culturally, marriage is and has been the solution to one of mankind’s most vexing problems. It is therefore good not because it is traditional; it is traditional precisely because it is good. Marriage is good because it is true and serves human life.

This audio recording of “Metaphysical Marriage” is available to all subscribers of The Redneck Intellectual.

Have a great week!

THE GOOD

I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO RECOMMEND THE NEW SUBSTACK JUST LAUNCHED BY MY GOOD FRIEND, ROGER KIMBALL. Roger is one of the best thinkers and writers of our time. Agree or disagree with some of his views, Rogers essays are always top-shelf:

LET’S GO! A researcher may have found a shortcut to Mars as NASA eyes red planet. Here’s what to know about the newly found possible shorter trajectory to Mars, and what it could mean ahead of future missions to Earth’s planetary neighbor.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY CAPITALISM:

IN MY EXPERIENCE, THIS IS TRUE, BUT THERE IS, OF COURSE, A THIRD OPTION THAT PROMISES EVEN GREATER HAPPINESS: Why are conservatives so much happier (and less neurotic) than liberals?

MUST READ. Good essay on a bad topic: Don’t Lose Your Nerve: Free Societies Facing Ideological Violence.

• Related: The Destructive Impulse of Liberalism: Where is ‘progress’ leading? And other questions you should never ask.

• Related: The bougie nihilism that is killing America

BECAUSE MODERN LIBERALISM IS GROUNDED IN HATE AND PERPETUAL HATRED IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNSUSTAINABLE: Why are conservatives so much happier (and less neurotic) than liberals?

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

• ‘Weight loss’ drug helps heart regardless of amount of weight lost.

• ‘Earth-shattering’ discovery reveals why some 80-year-olds have superior memories

• Living tumor-on-a-chip exposes how cancers block immune attacks.

• New research from the University of Auckland’s Liggins Institute suggests that a capsule containing healthy gut bacteria could potentially change the future of obesity treatment.

• New research uncovers how the brain’s activity, energy use, and blood flow change as people fall asleep.

I’M NOT CONVINCED THAT IT’S TIME TO CELEBRATE, BUT WE’RE ON THE RIGHT ROAD: How the left ‘lost’ the DEI wars

• Related: Staffers at UNT, UT-Arlington ‘no longer employed’ after undercover videos detail DEI practices despite ban.

THE HARVEY C. MANSFIELD EDITION. Two new books this year at age 94. Looks to me like his career is about to take off:

• Harvard’s ‘Annoying Socratic Gadfly’ Takes a Victory Lap

• Harvey C. Mansfield’s honorable quest to educate Harvard

YOU CAN’T RESPECT MELEI ENOUGH! When Argentine President Javier Milei met with Pope Leo XIV, he gave him a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s 1988 book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Let’s hope the Pope did his homework.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP:

• Under the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Archeologists Found What Could Be the Tomb of Jesus.

• Archeologist thinks new tech could reveal where the Lost Ark is hidden at last.

• Archaeologists crack ‘Spanish Roanoke’ mystery with haunting find from doomed colony

• Archaeologists Found 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Where They Shouldn’t Be.

• Bronze and Iron Age Settlement Discovery in Georgia Rewrites Ancient History.

LEFT-WING CORRUPTION IS BOTTOMLESS: ‘MASSIVE!’ Feds indict SPLC for using donor money to pay white supremacists to stage ‘hate crimes’

POWER UP: Appalachia Lithium Cache Could Power U.S. for Centuries

THIS IS GOING TO GET INTERESTING:

• Alberta separatists say they have enough signatures to trigger independence referendum

• Oil-rich province could hold vote on leaving Canada as early as October

SCIENCE ROUND UP:

• The Genesis revitalizing U.S. scientific research

• 24,000-year-old zombie worm gets thawed, immediately starts reproducing.

• An Unknown State of Matter Could Be Hiding in Our Solar System.

• Physicists just found a tiny flaw in time itself.

• A tiny world beyond Neptune has an atmosphere that shouldn’t exist.

I DON’T THINK THIS IS QUITE RIGHT, BUT IT’S AN INTERESTING ENCAPSULATION OF A THEORY OF CIVILIZATIONAL DECLINE AND FALL. What do you think? Please leave a comment below.

I SURE HOPE SO: Is America on the Verge of a Nuclear Renaissance?

CLEANING UP THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH: Good gut bacteria may be the secret to longevity — how to get it, including the strain that boosts your natural GLP-1.

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THE BAD

THIS IS NOT A SOMALI THING; IT’S A WELFARE THING: DOJ says it has prosecuted $500 million in healthcare, COVID fraud claims in 3 states

STEP #1: STOP REPRODUCING. Step #2: Make up for Step #1 by inviting your enemies to do just the opposite. Step #3: die slowly: US Birthrate Hits Record Low In 2025

WHAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER, WON’T: Queer advocacy group pauses $500 yoga allowances for immigrants in Boston

ALAS, I STRONGLY SUSPECT THIS IS TRUE: The scourge of left-wing violence isn’t new. It’s only going to get worse.

NO: Can Our Civilization Survive Its Betrayal By Elites?

CHINA WATCH:

• Mayor admits she secretly pushed Chinese propaganda at Beijing’s command: feds

CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERTARIANS NEED TO REDISCOVER THE IMMORALITY OF THE WELFARE STATE: Medicaid Millionaires: How The Feds Pay Immigrants Billions To Hang Out With Their Families

WHAT CAN’T GO ONE FOREVER, WON’T: U.S. deficit projected to hit $2 trillion, double fiscal target.

END THE WELFARE STATE: Ohio gov candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sounds alarm about Medicaid fraud — after 288 companies found registered to same address.

THE UGLY

I’M SPEECHLESS! This is worst piece of news that I’ve seen in years: 600 groups with $2B in revenue mobilize 3,000 May Day protests in a ‘red-blue’ alliance

WHAT DO YOU THINK WOULD BE THE APPROPRIATE RECKONING? There Must Be a Reckoning for Gender Transitioners Who Destroyed the Lives of Thousands of Children.

VERY SAD: I De-transitioned. My Body Will Never Be the Same.

NEXT LEVEL EVIL: Redefined evil’: New report reveals ‘almost unimaginable horrors’ by Hamas during Oct. 7 war against Israel

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

DON’T YOU JUST LOVE AMERICA! Route 163 Through Monument Valley in Arizona. I’ve done this drive. It’s fabulous. Highly recommended.

HAVE A GREAT WEEK!!!

**The audio recording of this essay is at the bottom and is reserved for paid subscribers.

“Married love between man and woman is bigger than oaths, guarded by right of nature.”—Aeschylus, The Furies (458 BC)

Marriage was once a topic of serious contemplation and conversation in the history of moral and political philosophy because it was thought to be the central social institution of civilization. Virtually all the ancient Greek and Roman moralists thought marriage an important topic to think and write about and early modern moral philosophers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau likewise thought it a subject worthy of serious consideration. In fact, most philosophers examined marriage as a topic of serious philosophic investigation up through the end of nineteenth century.

By the twentieth century, however, marriage died an ignominious death as a subject worthy of serious philosophical contemplation, which may help to explain why it has suffered a mortal wound as a lived experience. Once wedding vows were reduced to the ritualized incantation of mere words and the institution of marriage relegated to the world of pop psychology, its standing as a topic of serious philosophic consideration was relegated to an afterthought. Eventually, by the post-WWII era, avant-garde “intellectuals” began to treat marriage as a quaint, non-essential relic of late-bourgeois society, and, at worst, as an authoritarian institution that oppressed women, children, and various sexual minorities.

The time has come to reconsider marriage as a topic of profound importance and consequence. Even though it is the most timeless and universal social institution known to man, its philosophic meaning has suffered from one very real problem: it was assumed that that which is virtually self-evident to all men and women everywhere, through all time, needs no explication or defense. This is the tragic flaw of marriage as a social institution: in a postmodern age that seeks to deconstruct and tear down virtually all moral, social, political, and economic institutions in order to rediscover what Marx called man’s “species-being,” an institution, the meaning of which formerly went without saying, was bound to be deconstructed sooner or later.

Fast forward to today.

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How to Think About Marriage

Ironically, the rise of the same-sex marriage movement in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century has spurred a renewed interest in both the theory and practice of marriage. In fact, a new front in America’s ongoing culture wars was opened around the marriage issue in the decade before the Windsor and Obergefell decisions, pitting the nation’s two dominant sectarian forces—religious conservatives and secular liberals—against one another in pitched battle.

Religious conservatives argue that marriage is commanded and ordered by God (see Genesis 1:27-28, 2:24). This view can be summed up in two words: “God said.” God’s law defines and guides the institution of marriage (e.g., “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder,” Matthew 19:4-6). The Christian ideal says that marriage is fixed and unchanging: it is the monogamous, exclusive, permanent union of a man and a woman whose one-flesh union mirrors in some way the nature of God himself. For traditionalists, the forms and formalities of marriage are intrinsic to God’s will. For proponents of this view, the very idea of same-sex relationships, never mind a same-sex marriage, is an abomination.

Secular liberals, by contrast, argue for a latitudinarian view of marriage, one that decouples marriage from any religious foundation. This “liberationist” or postmodern view of marriage rejects the traditional forms and formalities of marriage as representing an outdated, unenlightened, oppressive view of human flourishing. For secular liberals, marriage is inherently subjectivist in nature. It is grounded in feelings, wishes, and whims. Postmodern marriage is an inherently genderless institution based on the emotional needs of adults as they seek spiritual and sexual autonomy. And it too can be summed up in two words: “I want.” The liberationist view defines marriage simply as the companionship of two or more people based on a strong emotional commitment. Some postmodernists view traditional marriage, at least traditional heterosexual marriage, as something to destroy.

In my view, both sides of the marriage debate—the “God said” versus the “I want” positions—are mistaken. Marriage is neither intrinsic to God’s will, nor is it grounded in the subjective will of men. Both views are fundamentally disconnected from reality.

Methodologically, my approach is not based on religious claims or postmodern ideology, nor does it appeal to authority or whim. The traditional definition of marriage does come closer—much closer—to the truth of what marriage is relative to the postmodern view, but it does so for insufficient if not mistaken reasons. By contrast, my approach examines how and why marriage serves the requirements of human life. By elucidating and contrasting the metaphysical and postmodern views, I hope to transcend the superficial claims that have characterized the marriage debate of the last quarter century. Much hinges on the outcome of this national conversation, and so we must strive to get it right.

My purpose in this essay is to establish an approach to marriage that is objectively and demonstrably true (i.e., based on the requirements of human life), life-enhancing, and consistent with the moral and political principles of a free society. A view of marriage that is true (i.e., objective, certain, absolute, permanent, and universal) must be based on facts and data that have been available for all to see for millennia (i.e., the material of history, cultural artifacts, personal introspection, the observation of human nature, and vicarious experience).

In the essays to follow in this series, I present a rational view of marriage that is grounded in the facts of reality and that can be validated objectively and logically. I call it the metaphysical view of marriage. (I shall examine the metaphysical view of marriage in the next essay.) This secular, fact-based, rational approach begins by examining human nature and it does so by asking one simple question: why marriage?

By keeping this question center stage, we can see how and why a proper view of marriage is grounded in the immutable facts of reality. As a metaphysically grounded institution, marriage fulfills certain requirements of human life, which is why it would exist whether men were religious or not. Marriage is some thing (i.e., a certain kind of relationship) that is real and specific: it has a cause, a nature, a function, and a purpose that are grounded in the objective reality of human nature. Subsequent essays will contrast the metaphysical view of marriage with the postmodern view.

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The Curious Nature of Marriage

Before we go too far down the wedding aisle, it might be helpful to remind ourselves that what is often called “traditional” marriage is a curious, perplexing, and possibly even a bizarre institution.

Think about it this way: most men and women at a relatively young age will (often within a stone’s throw of puberty), amid countless members of the opposite sex from whom to choose, make a public vow to one person that they shall spend the rest of their lives together, loving and caring for each other exclusively. Two very different kinds of beings—the two great halves of humanity—are now united in a monogamous, sexually exclusive, and permanent relationship that is often fraught with mystery, uncertainty, adventure, joy, disappointment, longing, heartbreak, tedium, and peril.

How strange is that? Why limit yourself to just one person at such a young age? Why commit yourself forever? What’s the sense in that? And getting married is the easy part! It is the staying married part that’s hard.

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume actually thought marriage was an inherently “dangerous” enterprise, which is maybe why he never tied the knot. Consider what marriage does. “Nothing,” noted Hume, “is more dangerous than to unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total. The least possibility of a separate interest must be the source of endless quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment, will still be driving some separate end or project; and the husband’s selfishness, being accompanied with more power, may be still more dangerous.” Or, as House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, once put it, “Why would you get married? Why would anybody get married?”

