When the “junk heap” is steadily deteriorating

Wastewater analysis suggests increasing recreational drug use among New Zealanders. (Although there are some problems with the data.) But this isn't an issue confined to our small islands.

This is of course when recreational drugs are illegal. So drug consumers are willing to pay more to gangs for a riskier product to get their chosen high.

Two questions always come up when one advocates for drug legalisation. 

The first is that legal drugs will make drug consumption more prevalent and more sordid. This goes against both evidence and theory: Milton Friedman for one arguing that the Iron Law of Prohibition actively encourages the escalation of more virulent pharmaceuticals, to make any drug problem worse.

But the other question is this: 

Why do many people want to abuse drugs and alcohol? Why is this such a persistent problem in our culture — and would it still be a problem in a more rational culture?

Good question. And Stewart Margolis takes a good stab at answering it, beginning by drawing a distinction between drug use and drug abuse. Because clearly there are many well-functioning adults happily consuming recreational drugs including opium, alcohol and caffeine -- and if we trace the history, have been doing so since the first fermented berries were found several thousand years ago.  Indeed,

Archaeologists have found evidence of opium use in Europe by 5,700 BC, and cannabis seeds have been found at archaeological digs in Asia from 8,100 BC.

So it seems at least some adults have discovered a rational way to use mind-altering substances. A decent martini before dinner for example being one of the best ways to shake off the cares of the day.

There may be some that are simply too dangerous to ever be used, but that would be a scientific question rather than a moral one. 

But some adults won't, can't or don't want to be rational about it. If we discount the obvious (that some people are prone to addiction; that there might be genetic factors increasing susceptibility to substance abuse) we're left with the nagging idea that there might be more to it than that. 

Margolis makes the case that the problem is fundamentally philosophical:

Of course, a worldwide problem like this undoubtedly has multi-factorial causes, but I think at root drug abuse is an attempt to escape reality. 

Materially, the world has never been richer, so what are so many people eager to escape from? Despite our affluence, I think we are experiencing a philosophical crisis. 

Ayn Rand pointed out that humans need a philosophy in order to live. In “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” she wrote, 

“Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalisations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt.”

 I think Rand was spot on, and the increase we are seeing in drug abuse is the result of the self-doubt brought on by people who have assembled a “junk heap” of often contradictory ideas. This has always been a huge problem, and has always resulted in a tremendous amount of suffering. So why does it seem to be worse now?

I think it’s because the quality of the ideas in the “junk heap” has been steadily deteriorating. 

When ... [common sense and] enlightenment ideas were widespread in the culture, average, unthinking people could randomly pick up a pretty workable set of ideas, which would allow them to prosper and attain a measure of happiness. They were not as happy and prosperous as they could have been, had they done the work of choosing and integrating the right ideas, but they could do all right.

But today, many of the ideas floating around in the cultural are anti-enlightenment. If you unthinkingly accept a collection of these ideas, you are unlikely to prosper or find happiness.

It's perhaps also the case that governments' increasing  economic mismanagement has been making it increasingly difficult for younger folk to get ahead economically -- they can sense that even if they can't see that explicitly -- so that there's part of of them ready to give up on the "old" idea that hard work will pay off.

You [might] notice that you’re not doing as well as your parents did, either economically, romantically, or socially. As a result, you will be filled with doubt, with dread, with a sense that something is wrong with the world — but you don’t know what or how to fix it. I believe this is the feeling that people desperately want to escape — and so they turn to drugs that numb or relieve these feelings, at least temporarily.

While I’m sure there are benefits to be found in a variety of drug and alcohol treatment programmes, I don’t think we’re likely to make much progress on substance abuse until people deal with the underlying philosophical crisis driving the abuse. 

In the meantime, though, making drugs legal would provide a huge benefit, both to those struggling with abuse issues, and more importantly, to those of us who don’t use drugs or who are able to use them responsibly.