Pelosi’s question is not unreasonable, particularly given the divorce rate in the United States today, which stands at approximately forty-five percent. J. Paul Getty, one of America’s great twentieth-century industrialists and a man who was married five times, captured some of the mystery and irony that is marriage when he said, “I would gladly give all of my millions for just one lasting marital success.” Getty’s lament points to both the enduring desirability and difficulty of marriage, thus raising the question: is marriage rational?

Consider the moral meaning of that precise moment when a marriage is created. The publicly uttered wedding vows of a groom to his bride (reciprocated by the bride to her groom) typically go something like this:

“I, _Name_, take you, _N_, / to be my wife, / to have and to hold / from this day forward; / for better, for worse, / for richer, for poorer, / in sickness and in health, / to love and to cherish, / till death us do part.

With these forty-one words, the lives of two people change radically and forever. The decision of a man and a woman to marry is a life-altering moment in the lives of two different people, a choice that requires a good deal of wisdom about oneself and the other person—a very rare kind of wisdom, indeed.

But the fact that a man and a woman love each other above all others when they are 25 does not guarantee that they can or will love each other when they are 35, 55, or 75. Love is a complex thing. To be in love, which is to receive something, is not the same thing as to love, which is to give something. Marriage is a delicate balance between receiving and giving over a long period of time.

The practical challenge of marriage, however, is that individual men and women change over time; they change physically, psychologically, and emotionally, all of which means their needs and expectations change. Over the course of even just five or ten years, a wife may gain excessive weight and several chins, or a husband may go bald and develop a beer belly. One spouse becomes less attractive to the other or both to each other. With the inevitable physical changes that men and women experience will sometimes come psychological and emotional changes. One spouse may lose self-confidence whilst the other gains in self-confidence, and with those changes one partner becomes more or less interested in sexual relations with their spouse. Physical attraction changes over time. Rarely does it become stronger.

Often the material and spiritual values between married couples change as well, not to mention their moral, social, and political principles. What happens to a married couple where the husband becomes a radical vegan, and the wife becomes a devotee of the so-called “paleo” diet? What happens to a married couple when the husband wants to spend more and more money on cars and vacations and the wife wants to give more and more money to African charities? What happens when couples learn that they don’t share the same moral, social, and political values on topics such as welfare, abortion, drugs, sex, and pronouns? What happens if the wife is a Republican and the husband a Democrat? What if one becomes an atheist and the other is a devout Christian? What if one spouse supports transgenderism and the other doesn’t? And then, of course, there are the micro and macro differences that husbands and wives experience and face every day as they raise children.

If most people can’t know with certainty who or what they will become in the future, how can they expect to know who or what another human being will become 20 years in the future? And even if the particular individuals did not change one iota, the fact remains that relationships can and do change because our knowledge of the other person can never be absolute and because the relationship itself changes the people in it.

The romance and mystery with which marriage typically begins almost always ends in a very different place. At the beginning of marriage, husbands and wives may be described in their relationship to each other as “strangers in a strange land.” New love is a foreign place, and its mystery is exciting and dangerous. With time, however, marriage for many couples becomes familiar, dull, commonplace, and then, for all too many, it ends with crushing boredom and bitter resentment.

The biting sarcasm of H. L. Menken is not too far off the mark in describing the unromantic nature of many marriages. Speaking of husbands and wives in marriage, Mencken captured the enervating inertia of marriage: “By and by all the mystery of the relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister. Thus that ‘maximum of temptation’ of which Shaw speaks has within itself the seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by making Machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words.”

And of course, Mencken no doubt understood that the dismal art of marriage cuts two ways, not just one. I shudder to think what sharp-tongued female wits might say about their husbands. The Machiavellian lengths to which many women will go to avoid intimacy with their husbands is one of the principal causes of divorce. At the end of marriage, husbands and wives may once again be described in their relationship to each other as “strangers in a strange land” but for reasons entirely different than when they began their marriage.

On top of all the changes that define marriage, very few people get married in a vacuum. When a man marries a woman, he will almost always marry into her family. Brides typically come with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters as well as an extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, and vice versa. Most grooms in addition to becoming husbands also become a son-in-law and a brother-in-law. Most people who marry, marry into an extended and complex web of family relations, each with its own history, challenges, and problems. Each one of these relationships has the potential to affect the relationship of husband and wife. Not a few marriages have crashed on the rocky shoals of in-laws.

With time, husbands and wives also typically become mothers and fathers to a child or several children, and then, together, they become seen as parents to the outside world. Babies change everything. What was knowable or predictable in the relationship between husbands and wives now becomes unknowable and unpredictable in their relationship as parents. Children often bring to the surface the sometimes differing values and principles of their parents that were left submerged or hidden before the birth of a child. Parents are required to rear and educate their children on everything from table manners and fashion to friendship and sexual morality. To expect husbands and wives to agree on virtually all the choices and actions they must take on behalf of their children is to expect what never was nor ever will be.

For better or worse, marriage is usually a package deal of multifaceted, multi-layered relationships, and these relationships can change who we are. Change, complexity, and confusion are therefore endemic to marriage. Some marriages get better over time, and some get worse. Tragically, then, many people experience marriage as a form of cruel and unusual punishment and, in the worst cases, as an emotional death sentence. Nietzsche tells us with some apparent truth “There is bitterness in the cup of even the best love.”

That men and women would commit themselves to marriage is therefore quite a remarkable thing. Human beings are fallible and they are not omniscient, and yet they make a decision that will affect them in the most comprehensive and profound ways for the rest of their lives. It turns out that forever—till death us do part—is a really long time. In today’s world, a marriage may last a good fifty, sixty, or even seventy years.

Living with the same person under the same roof day after day for years and then for decades almost always leads to marriages—including the very best—that experience periods of frustration, indifference, disillusionment, anger, pain, and resentment. Most marriages go through trials and tribulations that would wreck most other relationships. Friendships do not end in murder-suicides, for instance, but, tragically, some marriages do. Add children to the mix and the challenges of marriage are compounded in untold ways. It is an inherently fragile institution that has the potential to hurt and wound not only the married couple but also any children it may produce when it all goes wrong. The same is usually not true for friendships. This is why marriage is ultimately about more than just two people, and this is why we all have a vested interest in the nature and meaning of marriage as an institution.

In the light of all this, marriage is simultaneously the most curious—or bizarre—of all human institutions, and yet it is the most important, the most needed, the most beautiful, and possibly even the most natural of all human institutions.

So, let us go forward by asking two basic questions: What is marriage, and why do men and women need it?

Have a great day!

Read more

***You can expect another marriage essay in one week.

DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 133)

K-12 EDITION

BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT YOUR CHILDREN ANYMORE AND EDUCATION ISN’T THE GOAL: Instead Of Reading And Math, Teachers Are Grading Kids On Personality And Emotions

THE MIND CONTROLLERS ARE LOSING THEIR GRIP ON REALITY: Will Johnny ever learn to read? Pushback against science of reading mandates

TITLE CORRECTION: GOVERNMENT SCHOOL TEST SCORES CONTINUE TO DECLINE OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST 50 YEARS: Public School Test Scores Continue To Decline Since Pandemic

ETERNAL VIGILANCE: Reasons to keep an eye on the activists in schools.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES (e.g., bridges falling, planes dropping out of the sky, etc.): Woke Mathematics in Education- Part 1. While the last few years have witnessed growing “fatigue” regarding woke and DEI policies, they are still prominent fixtures in our society, especially (and unfortunately) in our STEM fields.

DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY: THE COLLAPSE IS COMING FASTER THAN YOU THINK, AND IT’S ALL SELF-INFLICTED:

UH-OH: Leaked docs put nation’s largest teachers’ union in hot seat from top watchdog

HIGHER ED EDITION

AN ARRESTING TITLE BUT ON TARGET: Defund The Education Institutions Churning Out Left-Wing Assassins

CAUSE: San Francisco Reinstates 8th-Grade Algebra After ‘Equity’ Experiment Fails. EFFECT: Colleges drop remedial math, students drop math courses.

WHAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER, WON’T: Americans waking up to reality around college.

NOW IS THE TIME TO INVEST IN BLUE BOOKS BECAUSE THE BLUE BOOK EXAM IS BACK: AI Will Destroy Universities

WORST FINANCIAL DECISION OF MY LIFE WAS TO NOT HAVE INVESTED IN THE COMPANIES THAT MAKE BLUE BOOKS: Colleges Bring Back Blue-Book Tests To Fight AI Cheating, But There’s A Hitch

NO! Next Question: Can Universities Be Reformed?

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES: ANALYSIS: ‘Death to America’ chants echo across campuses due to Iranian influence and radical professors.

MORE FREE ADVERTISING FOR HOMESCHOOLING: SICK, EVIL MONSTERS’: Principal who celebrated Charlie Kirk assassination gets busted for child porn, now learns fate

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

BUT NOT MUCH ELSE: Nursing schools finally can cure the DEI disease

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DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 134)

K-12 EDITION

THAT BAD PEOPLE WANT TO HURT OUR CHILDREN IS NOT SURPRISING. What is surprising is that the government schools are ok with it: ‘Gaining steam’: Terror ‘front group’ accused of strong-arming U.S. schools into promoting Islam

THERE WILL BE LAWSUITS—PROMISE: NY School District Secretly Promoted Medical Gender Transitions For 8th Graders

TOTALLY NORMAL: FIRED! Kindergarten teacher terrified kids with his fetish persona as a wolf

GOOD NEWS, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Zero is the number we’re looking for: The Education Department Is Shrinking

WHY IS IT ALMOST ALWAYS FEMALE TEACHERS? Former Teacher Of The Year Finalist Gets 14 Years For Sexually Exploiting A Student

UMM . . . PRETTY SURE THE ANSWER IS THE METHOD BY WHICH CHILDREN ARE TAUGHT HOW NOT TO READ VIA THE “WHOLE WORD” APPROACH TAUGHT IN THE SO-CALLED “ED” SCHOOLS: Why Johnny Can’t Read.

HIGHER ED EDITION

YOU’D THINK A FEW PROFESSORS AT PENN MIGHT DO THAT, BUT NO . . . : Pennsylvania lawmaker calls for mandated course for students on ‘dangers and realities’ of Marxism.

AND THE ARGUMENT IN DEFENSE OF THE PROFESSOR WOULD BE . . . WHAT? Please enlighten us. What do you think? Is College Making People Stupider?

CORNELL IS IN BIG TROUBLE: Biologist accuses Cornell of ‘egregious’ discrimination against white men in lawsuit.

SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD. This has been the goal of the Left for the last 75 years+: Villanova U. Prof Says Academia Should be Used as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for Socialism

ANALYSIS TRUE: Intersectionality is an “intellectual foundation for violence, terrorism, antisemitism, and anti-westernism”

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

IF SOCIALISM ALWAYS FAILS, THEN WHY DOES IT NEVER DIE? Law Schools Are Training Next Generation Of Immigration Activists

*Have a great week.

And if you’re looking for something to read . . .

My newest book (and there is a second volume to go with it) . . .

My best book . . .

My first book . . .

My most controversial book . . .

My most personal book . . .

***This is the first essay in a series on the nature, purposes, meaning, and consequences of marriage. I can think of no topic more important than that of marriage. The series will last as long as I’ve said what I need to say.

I have no doubt that both religious conservatives and secular Progressives will find things to dislike throughout the series. That’s ok. Please feel free to leave comments in support of or against my claims. If you disagree, prove me wrong and make a better argument. I’m open to persuasion.

This first essay is merely introductory, while succeeding essays will drill down more deeply into the marriage question.

The audio recording of this essay is available at the bottom.

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“It is a good thing when a man and woman choose to live together as husband and wife. It is a joy to their friends, a warning to their enemies, but only they know the true meaning of it.”—Homer, The Odyssey

The Western world is experiencing an unprecedented change in how it views the nature and meaning of marriage. Fewer people today are getting married, and almost forty-five percent of those who do end their marriage in divorce. More importantly, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5-4 in its 2013 landmark decision, U.S. v. Windsor, that certain provisions of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act were unconstitutional, thereby opening the door to nationalizing same-sex marriage (SSM), which of course is precisely what happened two years later in the Supreme Court’s Obergefell vs. Hodges decision.

The Court’s 5-4 decision in Obergefell ruled that the 14^th Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses require all states to license marriages between two people of the same sex and to recognize same-sex marriages lawfully performed in other states. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion held that the fundamental right to marry is inherent in individual liberty and applies equally to same-sex couples, as there is no fundamental difference between same-sex and opposite-sex unions with respect to the principles of love and companionship. In a nanosecond, an almost 5,000-year-old, legally-recognized institution was changed radically.

The Windsor and Obergefell decisions represent a major event in the life of the nation not dissimilar to the 1857 Dred Scott decision. (I am not suggesting that these two very different institutions are the same morally.) Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in that infamous case expanded the meaning of property to include slaves, thereby laying the groundwork for the nationalization of slavery. Similarly, Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell expanded the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions, thereby nationalizing same-sex marriage. In both cases, the majority opinions were subject to powerful dissents, which in turn reflected the views of a divided public. All parties to the Windsor and Obergefell cases recognize that the court’s two-pronged decision goes to the heart of our society’s most fundamental values and principles.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court says or what the cultural consensus is at any given moment, serious philosophic questions about monumental questions never go away. And few questions are more important than the question of marriage. In fact, I’m not sure that I can think of a more fundamental and consequential moral question. Consider, for instance, one of the critical functions served by a wedding, which is to encourage those in attendance and witnessing the union to reflect upon the nature, meaning, and beauty of marriage.

Still, as a culture, a nation, and even as a civilization, I do not think that we reflect often or deeply enough about the nature and meaning of marriage. Certainly the older I get and the longer married I am, the more I feel drawn to think about marriage. It took a long time (maybe longer than it should have), but I think I’m only just now beginning to see the monumental importance of marriage not just for my life but for civilization.

How, then, should we view marriage in the twenty-first century? Have we transcended the traditional and outdated understanding of marriage and reached some bold new and higher meaning of marriage?

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The New World of Marriage

For several thousand years of human history, the idea of same-sex marriage had less reality than the idea of unicorns. It was simply beyond the pale of what wise men and women in every culture considered in accord with the nature and purposes of marriage. In the blink of an eye, all that changed. A moral and cultural Tsunami—one that is sweeping aside customary social norms and legal precedents that have existed for millennia—is now washing over America with breathtaking speed.

Both sides of the marriage issue understand that altering the institution of marriage will have profound consequences for the kind of society we live in. This Brave New World will affect the kinds of relationships we have as adults, and it will certainly affect how we understand the nature of the family and the raising of children. To discuss the nature of marriage is therefore to discuss the nature of the family, which in turn is to discuss the nature of society.

To fully appreciate the intellectual, psychological, cultural, and political revolution that has taken place in the last quarter century, let’s consider some basic historical and sociological facts. Up through the late 1990s, only a handful of obscure intellectuals were even talking about same-sex marriage. Even by the early 2000s, the idea of same-sex marriage was incomprehensible for most Americans. As late as 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both publicly opposed same-sex marriage. Today, that view is equated with Jim Crow segregation.

Even more remarkably, this massive cultural upheaval has taken place with virtually no serious public discussion, no serious intellectual engagement, and no serious thought about the profound effects it will have on our individual and cultural self-understanding. How do we account for this enormous sea change in public opinion over the course of the last twenty years or so?

This much is certain: the proponents of same-sex marriage were enormously successful in raising vast sums of money to advance their cause culturally and politically, methodically relentless in their grassroots organization and marketing, tireless in pushing their message through the print and electronic media, Hollywood and the music industry, and utterly ruthless in propagandizing the universities and America’s schools K-12. In short, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an intellectual blitzkrieg, a program of cultural “Shock and Awe” over the course of the last two decades that has left many dazed and confused.

And so, what seemed unthinkable within the memory of most adults is now a legal and cultural fact. Ask a typical college student today if he or she supports same-sex marriage and the answer is an incredulous “well, of course.” It is a complete non-issue for many of today’s young people. It is not a subject about which they must do any heavy mental lifting. The justice of “marriage equality” is a truth self-evident to Millennials and Gen Z requiring no reasoned defense. In fact, to even question the propriety or wisdom of same-sex marriage is now beyond the pale of civil discourse or social decency. Young people feel no real need to think seriously and deeply about the profound effects that redefining marriage will have for our self-understanding, and they seem disinterested in reflecting upon the far-reaching practical implications that same-sex marriage will have for our society.

We now live in a curious world where otherwise relatively uneducated and thoughtless teenagers and twenty-somethings have reached a new stage of post-Hegelian enlightenment, a state of higher consciousness unavailable to their reactionary and unenlightened parents and teachers, who are now thought to be out of step with the times. Publicly announcing one’s opposition to same-sex marriage on an American college campus today is almost akin to announcing that one is a Christian or an atheist on a street corner in Mecca. Observing the disdainful and hectoring attitudes of our young people today reminds one of the child revolutionaries in Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields, who lecture their much wiser elders in reeducation camps on the historical inevitability of The Revolution.

How did America’s young people, who seem to know so little about anything else, come to have such enlightenment? What is the source of this newfound wisdom? It would seem that the long arc of History has already declared as predestined tomorrow’s winner and losers. Who needs Xenophon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, or Locke on marriage when you have “Will and Grace” and the “Modern Family” (aka the TV shows) on your side?

America’s rapidly changing demographics on the marriage question do not, however, tell the whole story. More ominously, American society today is now divided between the enlightened few and the unenlightened many. On one side stands reason, morality, freedom, equality, progress, compassion, decency, and love, and on the other side stands nothing but the forces of superstitious irrationalism, reactionary stupidity, Troglodytish bigotry, and segregationist oppression. To support the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is now seen by many as illiberal, which means bad. It is the Forces of Light set against the Forces of Darkness. This Manichean world is now divided into binary categories of Us and Them, Friends and Enemies, Saints and Sinners, Believers and Infidels, all of which can be reduced to “The Good” and “The Evil.” The unwashed masses that stand for traditional marriage are said to suffer from a new kind of mental illness: homophobia.

Not surprisingly, many conservatives and libertarians have either waved the white flag of surrender, or they have begun calling for a brokered truce on the marriage issue before any real intellectual engagement has taken place. But a truce was never an option for the proponents of same-sex marriage. Nary a shot was fired in the cultural battle over same-sex marriage before the Nervous Nellies of the Right vacated the intellectual battlefield and began their fast retreat. This would suggest that they quickly realized they had been wrong on the marriage issue, that they are intellectual cowards, or compromising pragmatists.

Thus, it was only a matter of time before Ross Douthat, the lone “conservative” columnist at The New York Times and a supporter of traditional marriage, waved the white flag asking in a whimpering op-ed for “The Terms of Our Surrender.” Douthat conceded unconditional defeat on the marriage issue and expressed his hope that the conquering forces would treat him and his friends humanely.

Make no mistake about it: this is a cultural revolution the likes of which has never been seen before.

Still, for the tens of millions of unenlightened Americans stuck in the here-and-now, the question of marriage is a living and not a settled issue. It is not going away anytime soon. In fact, we may very well be witnessing the beginning and not the end of the marriage debate. Thoughtful Americans on both sides of the issue are right to wonder about the true meaning and long-term consequences of redefining marriage politically. The form in which this conversation takes place will be a test of who we are as a nation.

We do well, then, to recall Abraham Lincoln’s prescient words as he contemplated the impending crisis haunting the United States in the late 1850s: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,” he said, “we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” These are wise words for our present discontents. It is imperative that we understand “where we are, and whither we are tending” on the marriage question. Thoughtful Americans will no doubt disagree with one another on this controversial topic, which is why we must demand nothing less than a rational, serious, frank, and high-minded conversation. While it is still permissible to think and talk about the nature and meaning of marriage and family, let us do so in the spirit of genuine philosophic investigation.

To that end, I plan to offer a (longish) series of essays on three general topics: 1) the nature and meaning of marriage; 2) the role played by marriage in society; and, 3) the relationship between marriage and government in a free society. I will publish several essays under each of these broad topics.

The first general area examines two competing theories of marriage: what I call the metaphysical and the postmodern. These essays ask the following questions. What is the origin, purpose, and structure of marriage? Is it grounded in objective reality, or is it an infinitely flexible social construction? If it is grounded in objective reality, what are the facts that give rise to it? If it is a social construction, can its purposes and characteristics be remade at will?

The second general area examines the two best arguments for same-sex marriage: first, that homosexuals deserve the same right to marry as do heterosexuals; and second, that same-sex marriages will not diminish opposite-sex marriages.

The third general area examined in this series investigates the relationship between marriage and government in a free society. More particularly, I shall ask two questions: first, what is the proper role of government in marriage, and second, will laws supporting same-sex marriage expand or contract government and the sphere of freedom in America?

In the end, all of us should examine, philosophically, the nature and meaning of marriage and its relationship to the principles and practices of a free society. We must examine the presuppositions of the metaphysical and postmodern views of marriage and then explore the practical implications and consequences of both views. The manner in which we define marriage will have real consequences for how we think about the structure and wellbeing of families, how we think about the nature and meaning of motherhood and fatherhood, and, most importantly, it will affect how we think about the rearing and education of children. Surely these are topics worthy of the deepest philosophic consideration.

Ultimately, the way we view marriage will profoundly affect how we view the kind of society we are and want to be. In many ways, the marriage question, philosophically understood, cuts to the core of the human condition. To ask what marriage is, or should be, is one of the most important and fundamental human questions. It speaks to who and what we are as humans.

The time has come for Americans to renew their interest in the marriage question. As we go forward, let us pursue the truth about marriage in the spirit of rigorous and honest analysis.

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***Note to readers: I’ve been doing a lot of traveling recently and writing commissioned essays, all of which has slowed down my Substack writing rather significantly in the last couple of months. I do hope to get back into the writing saddle this weekend as Mrs. Redneck is heading out of town to see some of the grandkids. The goal is to start my long promised series of essays on marriage next week. I’m using these essays to try and figure out what marriage is, why it matters, what its consequences are for individuals and society, what its relationship is to the government of a free society, and many other important questions. Some of you will no doubt be upset by some of my arguments. Please feel free to disagree and offer better arguments in the comments section. I should also let you know that I may be putting parts of some essays behind the paywall with the hope that you’ll be motivated to think my work is worthy of support.

THE GOOD

PLEASE WATCH THIS WONDERFUL INTERVIEW WITH MY FORMER TEACHER, WHO ALSO HAPPENS TO BE THE GREATEST SCHOLAR OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

SIMPLY OUTSTANDING! The United States of America needs more Milei and a lot less of everything that we have right now: Davos 2026: Special address by Javier Milei, President of Argentina

SUPREME COURT JUST CLARENCE THOMAS ON PROGRESSIVISM’S ANTI-AMERICANISM:

• Related: Why Is Progressivism Incompatible With the Declaration of Independence? Clarence Thomas Explains

MORE PLEASE: Life Expectancy In US Hits Record High Of 79 Years In 2024, CDC Says

IF THIS FAILS, WE SHOULD JUST STOP PRETENDING AND ESTABLISH A WELFARE STATE FOR THE WHOLE WORLD, WHICH WE’RE PARTIALLY DOING ALREADY: Sen Rand Paul Introduces Bill To Halt Welfare Payments To Non-Citizens

I’M SORRY THIS HAPPENED TO HER, BUT PLEASED THAT SHE WON THIS LAWSUIT. My only disappointment is that she didn’t win a much higher award: Jury Awards Detransitioner $2 Million In Historic Medical-Malpractice Lawsuit:

WE LIKE OLIVE OIL: Extra Virgin Olive Oil Linked to Better Brain Function.

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

• Engineered stem cells yield millions of tumor-fighting natural killer cells at reduced cost.

• Scientists Extend Lifespan by over 70% in Elderly Male Mice with New Treatment.

• Researchers Discover the Cell’s Secret Anti-Aging Mechanism.

• A Common Pain Relief Drug May Have Anti-Cancer Properties.

• Parkinson’s Discovery Suggests We May Have an FDA-Approved Treatment Already.

NICE: Report Finds More Low- And Middle-Income Americans Are Investing

IS MANLINESS TRENDY AGAIN? Not so toxic: Masculinity’s comeback makes America thrive.

GEE, I’M PERSUADED. Communism sounds really cool: The warmth of the collective.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY UPDATE:

• New Dinosaur Species Discovered In Sahara Desert

• Earliest known writing dates back over 40,000 years.

• Humans invented writing to track debts. The world’s first writing system, cuneiform, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC to record who owed what to whom. Clay tokens for accounting date back as far as 8000 BC. Debt isn’t some corruption of a golden age. It’s so fundamental to human cooperation that we created literacy because of it.

• Hidden Crotch Detail Solves a 500-Year-Old Leonardo Da Vinci Mystery.

• A 5,500-Year-Old Skeleton Reveals the Deep Origins of Syphilis.

THE RETURN OF SANITY: As Lawsuits Grow, Transgender Detransition Movement Builds Momentum

INTERESTING QUESTION (AND I DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER TO IT): Courts To Decide Whether Founders Intended To Count Illegal Aliens In Census

YOU DON’T SAY: Anti-DEI medical group debunks study claiming black patients benefit from black doctors.