Thank you Adam Smith

It's a busy week. This week also marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the first in-depth exploration and explanation of (in PJ O'Rourke's words) why some nations are prosperous and wealthy and other places just suck.In honour of the anniversary, here are several of Adam Smith’s most insightful observations:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter II]

It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter I]

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. [Lecture in 1755, quoted in Dugald Stewart, Account Of The Life And Writings Of Adam Smith LLD, Section IV, 25]

It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV Chapter I]

By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV, Chapter II]

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV Chapter VIII]

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV Chapter VIII]

To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI]

It is the highest impertinence and presumption… in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense... They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book II, Chapter III]

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book V Chapter II Part II] 

Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
    Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV, Chapter II]

What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I Chapter VIII]

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. [From his 1759 work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments]

The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. [The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part VI, Section II, Chapter II]

"The New Zealander prides himself on his common sense"

"The New Zealander prides himself on his common sense—that 'settled truth can be attained by observation'[10] and is 'knowable and graspable by our own experience.'[11]

"For the most part this is held so assuredly that 'to reason against the [evidence of sense and memory] is absurd'; these are held as 'first principles, and as such fall not within the province of reason, but of common sense.' [12]

"This was the argument of the enlightened Scotsman Thomas Reid, whose 'last phrase stuck' and came to New Zealand with Scottish settlers. 'It helped to produce a cultural type that some consider typically American, but which is just as much Scottish' and equally applies here: 'an independent intellect combined with an assertive self-respect, and grounded by a strong sense of moral purpose.'[13]

“'The teachings of these Scots became known as the philosophy of Common Sense: it was the real basis of the Scottish Enlightenment,'[14] and probably our own."

~ yours truly from my post on that other blog 'New Zealand: A Nation of the Enlightenment'

[10] McCosh, J. (1875). The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutchinson to Hamilton. London: MacMillan & Co, 194

[11] Herman, A. (2001). How the Scots Invented the Modern World. New York: Three Rivers Press, 262

[12] Reid, T. (1823). An Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense. London: Thomas Tegg, Cheapside, 28; Herman, 2001, ibid, 262

[13] Herman, 2001, ibid, 263-4
[14] Fry, M. (2025). How the Scots Made America. New York: Macmillan

Yes, let's keep piling on Anne Salmond.

"Salmond claims to have been guided by a list that reads like a Who's Who in 

Postmodernity... What she does not discuss is whether these thinkers are sound guides."

Anne Salmond, who recently called for thinkers to engage with open rather than closed minds—arguing that "other cultures may have insights that elude us" —was recently called out by Dane Giraud for the very same reason: specifically, for ignoring the insights of Enlightenment culture. The only position that actively suppresses inquiry, pointed out Giraud, is her own. "What is more antithetical to free thought'" he asked rhetorically, "than declaring whole categories of knowledge off-limits to criticism because they belong to the wrong culture."

Salmond, of course, has form. Her own favourite cultural whipping person is Western. Her writing, said Michael King of her 2003 book Two Worlds, gives "a strong impression that, rather than attempting to represent both cultures dispassionately, Salmond [is] straining to case every feature of Māori behaviour in a favourable light and many features of European in an unfavourable one.” 

But in doing so, she fails to learn there either. Reviewing Salmond's work, historian and former Waitangi Tribunal director Buddy Mikaere reckons Salmond's work "turns  our tipuna into cardboard caricatures." Rather than learning deeply from other cultures, he says, she offers only a "one-dimensional characterisation." For her and several other Pākeha historians, he says, "Māori [are] invariably depicted as deeply spiritual beings who only ever acted on the basis of high-minded principles. Pākehā, on the other hand, [are] mostly unprincipled rogues or fools whose behaviour was always motivated by racial arrogance, greed and self-interest."

Such is the accusation, it will be remembered, Salmond throws at the Pākehas of the Free Speech Union. It apparently never gets old.

It begins to look as if Salmond is unable to learn much from either of the Two Worlds of which she writes.

What also never gets old is re-reading the demolition of Salmond's work by the grand old man of New Zealand history Peter Munz, who destroyed her whole platform of post-modern posturing and epistemic duplicity in his 1994 review of her first major book. In her work she is guilty, he says, of not just "disinformation, but of actual misrepresentation."

Salmond claims to have been "guided by 'Heidegger, Foucault, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas, [Mary] Hesse, Derrida, Eco and others.' ... [a] list [that] reads like a Who's Who in Postmodernity ...  all of whom would have helped to confirm her in her prejudices and methods."

What she does not discuss ... [is] whether [these thinkers] are sound guides. It appears that she is under the impression that these postmodern thinkers have solved the problem as to how different systems of knowledge or belief are related or, rather, not related to one another. Could it be that she is simply ignorant of the fact that there is much modern thought which rejects these facile, politically motivated doctrines of Foucault and Derrida, of Eco and Ricoeur? If she takes her stand with these people, she ought, to say the least, have produced some evidence that she has also examined the counter-arguments and, perhaps, found them wanting. But as things stand, she appears simply as an  uncritical camp-follower — which is a poor show for a professional anthropologist.