DOUBLE BONUS: Viagra Linked to Much Lower Risk of Death in Men, But Questions Remain.

IT’S FALSE TO CLAIM THE WELFARE STATE WAS BUILT WITH GOOD INTENTIONS. It was built to satisfy the guilt and envy of upper-middle-class “progressives”: Millions may be falsely enrolled in ObamaCare.

BRAVE OR STUPID? The True Story of a Tornado Scientist Who Got Trapped Inside One.

HOW ‘BOUT MORE, MORE, AND MORE: Trump Ends Obama Climate Regulations and Finalizes Massive Deregulation.

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THE BAD

THUS IT HAS EVER BEEN: Iran’s Greatest Ally Is the Left.

WHAT SAY WE JUST LEAVE THOSE LITTLE BUGGERS WHERE THEY ARE: Scientists Warn: 5,000-Year-Old Ice Cave Bacteria Resistant to Modern Antibiotics.

YES: Was Climate Change the Greatest Financial Scandal in History?

WIND AND SOLAR ENERGY HAS BEEN A DISASTER FOR THE WEST. We need more nuclear and a lot more real fast.

WELFARE STATE UPDATE:

• States spent welfare cash in ‘crazy ways’

• California Has Lost $180 Billion To Fraud, According To Experts

HEY REPUBLICANS: NOTHING TO SEE HERE . . . MOVE ALONG: It’s True: Gavin Newsom’s California Government Has Paid Protestors Over $100 Million.

SOCIALISM NEVER WORKS, NOT TO MENTION THAT IT’S IMMORAL: Nordic Countries Are Not Socialist Paradises: Most of the descendants of Scandinavian immigrants to America in the 19th century are more successful than their cousins in Scandinavia, which suggests that the latters’ welfare policies have impeded the growth of economy.

OH CANADA:

• Canada Considering Door-To-Door Gun Confiscation Program

• Canada’s Suicide Culture Is Devolving Into an Assisted Suicide Death Machine.

• Woman waits over 12 hours in emergency room amid Canada healthcare crisis

AND YOUR FIRST CLUE WAS . . . : Pathological narcissists have taken over the political left.

AT WHAT POINT DO WE SAY “ENOUGH”? Is ‘White Supremacy’ Causing an ‘Epidemic’ of Transgender Murders?

FEMINISM IS DEAD: Outraged by grooming gangs? You’re an extremist.

(NOT) GREAT BRITAIN WATCH:

• The Humiliation of Great Britain Is Complete

CHINA WATCH:

• Xi Jinping Carries Out Record-Breaking Punishments In CCP Amid General Purge

• China Is Starting to Pull Ahead of US in AI Race.

GEE, I WONDER HOW THAT HAPPENED? Americans believe in founding principles, but not sure we’re living up to them

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THE UGLY

DECLINE AND FALL:

NO KIDDING, SHERLOCK: Finnish Study Links Transgender Procedures to Decline in Youth Mental Health

THE TRANS-LEFT HAS ALL THE MONEY: THE HIGHER ED DEEP STATE: How the Mellon Foundation Funds Trans Ideology

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

THE PAIN OF IMPENDING LOSS CAPTURED IN MUSIC. I find this hauntingly beautiful piece of music by Tristan Barton, an Australian composer, deeply moving. It makes me think of the moment when a man wakes up in the early morning on the day he knows he will die. The opening evokes a sense of confusion that quickly turns into the painful realization that brings a dying man into full consciousness and the knowledge that that today is the last day.

***Enjoy the rest of your week!

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DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 131)

K-12 EDITION

FEMALE TEACHERS IN THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS HAVING SEX WITH THEIR STUDENTS IS MORE THAN A TREND; IT’S AN EPIDEMIC: High school teacher arrested after alleged sex with student living under her roof

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING? School secretary, 31, accused of having sex with two students after husband catches her with one of them.

HE LOOKS LIKE A JUNIOR LEAGUE DOPE DEALER: California middle school assistant principal nabbed in child sex sting.

BEST TO HOMESCHOOL OR LEAVE CALIFORNIA: ‘Epidemic of Sexual Abuse’ in California Schools, Attorney Claims.

SERIOUSLY, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? NY Teacher Suspended After Helping Students Form Turning Point Club

PRETTY SURE THE ANSWER IS THE METHOD BY WHICH CHILDREN ARE TAUGHT HOW NOT TO READ VIA THE SO-CALLED “WHOLE WORD” APPROACH: Why Johnny Can’t Read.

AND THE MONEY IS SPENT ON WHAT? Time to end the taxpayer part: Taxpayer-Funded Teacher Unions Receive $390 Million In Dues

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT FOR YOUR CHILDREN? ‘Mommy, I’m scared he’s going to come eat me!’ Trans teacher demands kids take part in his wolf-like fantasies

HIGHER ED EDITION

SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD. This has been the goal of the Left for the last 75+ years: Villanova U. Prof Says Academia Should be Used as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for Socialism

TEXAS IS THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE: Texas State University lets socialist club run amok, but cracks down on conservatives.

I’M SHOCKED! I didn’t think it would be that high! Only 1.7% Of Stanford Faculty Donations Go To Republicans In Midterms

ANALYSIS TRUE: Intersectionality is an “intellectual foundation for violence, terrorism, antisemitism, and anti-westernism”

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: Cold Civil War: Many College Students No Longer See the Rule of Law as a Restraint.

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME: College promotes men’s cuddling group to ‘redefine masculinity.’

AMERICA’S UNIVERSITIES ARE MOVING TOWARD BECOMING ALL-WOMEN’S COLLEGES. Why should young men go to college only to be told that they’re the cause of the world’s problems? Better to become a plumber. There will, however, be long-term unintended consequences, and the women going to college may not like those consequences:

• What’s Missing on Campus? Men.

• The Missing Men of UNC

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DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 132)

K-12 EDITION

HOMESCHOOL: Calif. Teacher Of The Year Finalist Busted For Trying To Buy Sex From 13YO Boy

THE REVOLUTION IS HERE: Government school teachers are homeschooling their own children. See the X video here.

THE ABILITY TO WRITE IN CURSIVE—FOR BLUE BOOK EXAMS—WILL BECOME MORE IMPORTANT GOING FORWARD BECAUSE AI HAS MADE ESSAY WRITING SERIOUSLY PROBLEMATIC: The Case for Cursive

LET THE GRAMMAR WARS BEGIN: THE ENDLESS WAR ON GRAMMAR

NO OPTION NOW BUT TO HOMESCHOOL: Judge rules father cannot opt son out of kindergarten lessons on gender stereotypes

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN FROM SEXUAL EXPLOITERS: TIME TO HOMESCHOOL: Assistant principal among 11 arrested in child exploitation task force operation, police say

FIGHT THE POWER: Wisconsin Parents, Students Rail Against Allowing Boys In Girls’ Bathrooms

HIGHER ED EDITION

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES: Academia should burn.

YES, THERE WAS A TIME BEFORE HARARD BECAME A CLOWN SHOW, BUT THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO (E.G., IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY): Harvard ‘ecofascism’ professor also taught course on ‘aquatic, atmospheric life of Blackness.’

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS. You know you’re winning when you can capture Utah: Marxist ideologies found in University of Utah’s economics department.

FOR THE 200^TH TIME: HARVARD IS A CLOWN SHOW: Harvard Students Earn Course Credit Helping Asylum Seekers

GOOD IDEA: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are

YUP. Believe it: Penn State Forces Faculty To Become DEI Zealots To Get Promoted, Lawsuit Claims

OF COURSE THEY DO: Chinese Academics Who Attended Chinese Military-Run Schools Work At US Colleges

THERE SEEMS TO BE A LOT OF DISCRIMINATION GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY THESE DAY: Five Racially Discriminatory Programs at UC Berkeley Challenged by Equal Protection Project

THAT WOULD BE THE QUESTION: What Are Foreign Governments Buying by Sending $5.2 Billion to Ivy League Schools in Gifts and Contracts?

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS CONTINUES UNABATED: How a Leading Academic Journal Was Captured by Left-Wing Radicals

THIS WILL NOT END WELL: Professors say Gen Z students can’t read, forcing colleges to lower academic standards.

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Have a great week!

***Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Substack to present this poem with either no space between the lines of each couplet or indented second lines. Hence the forward / slash to mark line breaks.

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Step forward, my son. / Step forward when all around you turn and run.

Step forward when the storm draws too near; / Step forward to defend those most dear.

Step forward when the water is deep and cold; / Step forward to defend the weak and old.

Step forward when the sun wilts the weak; / Step forward to defend the mild and meek.

Step forward when the siren makes its sound; / Step forward to defend this sacred ground.

Step forward when the mighty lose your trust; / Step forward to defend what’s just.

Step forward when you’re misunderstood; / Step forward to defend what’s good.

Step forward when there is no one but you; / Step forward to defend what’s true.

Step forward when too many wear the face of fear; / Step forward to defend those you most revere.

Step forward when death’s shadow casts its pall; / Step forward though you might falter and fall.

Step forward when you feel most unloved; / Step forward to defend your best beloved.

Step forward to your hill and make your stand; / Step forward to defend the fort unmanned.

Step forward despite life’s common sorrows; / Step forward to defend the humble heroes.

Step forward through life’s petty wars; / Step forward, my son, and honor is yours.

Step forward, my son. Step forward.

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I would be grateful if you shared this poem with family and friends.

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THE GOOD

A YOUNG HERO: What One Australian Teen Did to Save His Family Is Superhuman.

HENRY KNOX: The Most Unlikely Hero of the American Revolution.

EXCELLENT NEWS: US Economic Freedom Posts Biggest Annual Gain In 25 Years

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

• This Vitamin B3 Supplement Could Cut Your Skin Cancer Risk by up to 54%.

• Most aspirin use in middle-aged adults m…

Read more

DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 129)

K-12 EDITION

#JustWalkAway: Seattle Public Schools Roll Out Gender Book Kit Lessons For Kindergartners

SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? ‘Horrified’: Lawsuit accuses public school district of pushing young students to explicit porn

ARE WE REACHING PEAK INSANITY? Non-Binary Teacher Cites Personal Safety Concerns to Avoid Dir…

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My last essay “Thoughts on History” presented a few preliminary thoughts on the philosophy of history, particularly with regard to what I call the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of history. Today’s essay applies those general ideas to the development a new approach to history that I call “the new moral history,” which I first introduced in America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It.

I first began to think about and develop the idea of “moral history” in the summer of 2016 when I was just starting to write a book on the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. The revolution is, of course, the most written about subject in American history, and I began with this question: is there anything original left to say about the American Revolution and its causes and meaning? To be clear, I was not interested in writing a book on a tiny, fractional part of the Revolution. My hope, certainly my ambition, was to write something original and capacious that would open new avenues to the Revolution’s deepest causes.

As I was beginning to sketch such a history, I came upon some letters and other writings by John Adams and Thomas Paine that opened a new way of viewing the Revolution and its causes, and which led me to the conclusion that “yes,” something new and original could be said about the Revolution. Here’s what I found.

During his retirement years, John Adams thought a good deal about the meaning of the American Revolution. In a fascinating letter written to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, he asked a simple question: “What do we mean by the Revolution?” Surely not the war, he answered rhetorically. “That was no part of the Revolution,” he declared. The war, he said, “was only an Effect and Consequence” of the Revolution. The true Revolution, he continued, “was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected . . . in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” A few years later, Adams suggested again that the “real American Revolution” was represented by a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” of the American people. The former president was suggesting that the root cause of the American Revolution was to be found in a radical change in the colonists’ moral reasoning and political principles. Adams’s comments raise important questions: how and why was the American mind revolutionized in the years before 1776, and, more particularly, what new moral ideas defined America’s emerging revolutionary consciousness? Adams considered these questions “surely interesting to humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to posterity.”

Like Adams, Thomas Paine also understood that a revolutionary transformation had taken place in the American consciousness in the years leading up to 1776. As Paine put it so strikingly in Common Sense, “a new æra for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen.” He described this “new method of thinking” in an extraordinary letter to the French philosophe, the Abbé Raynal. Paine told the French cleric that the American “style and manner of thinking ha[d] undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country.” The Americans now see, he explained, “with other eyes; [they] hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those [they] formerly used.” This revolution of the mind transformed the colonists into “another people.” Paine identified the precise meaning of that revolution when he wrote in Rights of Man: “the Independence of America” was “accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments.” The Americans had done something, he continued, that no other people in history had ever achieved: they founded their new governments “on a moral theory . . . on the indefeasible, hereditary rights of man.” The discovery, development, and adoption of that “moral theory” by the American people in the years before 1776 is the embodiment of the “real” revolution described by Adams.