Furthermore, 

the explanations of the differences in systems of knowledge that these thinkers provide should not, I trust, be considered final. In the pre-postmodern world of good sense, belief or knowledge systems are distinguished according to whether they are true or false. ... What is really at issue and what she is trying hard to disguise by her way of constructing the past, is the brute reality of cultural evolution. ... 

[I]nstead of jumping on the postmodern bandwagon which is nothing more than a belated overreaction to the Victorian age, it is time scholars like Salmond caught up with modern thought and revised their view of evolution.

The limitations of the early mind are the result of isolation and of absence of the kind of contact which would expose beliefs and taboos to criticism. Societies and cultures, which for demographic and political reasons are exposed to contact with others, are more likely to question their own traditions, change their taboos and develop eventually a more universal system of knowledge — that is, beliefs which are more than validations or legitimizations of their own parochial cultures. In a nutshell, this is the heart of cultural evolution.

An evolution — a progress — only made possible by being open to new ideas. Says Munz:

Darwin or no Darwin, we are all descended from black Eve, and every single culture which has ever existed is a departure from the culture of black Eve, whoever she was. [I am using the notion 'black Eve' metaphorically to indicate that all existing cultures are descended or transmuted from a common stock.] ...

I would suggest ...  that one can rank the distance of societies from black Eve according to their exclusiveness. The earliest societies were totally exclusive and would not admit people other than those who belonged to their descent group. Next came societies which would admit people through marriage; and at the other end of the scale, farthest removed from black Eve, there are societies which potentially include anybody who wants to be included. Ranking in these terms is completely neutral and value-free. All it says is that while one cannot 'become' a Maori, one can 'become' a New Zealander, and that, for that reason, there is a structural difference between these two kinds of societies, and that that difference defines the distance of these societies from black Eve and that the actually exclusive structures are earlier than the potentially inclusive structures. Since this criterion is neutral, there can be no question of 'progress', only of progression. ...

[W]hatever criteria one likes to choose, the distances from black Eve can be ascertained because evolution, including cultural evolution, is a reality of life. 

If one wants to understand the coming together of two different cultures, as Salmond does, one must take into account, as Salmond does not, the different distances they have moved away from the earlier forms. Salmond has explicitly rejected evolution. 'Contemporary literature on traditional thought is still bedevilled", she writes, 'with implicit sometimes explicit evolutionism.' If she had her way, it would soon cease to be so bedevilled! I suppose she rejects cultural evolution in the face of overwhelming evidence because by making all cultures more or less equal she thinks she can heal wounds and pour oil on troubled waters and be 'politically correct'. But in the long run, there is no point in burying one's head in the sand: a distortion of reality brings about its own nemesis even if one does not quite yet know what shape that nemesis will take.

Can one say 'Ouch!'? 

"Every so often, a critic of 'universal reason' appears who, in the course of denouncing it, inadvertently demonstrates why we need it."

Anne Salmond, the patron saint of the straw man 

"Every so often, a critic of 'universal reason' appears who, in the course of denouncing it, inadvertently demonstrates why we need it. ... 

"Anne Salmond ... goes after a recent article in the Herald by former Free Speech Union Chief Executive Jonathan Ayling, in which he called for 'an Enlightenment approach [to the school curriculum] grounded in universal reason' This is taken as proof that he wants all children to think in the same way, as though 'universal reason' means a kind of intellectual North Korea, complete with a Ministry of Correct Thoughts. The author writes that universal reason 'suggests there is only one right way to think.' The incessant quarrelling of Kant, Hume, and Voltaire surely makes a lie of that. 

"Universal reason, properly understood, means something so elementary it ought to be uncontroversial: that humans, regardless of tribe, tongue, or whakapapa, share the basic capacity to make and understand arguments. It is what allows a Māori scholar to critique a German philosopher, or vice versa. It is what allows any of us to read a book from another century, or to engage with the sciences, or to disagree at all. Without a universal reason, debate becomes a kind of cultural tourism in which we admire each other’s 'ways of knowing' from a polite distance, like exhibits in an epistemic zoo. 

"[Salmond's] column insists that because language and culture shape thought, there can be no universal reason. This is like saying that because people wear different clothes, there can be no human body underneath. Yes, thought varies, but its very variability depends on a shared structure that allows us to recognise a difference as a difference. If there were no universals of cognition, no common tools of inference or logic, the entire academic industry of “cross-cultural workshops” - which the author curiously cites as evidence - would be impossible. One does not attend a conference on how minds differ unless one assumes the participants have minds capable of discussing it. 

"Then comes the moralising: that the Free Speech Union lacks 'humility before truth,' that Māori voices are being 'silenced,' that universal reason somehow implies a political programme in favour of ignorance. But the only position in the piece that actively suppresses inquiry is the author’s own. What is more antithetical to free thought than declaring whole categories of knowledge off-limits to criticism because they belong to the wrong culture (or, as Salmond frequently argues, are immeasurable by a universal standard)? What is more hostile to academic freedom than demanding that educational policy be bound not by rational argument but by obligations to particular groups, with 'truth' distributed like government grants? 

"A liberal society cannot function on those terms."

~ Dane Giraud from his post 'Why Dame Anne Salmond Misunderstands the Enlightenment'

"Why Secularists Calling for a Christian Revival Are Wrong"

"Many readers will be well aware of the growing cultural narrative that what we need right now is a revival of Christianity. ... [What's] puzzling is the number of atheists and skeptics who have increasingly taken this position. ...

"Despite their still not believing Christianity to be true, they nevertheless think greater adherence to it has the potential to fix, or at least ameliorate, societal problems. Common arguments for this position are, I would argue, based on existential angst, historical revisionism, and a simple failure to understand human psychology. ...

"A common claim is that humans have a deep psychological need for religion—a Godshaped hole crying out to be filled. Related to this is the idea that Christianity is somehow inherently benign and provides a defense against far worse ideologies, particularly wokeness and Islam. Some argue that Christianity brings structure, order, a unifying narrative, and a sense of the common good that can reduce societal and political polarization. Others claim that all the positive things we value in society—science, reason, liberty, and democracy— are derived from and reliant on Christian values.

"These arguments largely ignore history and are based on an idealistic concept of human psychology. ...

"Atheists and skeptics who want to revitalise Christianity as a shared narrative and social glue are misguided. Their case rests on anxiety, revisionist history, and nostalgia for a culture that never existed. ...

"Christianity may feel benign today, but this is because it has been watered down and constrained by secular, liberal principles. Its authoritarian tendencies, like those of any proselytising faith that promises salvation or damnation, are still inherent within it and would be particularly likely to be activated were it to resurge into a culture already experiencing an alarming rise in radical and authoritarian ideological movements. ...

"Religiosity may be a manifestation of innate human tendencies heightened in times of existential anxiety, but religion cannot resolve the material causes of that anxiety. Atheists and skeptics who flirt with pro-Christian arguments are right to fear militant Islamism and woke authoritarianism, but wrong to imagine that a return to Christianity will protect them. The real safeguard is not mass commitment to any orthodoxy, but a principled commitment to secular liberalism. Rather than replacing one orthodoxy with another, we should strengthen those cultural and political frameworks that allow us to live together without coercion. ...

"I urge skeptics to recognise themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment and not to try to resurrect Christianity, but to rekindle confidence in the liberal tradition that made modern Western civilisation possible: a tradition that values evidence, reason, pluralism, and the rights of individuals."

~ Helen Pluckrose from her article 'Why Secularists Calling for a Christian Revival Are Wrong'

They "aim to change science from an endeavour finding truth about nature to an endeavour that’s a lever for social justice."

"'Nature' magazine published [a] long comment [recently], written by eight indigenous authors from five countries. [It] is a ... surrender to 'progressive' views that aim to change science from an endeavour finding truth about nature to an endeavour that’s a lever for social justice. Surprisingly, though, Nature allowed the authors to use the 'progressive' term of 'decolonisation,' arguing explicitly that the science is the result of colonisation of knowledge by white men from the Global North—a situation that must be rectified, pronto.

"The authors give eight ways to rectify the 'colonisation,' all of them involving sacrificing merit for ethnicity, replacing modern science with 'other ways of knowing,' and demanding both professional, monetary, and territorial reparations, even from those who never oppressed anybody. ...

"[A]s I’ve written about in extenso, 'indigenous knowledge' is never on par with modern science. Yes, indigenous people can contribute empirical truths to science, but indigenous 'science' almost invariably consists of local knowledge helping people to live in their specific environment (in New Zealand, for example, it consists of stuff like knowing how to harvest mussels or where to catch eels), and isn’t generalisable to other places. It does not use the tools of modern science and, as in New Zealand, is often imbued with nonscientific aspects like ethics, morality, unsubstantiated lore, and supernatural trappings like teleology and myth.