But what exactly was this “new method of thinking” and the new “moral theory” associated with the American Revolution? How and why did colonial Americans develop a “moral theory” about the “indefeasible, hereditary rights of man”? And what role did this moral theory play in the coming of the Revolutionaries’ revolution? Specifically, I began to think about how ideas affect motives and events. This was my “ah-ha” moment when I realized that these questions opened new historical vistas from which to view the American Revolution. What follows is a prolegomenon to the core tenets of the new moral history.

Broadly speaking, the new moral history is concerned with the nature of causation and agency in the course of human events. It attempts to explain behavior in given historical contexts by showing the connection between principles and practice in the day-to-day actions and interactions of men and women in a social context. This approach is not simply a history of the development of certain moral theories, although it can be that in part. Its primary goal is to examine the intersection between moral thought and moral action, between what people say and what they do (or don’t do). The new moral history studies the what, why, and how of moral reasoning, and then it looks for the connections with the what, why, and how of moral action. It studies the modes of reasoning and ideas used by individual men and women as they evaluated, judged, and dealt with their social reality, and it examines the alternatives confronted by individuals and groups of individuals as they made decisions about what to do or how to act. It emphasizes thinking, judging, choosing, and acting individuals over large-scale social processes moved by unseen forces.

The new moral history begins with certain assumptions about human nature: first, that individuals are the primary unit of moral value; second, that human nature is knowable and sometimes predictable; third, that man’s faculty of reason can know cause-and-effect relationships in nature and human nature; fourth, that individuals are confronted every day with choices, and that they have the free will to choose between alternatives; fifth, that freely thinking (rationally and irrationally) and freely acting (morally and immorally) individuals are capable of making decisions and acting on them; sixth, that purposive human agents cause events to happen; and finally, that human thought and action can have intended and unintended consequences. This view of human nature suggests that individuals are morally responsible for their decisions and actions and the consequences that follow therefrom. Thus, the new moral history puts the thinking back into ideas, the judgment back into intentions, and the volition back into actions.

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The new moral history has the benefit of being compatible with how eighteenth-century Americans saw the nature of reality, truth, causality, human nature, and the processes of historical change. All American Revolutionaries believed that there are moral and political truths—truths absolute, certain, universal, permanent, and immutable—that can be known by reason and acted upon. Such was the purpose of the Declaration of Independence—to declare certain self-evident truths thought to be accessible to all men everywhere. Likewise, in Federalist No. 31, Alexander Hamilton appealed to “certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.” Hamilton and his fellow Americans assumed that human reason was fallible, but they also assumed that the discovery of truth about the most important matters was possible and that by grounding their principles on axiomatic truths, they could “command the assent” of the minds of their fellow Americans. These truths, they believed, could not only be assented to by other Americans, but they believed they could be understood by all men everywhere because they thought these truths transcended their immediate historical situation. The Revolutionary generation viewed these truths as objectively true and not simply as historically conditioned. It is not possible to understand the moral and political thought of America’s Revolutionary generation without knowing and respecting this fact.

Eighteenth-century Americans also assumed that society is made up of autonomous moral agents who define the course of events. Understanding men’s moral principles, their modes of reasoning, their motives, their options, their choices, and their actions was the key to understanding the role of causation in human action and history. They believed that motives explain actions, that moral principles explain motives, and that moral reasoning explains moral principles. And if events are the direct consequence of individual (and group) principles, decisions, intentions, and actions, then it is imperative for historians to study the moral principles, choices, and behaviors of individuals, which, if shared by many or most of the individuals in a society, shapes the general character of a society. In this way, then, a culture with its unique manners and mores reflects the moral character of individuals writ large, which means that historians should be able discern patterns of moral belief and action that may reveal the existence of a common moral culture. Hence the history of human events is, for better or worse, the history of men and women acting according to a conception of what they think is good, right, just, and true.

The new moral history is about discovering the causes of social events in the ideas, motives, and actions of moral agents acting as individuals or as groups. This is precisely how Thomas Dawes, a colonel in the Massachusetts militia, studied and presented the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. In a 1787 Fourth of July oration celebrating American independence, Dawes informed his audience that they were convened “to consider the feelings, manners and principles which led to our Independence—the effects which have flowed, and the consequences that will probably follow, from that great event.” Dawes was, in effect, pursuing the research project described years later by John Adams, which called for examining how and why the American Revolution represented a radical transformation in the “Minds of the People.” For Adams, the war for independence was a consequence of the “radical change” that occurred “in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people” in the decade before independence. Dawes saw the Revolution in the same way. He insisted to his audience that when “contemplating the principles which originated” or caused the war and the Revolution, they must “not confound them with the occasions that only ripened, our Independence.” For Dawes, moral principles inspire actions, which in turn create events. The primary moral principle that motivated colonial Americans to act and therefore caused the Revolution, according to Dawes, was their recognition of and dedication to the principle that their “liberties are founded on the broad basis of everlasting justice.” Their reaction to the Stamp Act, he argued, was grounded in moral principle, moral judgment, and moral action. The colonists were dedicated to a certain conception of justice, which inspired them to act when they saw it being violated by British imperial officials. To understand why American Revolutionaries acted in the ways they did, we must begin by understanding their conception of justice and what it meant to them.

This common view of the underlying cause of the American Revolution rested upon an even deeper view of human nature and moral agency. According to the Bostonian John Perkins writing in 1771, men have “absolute liberty,” which means “a person has been supposed capable of determining differently, all circumstances remaining the same.” By “[m]oral freedom,” Perkins “meant a power of determining according to apprehended good and evil; opposed to a state of moral necessity, either natural, or induced by long custom, habit, passion, or some special depravity.” Moral historians take seriously the principle that “[a]ll appearances evidence that man was form’d for self-direction; since by his intellectual judgment; disengage himself from prejudices; foresee events, and conduct accordingly.” The following year, Stephen West bolstered Perkin’s view of moral action by affirming the cause-and-effect relationship between moral judgment and moral action: “If every moral event hath an answerable cause on which it is dependent for its existence; then all moral events come into existence under the influence of their several causes—an influence which is previous to the event and extrinsic of it, and with which the event is certainly connected.” These assumptions lay behind the revolution in American moral thought and action during the second half of the eighteenth century, and they provide a window through which we can see the deepest causes of the Revolution.

How and why, then, shall historians go about discovering the objective reality and meaning of past thought and action?

Historical objectivity refers to a relationship between a subject and an object. It occurs when a subject (the historian) interacts with and accurately re-presents past thoughts, actions, or events (the object). The most difficult part of this process is to uncover the reasons behind past actions. The act of doing history always begins in the present. It starts with a historian who wants to know something about some person(s), idea(s), action(s), or event(s) in the past. The historians’ craft is an act of recovery and reenactment. It seeks, first, to recover the objective truth about the what, when, how, and why of past thought and action, and then it reenacts that recovered knowledge in the form of a narrative story. This task presupposes that scholars be motivated by more than an antiquarian interest in a particular historical subject; they must be inspired by a sincere if not a passionate sense of curiosity and a desire to know the truth about past thoughts and actions as well as their possible relevance for the present.

History’s secrets can be revealed when historians ask probing questions of past thinkers and actors in order to reproduce their thoughts, motives, and actions. Scholars must first determine which questions were uppermost in the minds of their subjects and why their subjects were compelled to ask and answer them in the way they did. At a deeper level, the moral historian will ask: What did person X who wrote, said, or did Y mean by it? In other words, why did the subject under investigation write, say, or do some particular thing?

To answer these questions, the historians’ craft requires, as we have said, epistemological modesty: it seeks to understand the thought and action of past thinkers and actors in the context of their own self-understanding. It should not superimpose on past thought and action present-day epistemological assumptions about how ideas work, which means it should not assume that the thought of the present is superior to that of the past. In fact, true historical sensitivity and objectivity means beginning with a kind of naïve wonder, which means opening oneself up to the possibility that we might actually have something to learn from past thought, and, even more shockingly, that past thought could even be superior to that of the present.

The new moral history recognizes that authors past, present, and future are responsible for the thoughts they think and the words they write. It seeks to understand particular events by examining the ends and means available to and chosen (or rejected) by historical actors in a given place and time. This requires of historians that they attempt to enter the minds of past thinkers and actors, to the best of their ability, in order to see the world as their subjects saw it, to see the problems, questions, challenges, alternatives, and choices that motivated them to think and act as they did. This means attempting to view a past world from the inside out, that is, from the perspective of the particular thinker or actor. Intellectual historians must attempt to see the world through the author’s eyes, to hear with his or her ears, and to think with and through the author’s mind. We must follow, study, and contemplate the logic and argument of a text or speech. We must attempt to understand to the best of our ability what James Otis, Daniel Dulany, Richard Bland, John Dickinson, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and scores of others from the Revolutionary generation thought and said. Only by first understanding what they thought or said can we know why past actors thought, spoke, or acted as they did.

By this method, we can achieve or come close to achieving historical objectivity, which is knowledge of what, when, how, and most importantly, why past events happened. Answering the “why” question is the great challenge of American Revolutionary historians, but to address it in a meaningful way we must confront the problem of intention and motivation directly, which is the lynchpin between theory and practice. We must seek to recover the intentions of those historical actors who participated in the train of events before and after 1776. This takes us into the world of moral reasoning, ideas, principles, motivations, intentions, and actions. But how can we know why certain individuals acted as they did? To answer this question, scholars must go in search of historical evidence to recreate a scene or moment of human action (which includes thinking). Such evidence includes written documents, which typically means treatises, essays, pamphlets, sermons, speeches, diaries, letters, petitions, remonstrances etc. from the period or individuals under examination. Historians must then read and attempt to understand the content, argument, and purposes of these texts as the author or speaker understood them. Documents must be read carefully and reread. To discover the motives of people who lived hundreds of years ago requires tireless research, reading, reconstruction, and thinking.

The new moral history recognizes that “ideas have consequences” and oftentimes intended consequences, but it must also be capacious enough in its methodological scope to recognize the complex interactions of human thought and action from multiple angles or perspectives. The most advanced and sophisticated form of moral history recognizes that ideas inspire actions and actions create events, and events in turn inspire new ideas and actions that may be different from those that inspired them in the first instance. In other words, the realm of ideas evolves and interacts with the realm of action in a dialectical relationship and where the outcomes can be different than those originally intended. Human interaction is complex and therefore history is not simply linear; it is not always an issue of individuals making choices and acting on them. Thus the new moral history takes seriously the role of contingency in human affairs. It recognizes that decisions and actions could have turned out other than they did; that certain ideas, choices, decisions, and actions carried out in different contexts can have very different results; that good ideas and good intentions can sometimes have deleterious consequences different from those intended. When ideas (true or false, good or bad) are translated into action, they can have intended and unintended consequences, some of which are short term and some long term.

Thus, the new moral history must capture the conflict of visions, choices, and actions that exists between individuals and within societies. The simple fact is all individuals must make choices between alternatives all the time, and sometimes those choices come into conflict with one another. In the context of the American Revolution, there was conflict between Great Britain and her American colonies, between American Patriots and Loyalists, between more radical and more conservative Patriots, and then between even the most radical revolutionaries. And not only was there conflict between individuals or groups of individuals, but there was also conflict (and sometimes paralysis) within the minds of each individual person as they confronted difficult choices on innumerable issues. One can see these kinds of internal tensions in the thought of reluctant Revolutionaries, such as a James Otis and John Dickinson. To grasp the wholeness of the Revolution, to understand its full depth and breadth, requires an examination of the arguments, choices, and actions of a wide spectrum of contending views. At the very least, one should assume that the principles, choices, and actions of the Loyalists and George III were just as real and just as sincere as those of the Patriots. This is why a moral history of the American Revolution from the Loyalist perspective is needed just as much as one from the Patriot perspective. Both sides must be understood if we are to fully understand the nature and meaning of the Revolution.

The new moral history therefore recognizes and brings to life the drama and sometimes the comedy and tragedy of the human condition. It acknowledges that individuals make decisions in the face of doubt and errors of knowledge. It recognizes and takes into account ambiguity, contradiction, accidents, and anomalies. There is almost always some uncertainty in human affairs because individuals have incomplete knowledge or information. The Revolutionary generation knew this fact about human nature. In the 37^th essay of The Federalist, James Madison noted that the incompleteness and uncertainty of human knowledge is grounded in three deficiencies associated with human cognition: first, the “indistinctness of the object” under examination; second, the “imperfection of the organ of conception”; and, third, the “inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas.” A veil of obscurity between subject and object makes certain knowledge difficult, and the transference of that knowledge from one person to another only compounds the problem. Madison informs his audience that developing political concepts that are true (i.e., that reflect reality as it is) and then accurately conveying and receiving those concepts from one person to another is one of the great challenges of the human condition. The discovery and transmission of moral and political truth is inherently fraught with error given man’s nature. Madison thought this fact of the human condition was the greatest source of conflict between individuals and groups of individuals. Historians face the very same problem described by Madison: the eighteenth-century objects they study are indistinct, the historians’ organ of conception is fallible, and the vehicle by which historians transmit their historical recreations is imperfect. This is why the historians’ craft calls for epistemological modesty.