"Yes, some aspects of indigenous 'science' can and should be worked into science classes, but most of it should be taught in sociology or anthropology class. ...

"As one of my colleagues said after reading this paper, 'The authors’ decolonisation/indigenisation ideology is not only antithetical to science, it’s also anti-Enlightenment, and as such challenges the whole idea of universities as places where ideas are tested on the basis of reason and evidence without the imposition of cultural authority'.”

~ Jerry Coyne from his post 'The journal Nature calls for “decolonization” of modern science'

20 years after 7/7

UPDATE, 14/7: 

"Have we learned the lessons of 7/7? So begins every trite radio and TV discussion today as we mark 20 years since four homegrown jihadists blew themselves up on London’s transport network and took 52 innocent souls with them.
    "Going by much of the commentary, you’d think this was a purely logistical, security question. There’s a long piece on the BBC website, talking about how the police and the security services were forced to up their game after the London Bombings, the new powers they now enjoy as a consequence, the attendant concerns over civil liberties, etc.
    "The words ‘Islamist’ and ‘jihadist’ do not appear once in the piece, even as it details the evolving ‘extremist’ threat posed first by al-Qaeda and then the ‘self-styled Islamic State’. There is often a stubborn refusal, a stammering hesitation, to mention what flavour of ‘extremism’ most menaces us – a cowardly tic that was skewered best by Morrissey: ‘An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?’
    "This attempt to brush over the I-word – to blithely ignore the religious, ideological character of those hellish bombings two decades ago – is everywhere today. The deadliest terror attack on UK soil since Lockerbie – the deadliest terror attack on London ever – is being talked about as if it were motivated by some vaguely defined form of ‘hate’ or ‘division’, rather than a global Islamist movement."

~ Tom Slater from his post '7/7 and the refusal to confront Islamist terror'

"'Business as usual.' That was the phrase of stoic courage made famous in the London blitz, and 

typified in the photo to the right. 'Business as usual' is the quiet bravery of offering two fingers to 

aggressors who simply do not understand what makes human life sacred, and human effort valuable.

"The main reason so many people fear Islam is all the terrorism carried out by Muslims. The London bombings of twenty years ago are but one entry in a long, long list. Muslims are much more prone to commit acts of terrorism than any other group in the world. This has been true for forty years.

"No, this does not mean that all or most Muslims are terrorists. As I have often said, some of the bravest people in the world are Muslims who know that the terrorists can find them and their families and fight them anyway.

"No, this does not mean it is decent behaviour to buttonhole your Muslim work colleague and harangue him or her for the crimes of their co-religionists.

"It does mean that unless and until the Muslim world confronts the fact that most terrorism is Islamic terrorism, the non-Muslim world is rational to view Muslims with extra suspicion and to discriminate against them in matters of security. The idealistic refusal of the Western part of the non-Islamic world (or rather its political class) to do this is folly, a folly that will eventually backfire on Muslims living in the West.

~ Natalie Solent from her post 'The main reason so many people fear Islam'

"Clearly 'the whole of Islam' did not bomb London, or Madrid, or Istanbul, or Jakarta, or Bali, or New York. But there is a world-wide trend there, don't you think, that we should not ignore. One that needs to be taken seriously, that needs to be condemned.

"The culture of Islam fundamentalism needs to be condemned, as I argued here briefly just the other day before all this happened, and here some weeks ago. ...

"But it's not enough to just condemn it. Islam must be reformed, and the hate-success, clitorectomies-for-everybody, kill-the-west culture that has fomented nothing but hatred and poverty across the Muslim world firmly rejected. Witness the effect that the sisters of Robert McCartney had in speaking out against Irish violence — by saying "NO MORE!" they brought the hope of ending what once seemed un-ending. Only a like rejection from within is ever going to change the culture of Islam.

"Second, Islam needs a Reformation. Urgently. As I pointed out here and here four years ago to noisy dissent, unlike the West, Islam never had a Reformation, and 1.4 billion Muslims and at least 750 Londoners are the poorer for that today. Islam never had a Renaissance. It never had an Aquinas to liberate science, thought and life from its religious shackles. Crikey, Islam doesn't even have a New Testament saying that all the God-awful and God-ordained killing in that earlier collection of papyrus is no longer necessary. Islamic culture needs to embrace Enlightenment values, and it needs to do so damn quickly.