The new moral history also recognizes that different individuals work on different levels of consciousness. Not all thinkers or ideas are equal. Some individuals operate at the highest level of conscious awareness, some are middling thinkers, and some follow their unconscious passions, opinions, and interests. Some ideas are innovative, brilliant and influential, while some are banal, quickly forgotten, or never even noticed. Thomas Paine, America’s best-known democratic theorist, knew that there was a hierarchy of wisdom and influence when it came to explaining the causes of the American Revolution. He knew that not all Americans could make the sophisticated and nuanced arguments of James Otis, John Adams, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton. In his Letter to the Abbé Raynal in 1782, Paine noted that in response to the Stamp Act every American “had a right to give his opinion; and there were many, who with the best intentions, did not choose the best, nor indeed the true ground, to defending their cause.” Ordinary men “felt themselves right by a general impulse, without being able to separate, analyze, and arrange the parts.” The truth is—a truth confirmed by daily experience—that a few individuals live by a self-generated, consciously chosen, and rational process of thought, while most others absorb subconsciously the dominant ideas of their culture.

The new moral history likewise acknowledges that there is a hierarchy of influence in society. The ideas and actions of some individuals have the power to motivate and influence hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals in ways that the ideas and actions of others do not. Moreover, some thinkers and writers are original and ahead of their time, while others are distinguished for summing up the dominant ideas of their time. The hierarchy of influence is also connected to actions as well. Some individuals are leaders, and some are followers. Some have skills and abilities that others do not. The fact is that some individuals did more to bring about the Revolution or to bring it to a successful conclusion than others. For instance, the fiery speeches of Patrick Henry, the organizing skills of Samuel Adams, the moral leadership of George Washington, the constitutional arguments of John Adams, the rhetorical brilliance of Thomas Paine, the financial acumen of Robert Morris, the tactical genius of General Nathanael Greene, and the literary style of Thomas Jefferson commanded a greater degree of respect and influence than did the abilities of others.

Finally, the new moral history recognizes that some ideas are true and some are false, some are wise and some are foolish, and some are good and some are bad, which means they can and should be judged by the historian. It is a historical truism that past thinkers and actors almost always viewed their own ideas as right and therefore true and those of their opponents as wrong and therefore false. The Loyalists thought they were right and the Patriots wrong, just as the Anti-Federalists thought they were right and the Federalists wrong. It seems fitting, then, for historians to test, evaluate, and judge how past actors understood the truth of their ideas and actions. The most interesting kind of history recaptures first the intellectual and then the political and social clash of two or more contending opinions about the most important questions. This means that historians must be open to the possibility that one or the other position in any past dispute was right and therefore true and the other wrong and therefore untrue, or that both positions could be wrong. The historian must also confront, observe, evaluate, and judge actions relative to the ideas that inform the behavior of past actors. If military historians can judge (and they do) some strategic or tactical decisions to be “brilliant” or “disastrous,” then it seems reasonable that intellectual historians should be able to judge moral or political ideas to be true or false, good or bad, just or unjust. The new moral history must not be a value-free social science, but, to be clear, neither should it engage in vulgar moralism or moral self-righteousness. The historian’s first responsibility is to recreate the past as it happened. Then and only then, can he or she render judgment on past thought and action. Scholars of the American Revolution should be neither scientists nor preachers. Their moral evaluation of past thought and action should be fair and balanced and conducted with great care and caution.

Consider the battle of ideas between American Revolutionaries and British imperial officials. At its core, this debate was not primarily about taxes or representation; it was about the nature of justice and right. American Revolutionaries acted on the assumption that their principles of justice and right were true (objectively, absolutely, and self-evidently true), whereas the British viewed their principles of justice and right as historically true relative to time and place. At the deepest philosophical level, the great point of contention between these two sides concerned the nature of truth itself. On some level, these competing viewpoints can and should be evaluated and judged by historians. This does not mean, however, that historians can or should be partisans for one side or another, nor does it mean that historians should anachronistically judge the past as the means by which to judge the present. The fact is that elements of truth and falsity, good and evil, justice and injustice can exist on two sides in a debate or war, particularly if it is a fratricidal debate or war. In examining the debates between American Whigs and British imperial officials or American Patriots and Loyalists or Federalists and Anti-Federalists, it is entirely proper for historians to assess and judge the power, depth, originality, influence, and, ultimately, the truthfulness of an argument. It is entirely appropriate for historians to analyze past ideas, principles, intentions, motives, and actions, and then judge them as true or false, good or bad, always recognizing that the historical loser of a political contest might very well have had the truer argument. The new moral history welcomes studies that examine and evaluate—even positively—Loyalist political thought and action or the decisions of George III. The standards by which historians judge ideas and actions as true or false, good or bad, just or unjust should be stated openly and clearly. Their standard of judgment should likewise be open to evaluation and criticism.

In the end, the new moral history has the added advantage of providing a life-enhancing incentive to those who study history. History matters precisely because ideas matter. We study past thought and action to learn from it, to be guided by it, and to provide models of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Thus, the study of history is primarily a humanistic and not a scientific enterprise, one that can be, and in many ways should be, restored as a branch of philosophy. Indeed, the pursuit of historical truth is a form of philosophical inquiry. As John Adams learned from Bolingbroke and Bolingbroke from Dionysius Halicarnassus and Dionysius from Thucydides, history rightly understood is “philosophy teaching by examples.” History is philosophy’s handmaiden, or maybe it’s the other way ‘round! The value-free approach to history advocated by most historians has very little to teach us in the present other than as a quaint, antiquarian curiosity. The new moral history, by contrast, can help us to recover our past to better serve our present and future.

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**A reminder to readers: please know that I do not use footnotes or citations in my Substack essays. I do, however, attempt to identify the author of all quotations. All of the quotations and general references that I use are fully documented in my personal drafts, which will be made public on demand or when I publish these essays in book form.

***ANNOUNCEMENT: I have been traveling a lot lately (just spent nine days in Texas) and will be on the road again several times over the course of the next couple of months. I’ll do my best to keep up the pace of one post per week, but I can’t promise.

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THE GOOD

THE CAUSES OF WEALTH CREATION: Understanding the Great Enrichment: how mass prosperity replaced mass poverty. Britain became the first country to do learning-by-experiment at scale.

IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE TODAY, PLEASE WATCH THIS SHORT VIDEO FROM X. It’s a reminder of all that’s good and beautiful in life:

SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT SOMETHING BAD & UGLY: Socialism is a hate crime.

ALL CRIME IS DOWN (THAT’S GOOD) EXCEPT WELFARE FRAUD, WHICH IS UP—WAY UP (THAT’S BAD)! What is the cause of all this? (The cause of welfare fraud is the existence of the welfare State. That it would lead to fraud is a basically a law of nature.)

PRETTY SURE MOST ATHLETES HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR A LONG TIME: Pre-exercise sexual activity does not harm strength or endurance in male athletes, finds new study.

LET’S CELEBRATE TRUE HEROES: Marine Corps legend ‘Ripley at the Bridge’ is finally getting the Medal of Honor: John Ripley vs. 20,000 communists. Who you got?

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

• High-dose Vitamin D reduces MS activity, study finds.

• Poor sleep may accelerate brain aging.

• Scientists Identified Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation.

• Breakthrough Blood Test Detects Head and Neck Cancer up to 10 Years Before Symptoms.

• Fragments of Bacteria in Our Gut May Lull Our Brains to Sleep at Night.

THIS IS VERY GOOD NEWS, INDEED! The number of federal government employees is now at its lowest level in 50+ years. Next, let’s go for the lowest level in 100 years!

SCIENCE ROUND UP

• Fueling research in nuclear thermal propulsion.

• Maybe the Shortest Path to Mars Requires a 240,000-Mile Detour.

HEROES DON’T ALWAYS WEAR CAPES: ‘I have to keep on going’: 13-year-old swims in rough sea for 4 hours to find help for family

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP

• Archaeologists find a supersized medieval shipwreck in Denmark.

• Ancient Jesus-era footprints discovered on Scotland beach, triggering remarkable race

MORE NUCLEAR IS GOOD: The future of American nuclear energy just touched down in Utah.

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THE BAD

IT’S WHAT THEY DO: The Communism Isn’t Working, So Let’s Communism Harder.

THIS IS MARXISM APPLIED TO THE ENVIRONMENT: The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal.

OUR COMING SOCIALISM: “The Warmth of Collectivism” v. Capitalism.

“OBSTA PRINCIPIIS”—“RESIST FIRST BEGINNINGS”: 7 left-wing groups to watch in 2026

WELFARE STATE WATCH:

• From Minneapolis to “Somaliapolis”: How Incentives Reshaped a City. A Case Study in Welfare, Incentives, and Parallel Society.

• ‘Midtermunition’: Mamdani Is Already Trashing New York to Third-World Status.

• New SNAP Work Requirements, Included In Trump Megabill, Now In Effect

• Sen. James Lankford Goes For Jugular Of $100 Billion In Blue State Unemployment Fraud

ASK YOURSELF THIS QUESTION: WHY ARE REPUBLICANS ALWAYS UNABLE TO OPPOSE AND EVEN MARGINALLY REDUCE THE SIZE OF THE WELFARE STATE? Medicaid fraud and abuse are hitting unthinkable levels.

DEEP STATE WATCH:

• Zombie’ programs given cash to live again!

• Watchdog alleges Netflix coordinated with FBI to promote left-wing narratives

• How Biden and Fauci suppressed the COVID-19 lab-leak theory

• Teaching ferrets to binge drink: Rand Paul’s annual Festivus report finds $1.6 TRILLION in government waste

• Four ways Trump has dismantled the ‘Deep State’ since inauguration

PEOPLE KEEP TALKING ABOUT “THE YOUNG MAN PROBLEM” (AS THEY SHOULD), BUT WE ALSO NEED TO TALK ABOUT “THE YOUNG WOMAN PROBLEM (AS WE SHOULD),” WHICH IS A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF PROBLEM, BUT A PROBLEM NONETHELESS: Young women are radicalising.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

THOUGHTS, COMMENTS, REACTION? The Least Laid Generation in History: Gen Z Is Ghosting Sex — and the Implications Are Huge.

LIVING IN HERBERT MARCUSE’S WORLD . . .

THIS IS NOT GOING TO END WELL, AND I DON’T MEAN POLITICALLY. Consider the sociological consequences of this ideological gap between young men and women:

CHINA WATCH:

• China’s Xi Publicly References Recent Military Shake-Up

• Chinese Academics Who Attended Chinese Military-Run Schools Work At US Colleges

• Las Vegas bio lab contained human samples, testing materials, FBI says.

• HOW CHINA CORRUPTS ACADEMIC RESEARCH.

• Dire Strait: Sure Looks Like China Is Writing Off the Ayatollahs.

GREAT BRITAIN WATCH

• This perverse government is a greater threat to the British way of life than Russia.

• British Students Mourn “Beloved” Ayatollah.

• How the Royal Navy shrank to its smallest ‘since English Civil War.’

• Decades in the planning, the Islamic Republic of Britain.

OH CANADA:

• This Canadian Man Is Poor, So the Government Offered to Kill Him. Here’s What Happened.

• Death Cult: Canada Set To Surpass 100,000 Assisted Suicides

• “One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is now caused by the government’s assisted suicide program.”

CIVILIZATIONAL DECLINE AND FALL: Paris wine show reflects surging demand for zero- and low-alcohol drinks.

STONER NATION: 20 Million Americans Say They’re Always High, And Even Liberals Recognize The Craze Has Gone Too Far

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THE UGLY

IS THIS WHERE WE ARE IN 21^ST-CENTURY AMERICA?

• Is Giving Cross-Sex Drugs to Mentally Ill People Resulting in Trans Killers?

• Karol Markowicz: The rise in transgender killers proves that we have a major mental health crisis unfolding.

THEY LIED AND CHILDREN DIED: Parents told daughter would ‘probably die’ without sex change surgery, suit claims

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

Thomas Gainsborough. Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, 1763–64, Oil on canvas, English Heritage, Kenwood House, London. H/T New Criterion

Have a great week!

*I am going to Texas this weekend for nine days, so there will likely be no post from The Redneck Intellectual next week and possibly the week after as well.

DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 127)

K-12 EDITION

WOULD YOU PERMIT YOUR CHILDREN TO ATTEND THESE SCHOOLS? Sixth graders taught ‘binding’ and ‘coming out’ advice in ‘Transgender Week’ lesson

THEY REALLY DO WANT TO …

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* I know I promised a series of essays on marriage (which are still coming in a few weeks), but I’ve been distracted recently thinking about the nature of history. Before you begin reading this essay, stop and ask yourself this simple question: what is history? Think about it for a bit before you start reading. I may do one more essay on history, and then I’ll get to the question of marriage. Hope you enjoy!

I’m making the audio recording to this essay available to all readers with the hope that you’ll think my work worthy of a paid subscription.

This essay is concerned with the nature, meaning, methods, purposes, and possibilities of history. To that end, it is an exercise in the philosophy of history, which begins by addressing three fundamental questions: what is the past, how do we know it, and why does knowledge of the past matter?

Framed in this way, history mirrors the branches of philosophy. It has a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ethics. The metaphysics of history (i.e., the “what” of history) is concerned with the nature of past reality. The epistemology of history (i.e., the “how” of history) is concerned with the means by which we know or acquire knowledge of the past. The ethics of history (i.e., the “why” of history) is concerned with the meaning of history for the present.

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The Metaphysics of History

I begin with a few general observations on the “what” or what I have called the metaphysics of history. Simply defined, history is the past, or that which occurred in the past through linear time. The past is that which occurred one second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century, and millennium ago, and so on for every human who has ever lived. Metaphysically, there is never really a “present” in history, only a past. For the living, the present is a nanosecond half-way house between past and future. In the broadest sense, history is whatever existed and/or happened somewhere in the past from the beginning of time to the always evaporating present.

What are the metaphysical qualities and characteristics that define the past?

First, the past no longer exists; it cannot be observed or experienced firsthand. The past is dead. History is what once was, but now it is gone. There is no eternal return, and no one can relive the past. At best, it exists in memory. Second, the past is unalterable; it cannot be changed. To put a twist on Aristotle’s Law of Identity applied to history, we might say “A was A,” or whatever was, was. As such, the past is metaphysically absolute. There are no re-dos in history. Third, the past—or at least most of the past—is lost to us forever, and our knowledge of the parts which are recoverable is incomplete and imperfect. The full history human existence includes an incalculable number of events for which there is no record, which means that most of human history is inaccessible to us. Finally, the past is and shall always remain a foreign place to us, and its visitors from the present are always strangers in a strange land without the means to fully know and understand the people they study. Their distance from us can never be entirely bridged. We can never fully understand the past.

History has a second and more common definition, which is the study and recording of what happened in the past. The ancient Greek word historia means “inquiry” or “investigation.” Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defined history as “An account of facts, particularly of facts respecting nations or states; a narration of events in the order in which they happened, with their causes and effects.” In this sense, history is the pursuit of knowledge about what happened in the past, how it happened, and why it happened. In this sense, history is the creation of a social memory of things thought, said, and done. As such, history is a bridge between past and present. Events—human events—are a consequence of human action, and human action is the result of human thought. In a sense, then, as R. G. Collingwood once put it, “All history is the history of thought”—but that does not make history the same as philosophy. History is related to philosophy, but it is not the same thing. History is the study of what, how, and why humans thought in the past and the relationship of that thought to the what, how, and why of their actions. Thought and action are mediated by choice.

Ever since Herodotus, history has become a form of knowledge and a recognized field of study. History is the study of past human affairs, but those affairs are not static; they are always moving forward in time. Those who study the past are historians. Historians enter the portal of history, transport themselves in their imaginations to a particular time in the past, and then follow their subjects as they move forward in time to an end point. We might say that the “doing” of history is the study of change over time, which begins and ends at a point or time in past. As such, history requires a forward-moving narrative that takes readers from point A to Z. It studies the cause-and-effect relationships between human thought and action in time and across space and between actors in the past.

History comes in many shapes and forms. It is the most comprehensive form of knowledge because it studies what people think and do, which means that its potential topics are virtually endless. As such, the study or field of history can be as broad as the full panoply of human thought and action. Amongst the most common or prominent forms of history are social, demographic, cultural, political, constitutional, administrative, legal, diplomatic, military, economic, literary, medical, and intellectual history to name the most prominent.

The first challenge of history writing is a recognition the object of one’s study no longer exists. The historian’s job is to bring back to life, at least figuratively and artistically, that which is dead. The doing of history is the re-creation of a remembered or discovered past. Initially, the doing of history was concerned with recollection and retelling. This is what Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey do. Later, the doing of history—certainly modern history—became an act of discovery and re-enactment, that is, the act of discovering something unknown, lost, or forgotten, and the re-enactment of it for the sake of others. Most often, this knowledge is captured in the form of a book, essay, film, or documentary.

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The Epistemology of History

Let us turn now to the “how” or what I have called the epistemology of history. The question we must now ask is, how can we know the past? How can we in the present know the what, how, and why of past thought and action?

The study of history, like philosophy, begins with a sense of wonder and curiosity. A good historian, as with Socrates, begins with the recognition of his or her own ignorance about a past event and then pursues some kind of explanatory knowledge about it by doing historical research. The doing or making of history is a mode of thinking that requires the discovery and re-enactment (usually in the form of a written narrative) of past events. Put differently, the study of history is a search for the truth—the objective truth or something approximating it—as it relates to events that happened in the past. As such, history is a form of knowledge. The “doing” of history—by which I mean the researching, studying, and writing of history—is the work of a historian. Historians want to know what happened relative to some event in the past, when and where it happened, how it happened, why it happened, what its consequences were, and what its meaning was for the people who experienced the event and for future generations. Knowing the truth about the past, however, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is difficult.

We enter and arrive at some point in the past as though pilgrims on a journey to a foreign land. The historian’s goal is to recover what once was and as it was. But the question is, how do we get from the present to a past that is dead to us? How do we get to a time that no longer exists? What is our portal to the past? In other words, how do historians discover and re-create the past for the present and future?

Our entry point to the past typically begins by reading the histories of historians already written, but our question is how did those historians discover and recreate the past? One thing is certain: we cannot know the past beyond our own lives through direct, empirical perception. We cannot be eyewitnesses to the events we wish to know. Those in the present can only know the past if those who lived it left behind some kind of record of their lives. The historian’s knowledge of the past is therefore always second-hand and is mediated by the nature and availability of the historical evidence, most often in the form of written documents (e.g., books, pamphlets, essays, speeches, newspapers, resolutions, petitions, declarations, laws, decrees, diaries, autobiographies, correspondence, court records, wills, deeds, notes of transaction, contracts, etc.), oral traditions, or various other relics from the time.

The historian’s business is to discover and reconstruct the events that brought the evidence into being, as well as the causes of those events and the consequences that issued from them. There is no history if there is no extant evidence. Historians must not make claims about the past that are not supported by the evidence or historical record. For these reasons and more, the historian must therefore begin with a degree epistemological modesty.

Doing history requires thinking historically, which means the recovery of past thought and action, not as a static snapshot, but as a moving picture that involves cause-and-effect relationships between many actors. The historian’s craft involves discovery, collection, selection, distillation, synthesis, organization, interpretation, and narrative. The process is inductive. It means drawing generalizations based on countless particulars. History is a mode of thinking that requires separating the wheat from the chaff. Historians typically examine large numbers of documents in their research, often numbering in the hundreds or more, which might not necessarily have obvious connections to one another. The historian must choose, select, and rank by causal importance the evidence that he or she has collected. Much historical research and writing involves a process of elimination. This means that the historian’s craft is concerned, first and foremost, with choice, selection, and recreation, which means ranking hierarchically what is and is not important for the subject and story. The historian must also make sense of contradictions in the historical record and chart a causal explanation for what happened.

Historians investigating the past typically begin by examining external events (i.e., the effects, by which I mean the actions of individuals doing things), and then seek to discover the internal events (i.e., the causes, by which I mean the thinking, ideas, and choices of individuals). Let’s consider two examples. We know for instance, that John Adams delivered a speech in the Continental Congress on July 1, 1776, and we know that George Washington crossed the Delaware River on December 25, 1776. Knowing that they did these things is not enough. The historian seeks to discover the context, motivations, ideas and thinking processes that led Adams and Washington to do what they did. We want to know, for instance, what Adams said, how he said it, and why he said it. Likewise, we want to know Washington’s strategic thinking and decision-making that led him to lead his troops across an icy river at night in the middle of the winter. Why did he and his troops cross the Delaware when and where he did? What were the causes and consequences of both events, and how are both events related?

Historians, as opposed to annalists or philosophers, are never concerned with just external actions or internal thoughts to exclusion of the other because thought and action are inextricably connected for the historian in a dynamic relationship. The goal of the historian is not simply to re-present an event, but rather to explain its causes and consequences as well as its character and meaning. The “what” must be explained by the “how” and the “why.” We know about Adams’s speech and Washington’s journey, for instance, primarily through the private correspondence of those who participated in or were witnesses to them. Historians also know about these events via diaries, newspaper articles, and the records of the Continental Congress. Historians and students of history want to know what caused these events and what their consequences were.

Historians reconstruct the past according to an explanatory generalization, narrative, and a theme that are the result of piecing together many parts into a whole. After collecting, sorting, collating, organizing, and trying to make sense of a vast array of evidence, the historian then re-enacts the past in his own mind, which means to forge a narrative and explanation about what happened and the meaning of what happened. The historian’s task is to examine how the parts fit together to create a narrative of the past. At this point, the historian’s craft becomes an art. Thinking historically means dealing in generalizations, which requires seeing connections and bringing them together in a coherent whole.

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The Ethics of History

We turn now to the “why” of history, or what I have called the ethics of history. The first task and primary purpose of those who “do” history (i.e., the work of historians) is to pursue the truth about the past, and the primary purpose of those who study and teach history is, at least in part, to help make sense of the world in which we live by studying the movement from the past to the present. The past only has meaning in the present. Our concern in this third section is with the latter—with those who study and teach history.

Having come this far, we are compelled to ask, why do we study history? What is its value to us? What do we hope to get from it? Specifically, why do we in the present want to know the “what,” “how,” and “why” of the past if life always moves forward? To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make? Viewed critically, isn’t the past an anchor on our lives? Do we need history to live in the present? Alternatively, what happens to us if we’re liberated from our past? Why have all civilizations recorded their pasts in one way or another? Do we become unwitting slaves to it, or is knowledge of the past liberating? Not to be trite, but George Santayana’s now hackneyed line, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” should be offset by Gordon S. Wood’s riposte, “Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it!”

Before I go further, I should say that I am not concerned here to examine if there is purpose—particularly moral purpose—in history, or if there are purposes in the historical process. It is not my goal to determine whether some kind of internal necessity is built into the metaphysics of history, or whether history is deterministically cyclical, moves in a straight line of progress, or is dialectical. That would require us to discover and reveal largely unseen meta-forces impelling and directing the past into the present and future. This is a large and difficult topic beyond the purview of this paper. Nor am I here to say that history is simply one damn thing after another. Instead, my aim focuses on a narrower question: what public purpose is to be served by the study of history? Of this much, I am certain: history is not and should not be an exercise in dilettantish antiquarianism or idle curiosity. The study, writing, and teaching of history serves a practical moral purpose for individuals and society, which is captured in this question: why do we want our children to be taught history? In fact, why do we engage in culture wars over the history that is taught to our children? The answer is simple: history matters, and it has always mattered.

History often begins as an exercise in self-knowledge both for individuals and for communities. It grows out a deep and abiding longing in the human soul to know where we came from. All of us are the products of our past, and history helps us to understand who and what we are. We are all curious about our origin story. Our cultural manners and mores and the forms and formalities of our political institutions are imprinted with the historical DNA of our national origins. Historical self-knowledge is therefore the first step to self-improvement both as individuals and as communities. From our study of the past, we can try to figure out how to be better in the present and future. We use the lamp of experience and history to illuminate the present and to guide us on our journey forward.

History can also teach us many other things about the human condition. For instance, it can teach us about: 1) human nature, particularly the role that reason and the passions play in our lives; 2) the role of perspective and time in human life (including death); 3) the role of cause and effect in human action; 4) the role of intended and unintended consequences in our lives; 5) the limitations and possibilities of life; 6) right and wrong, just and unjust, and good and bad; 7) heroism and villainy; and 7) what it means to love and honor the best or highest things.

History thus serves us as a kind of moral laboratory, not the kind where we do live experiments, but the kind where we can observe the nature of man under certain conditions, and the causes and consequences of human thought and action. Through the laboratory of history, we can test our theories about how to live in the present through the observation of how people lived in the past. The past is a testing ground where we can exercise and practice our moral reasoning and judgment. Through a study of history, we can observe virtue and vice, heroism and villainy, and success and failure. The pedagogic value of history is that we can there see the good, the bad, and the ugly and learn from them. We can see what ideas and actions did and did not work.

In these ways and more, I would like to suggest that a knowledge of history is a precondition for wisdom, and wisdom is a cardinal virtue, if not the architectonic virtue. To know where we have been helps us to know where we are, and both guide us in knowing where to go. In this way, history is a necessary partner of moral philosophy. They go hand in hand. Most of us are familiar with Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke’s 1735 statement in his Letters on the Study and Use of History, where he famously wrote, “History is philosophy teaching by examples.” By philosophy, Bolingbroke clearly meant moral philosophy.

Originally, the teaching of history to children was conceived as a form of moral instruction by which we teach children the what, how, and why of living free, just, and honorable lives. History and philosophy complement one another: history grounds abstract thought in lived reality, while philosophy draws upon and elevates experiences into timeless wisdom. They are two sides of the same coin: one moves from the general to the particular (i.e., philosophy teaching by examples), and the other from the particular to the general (i.e., history teaching by principles).

Lastly, I’d like to note that history as self-knowledge includes not only our lives as individuals but is most often defined as the self-knowledge of political communities. The goal is to create social memories of who we are and where we came from, and we typically do this to define who and what we are as a people or community. Conceived in this way, history is a social adhesive or a moral glue holding society together, and it is a source of wisdom from which we can draw to help solve the challenges of the present.

History also serves to induce patriotism, rightly understood. This is how history has been taught in virtually every human culture or nation from the beginning of time. If, as Americans, we believe that the United States is a good if not a remarkable country that has given us unique freedoms and opportunities to live and pursue our highest aspirations, then it behooves us to understand and show our appreciation for previous generations who built this nation. All that we have—our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our political institutions, our unique and diverse manners and mores, our cities, our manufacturing plants, our hospitals, our universities, our libraries, our rockets, our music and literature, and, most of all, our freedoms—was created for us by someone else. To those who dedicated their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to building and defending a free society we surely owe something in the form of gratitude. This is why we celebrate July 4^th or Memorial Day, and this is one important reason why we study our national past. There is nothing wrong with love of country, particularly if that country is uniquely good. Taught in this way, history is the principal vehicle by which to promote principled patriotism and enlightened citizenship. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

Alternatively, we can teach the history of our past, as we mostly do now, by focusing not on the good but on the bad and ugly of American history. Those who believe that the United States of America is an inherently wicked nation will no doubt tell a different kind of story about America’s past. And of course, the question is: what story of America’s past will be told to the children? Given a choice, would you want America’s children to be taught the good, the bad, or the ugly of American history, particularly if the goal—and I can’t imagine anyone objecting to this goal—is to encourage them to be virtuous citizens of a free society and the very best that they can be as individuals? Do we want to teach our children to love or hate their history and ultimately themselves. Is it wise or nihilistic to teach children to hate their past and their ancestors’ past? These are serious questions in the year of America’s semiquincentennial.

In my view, there is a time and place for everything including the bad and the ugly, but when we’re talking about children, we must consider their psychological and moral needs. To teach children to resent and hate the past of their forefathers is, in my view, a form of cognitive child abuse. It creates crooked souls. The best kind of history for children is one that fires their imaginations and their ambitions with the hope of possibilities yet attained. Young people have a deep and abiding need to see and experience adventure, greatness and heroes. This is what they want and need. If given a choice, I’m willing to bet that the kids want to learn about the best and not the worst of which men and women are capable.

* I have reluctantly decided to temporarily halt my ongoing series of essays on the selfishness/selflessness problem. I have a few essays that I’d still like to write, but I simply don’t have the bandwidth right now to work on them. I will return to the series at some point in the near future. Promise.

**That said, I’m hoping to launch a new series of essays in the weeks ahead on the topic of marriage. I’m hearing a lot of talk right now that the Supreme Court may take up a case challenging the Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage.

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THE GOOD

OPENING AMERICA’S CONTINENTAL INTERIOR CAUSED A QUANTUM LEAP IN COMMERCE AND EMIGRATION TO THE TRANS-APPALACHIAN WEST: 200 YEARS AGO, THE ERIE CANAL OPENED AND AMERICA WAS NEVER THE SAME:

LESS (TAXATION) + LESS (REGULATION) + LESS (WELFARE) = BOOMING ECONOMY: America Is The World’s Hottest Economy.

I’M A PEACE-LOVING MAN AND DON’T LIKE WAR, BUT I ALSO KNOW THAT IT’S SOMETIMES NECESSARY. I also prefer that the good guys win in a world of bad guys. Ergo, it’s best to be prepared: The Coming Revolution in Warfare

MRS. REDNECK SAYS SHE’S GOING TO ORDER ONE FOR ME: Ancient practice of blowing through a conch shell could help treat dangerous snoring condition.

TAKE A STROLL THROUGH A CENTURY PLUS WORTH OF COMMERCIAL FLIGHT. Pretty cool: 15 fascinating photos of flying through the decades.

NOT MY IDEA OF A VACATION, BUT I’M IMPRESSED BY IT AS A TECHNOLOGICAL MARVEL: World’s largest cruise ship sets sail as industry nears record-breaking highs

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND-UP

• Vitamin D May Help Slow Aging, Study Finds.

• Heart Attacks May Be Infectious and Vaccines Could Prevent Them.

• This Over-the-Counter Vitamin B3 Supplement May Help Prevent Skin Cancer.

• Elon Musk’s Neuralink plans brain implant trial for speech impairments.

• A single blood test can measure how different parts of our bodies are aging.

• A 100-Year-Old Problem Solved? Scientists Discover How To Freeze Organs Without Cracking Them.

THERE ARE LAWS OF NATURE AND THEY ARE EVERYWHERE. MOREOVER, THEY CAN BE DISCOVERED AND UNDERSTOOD: Is life a form of computation?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What happened before the Big Bang? Computational method may provide answers.

THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE LIVES! How to sail across the Indian Ocean: Everything you need to know.

OFF TO THE GYM I GO: Scientists Say Exercise May Actually Reverse Your Biological Age.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUNDUP

• Massive New Map Reveals 300,000 Km of Ancient Roman Roads.

• Roman warriors found stacked in ancient well suffered ‘humiliating’ fate after battle

• Metal detectorist uncovers gold ring linked to one of history’s most infamous plots

• Wisconsin lake reveals ancient vessels that predate Egyptian pyramids

• The cave where it happened: Denisova cavern’s congress of ancient peoples.

PROGRESS: Scientists sound alarm on DEI’s threat to academic freedom at ‘War on Science’ event.

WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON A FASCIST? We read history books we do not eat them.

ANYONE WITH THE SLIGHTEST AMOUNT OF REFINEMENT, TASTE, AND CULTURE KNOWS THAT SCOTTISH MEN SWEAR. That’s just a fact. Refinement, taste, and culture come with being culturally sensitive to cultural differences. Anyway, that’s my weak attempt at apologizing for all the swearing in this important video commentary. Disney’s Self-Inflicted “Boy Trouble”

SCIENCE ROUNDUP:

• Study shows evidence of habitable conditions on Saturn moon.

• It’s Official: Scientists Confirmed What Is Inside Our Moon.

• New Study Suggests Early Mars Hosted Conditions Suitable for Life.

• Scientists extract viable RNA from woolly mammoth remains.

• Kissing started 20 million years ago, long before humans existed.

LET’S HOPE SO, BUT I’M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH: Is This Finally the Dawning of the End of the Woke Corporate Era?

IT ALL STARTS WITH A SIMPLE QUESTION: WHAT IS MARRIAGE? Judge makes significant ruling for schools on ‘children’s book promoting same-sex marriage’

HEAL THYSELF: ‘The world is waking up’: Surveys show trans identification in ‘free-fall’ among young people

MORAL PROGRESS IN THE STATE THAT ONCE HANGED MEN AND WOMEN FOR BEING WITCHES: Health Centers In Massachusetts Suspend Transgender Care For Minors

EXCELLENT ESSAY FROM ROGER KIMBALL ON THE ALLEGED EVILS OF CAPITALISM: Capitalism’s critics cling to a mythic past, but the record shows the factory age ignited rising living standards, broader opportunity, and the modern prosperity we now take for granted.

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THE BAD

YES, IT’S REALLY THAT BAD: Top 20 Insanities DOGE revealed in 2025.

COMING TO A BLUE CITY NEAR YOU: 16 Dead in NYC From Warmth of Collectivism.

WE ALL KNEW THAT MARGARET THATCHER WAS RIGHT . . . THEY’RE ONLY JUST ADMITTING IT 40 YEARS LATER: German Chancellor Admits That Welfare State Is Running Out of Other People’s Money.

CALIFORNIA TURNED INTO ZIMBABWE SO SLOWLY THAT NO ONE NOTICED: ‘Stolen Land’: Gavin Newsom’s ‘Agricultural Equity’ Advisers Prepare Plan To Redistribute Farmland to Racial Minorities. California has ‘the responsibility’ to help ‘rebuild the wealth that was stolen,’ task force says.

PORTLAND TURNED INTO CALIFORNIA SO SLOWLY THAT NO ONE NOTICED: Reactionary, Neo-Confederate Portland.

UK WATCH:

• Londonistan and the Death of Tolerance.

• You Can’t Make This Up: UK Theater Cancels Showing of Free Speech Documentary.

• Britain’s Plan to Abolish Most Jury Trials Should Make Us Grateful for the Constitution.

PRETTY SURE THAT DOESN’T SOUND GOOD: Deep Beneath The Pacific Ocean, Earth’s Crust Is Tearing Itself Apart.

BETTER GET A PARKA: Climate scientists’ controversial claim Gulf Stream could be near collapse — predicting a new ice age.

I LIKE “NICE” BUT NOT SUICIDAL EMPATHY. They’re not the same thing: American civilization is being destroyed from within by the ‘Republic of Nice’

CULTURAL SEPPUKU: German Christmas market installs ‘anti-tank’ barriers meant to stop invading armies, public media cheers ‘creative’ solution.

CHINA WATCH:

• China’s Engineering State

• Three Chinese scholars at UMich charged with conspiring to smuggle biological materials into U.S.

• US Nuclear Bomber Base Shares Fence With Trailer Park Tied To Chinese Intel-Linked Fraudster

• China’s 1st reusable rocket test fires engines ahead of debut flight.

• How China Raced Ahead of the U.S. on Nuclear Power.

THIS MAY BE THE GREATEST SCANDAL OF OUR LIFETIMES: New Docs Show More Connections Between Wuhan Lab and U.S. Intelligence.

BUILT INTO THE WELFARE STATE IS A BOTTOMLESS HOLE OF CORRUPTION:

• Watchdog Warns Of Hundreds Of Millions In Medicaid Payments To Deceased Enrollees

• US Government Awards Nearly $200M In Health-Related Grants To Help Illegals

LIKE ALL WELFARE, USAID IS A FRAUD: Lies, Damn Lies, and USAID Lies.

THE PLAGUE COMES IN MANY DIFFERENT FORMS: The Death Rattle of Apocalyptic Environmentalism.

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING: Can the ‘Lost Generation’ be found?

• Related: Feminism Burned Down the Home—Now the West Is Shivering in the Dark

THIS IS WHAT IT’S COME TO. Turns out, the needs of young men—the so-called “Lost Generation”—are pretty simple: they want a wife, kids, a job, and a little respect every now and then. Is that too much to ask?

YOU DON’T WANT THIS, AND YET YOU SEEM POWERLESS TO STOP IT: How Islam Caused — and Is Again Causing — a Dark Age in Europe.

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THE UGLY

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE THEY SAID, BUT WHAT THEY GAVE US WAS QUACK SCIENCE AND QUACK MEDICINE: Did Dr. Spock’s parenting advice kill 60,000 babies?

THE DEEP STATE IS YOUR FRIEND—NOT! KASH PATEL DROPS COVID ORIGIN BOMBSHELL:

YES, IT WORKS SOMETHING LIKE THIS: The Left-Wing Terror Memeplex

I’LL BET YOU NEVER KNEW THIS WAS HAPPENING TO YOUR NATION AND TO YOUR CHILDREN: FBI Sees Dramatic Increase In Arrests Of ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremism,’ Individuals Targeting Children. There is a lot more to this story about which we need answers. For instance, we need to know more about the backgrounds of these of these two characters. Are they recent immigrants to this country? Did they go to university in the United States? If yes, which ones?

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

HERE IS ERNEST BARRIAS’S (1841-1905) stunningly beautiful polychromatic marble sculpture La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science (”Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science”), which was commissioned in 1889 to decorate the new Faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux. H/T to Kelsie Rose for bringing Barrias and his La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science to my attention.

Have a great week!