"It needs its own McCartney sisters and its own Aquinas. Until it gets them the culture stands condemned, with smoking ruins and a trail of corpses across the west as sad monuments to its destructive power."

~ Me from my post 'Condemning a Culture'

"The Islamic terrorists who commit these atrocities are not the poor or downtrodden of the Muslim world, they are its best and brightest. What sort of culture has its best and brightest commit multiple murder, while its poor and downtrodden flee (when they can) to find a better life.

"Freedom's enemies have many faces, but one fundamental evil: hatred of the good for being the good. The lietmotif of nihilist hatred is a "radical rejection of the good, absolutely and in principle; rejection of what is good by any standard and by all standards, rejection of good as such. The emotional expression of nihilism is 'hatred of the good for being the good'."

~ Me from my post 'Business As Usual'

"Good guys can't believe nihilism. They can't imagine that anyone could accept nihilism, let alone try to practice nihilism, let alone cultivate in himself a hatred of the good. The good guys' naiveté on this point is their main strategic weakness: how do you fight enemies you can't even believe exist?"

~ Michael Miller from his post 'Nihilist Mutants'

• "Londoners are so wonderfully calm under this sort of pressure. Grace under pressure.
• "52 people killed. 700 injured. I hope some of those killed were the perpetrators.
• "London stock exchange down, and then straight back up again. Business as usual.
• "Given the planning that this attack displays, the good news is the relatively low loss of life. Despite the easy, soft targets they chose to rip apart with their explosives, it seems the cowardly, destructive fuckers were unable to acquire the materiel to kill and destroy at the level of Madrid, New York or Bali, or the coordination to kill on an even greater scale. Is that some sort of blessing? Are these people weaker in their destructive powere than we give them credit for?
• At times like these, isn't it a reminder that (despite their mixed premises and many political differences between us—and with significant low-life exceptions such as George Galloway and Keith Locke) western people and politicians actually share more than we differ. Tony Blair's words at midday London time could hardly be bettered: "It is important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. Whatever they do, it is our determination they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations around the world.”
• The solidarity shown by western leaders at Gleneagles was something to see. Thirteen leaders including Jacques Chirac, George Bush, Kofi Annan and [even] Vladimir Putin stood shoulder-to-shoulder on stage behind Tony Blair has he decried the outrage, and promised to defend our values. I hope they mean it.
• Once again we see the lesson that you can not kill terrorism, you can only choke off its means of supply by hunting down those who support them and give them succour. At times such as these it becomes even more important that those who value human life and the ideas that support life do make a stand for the values of liberty and freedom.
• Those people that commit these atrocities and those who support them have exactly nothing to offer us except bloodshed , tears and death. Nothing."

~ Me from my post 'Grace Under Pressure' 

"Many years ago I was working in The City [of London] and there were two events that made travel into work almost impossible.

"The first was a series of storms that brought down power lines, blocked train routes and so on. Not surprisingly, the place was empty the next day. Why bother to struggle through?

"The other event was an IRA bomb which caused massive damage and loss of life. Trains were disrupted, travel to work the next day was horribly difficult and yet there were more people at work than on a normal day. There was no co-ordination to this, no instructions went out, but it appeared that people were crawling off their sick beds in order to be there at work the next day, thrusting their mewling and pewling infants into the arms of anyone at all so that they could be there.

"Yes, we’ll take an excuse for a day off, throw a sickie. But you threaten us, try to kill us? Kill and injure some of us?

"'Fuck you, sunshine.

"'We’ll not be having that. '

"No grand demonstrations, few warlike chants, a desire for revenge, of course, but the reaction of the average man and woman in the street? Yes, you’ve tried it now bugger off. We’re not scared, no, you won’t change us. Even if we are scared, you can still bugger off."

~ Tim Worstall from his post 'From Back in the Day'

The separation of church and state is being ignored by laws that officially reference Māori spirituality, customs, and worldviews

The separation of church and state is a principle established back in the Enlightenment era, one recognised in the US Bill of Rights. Establishing "a wall of separation between Church and State," Thomas Jefferson explained the principle in a famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Association:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

The principle rests on this compelling point: "that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions," so that neither the Danbury Baptist Association nor any other religious-based group need fear government interference in their right to expressions of religious conscience. 

This was a historic change from centuries of religious persecution. This is a point now unfortunately lost on New Zealand's legislators, who for decades have routinely inserted into law concepts emanating from Māori spirituality, customs, and worldviews, i.e., Māori religion. 

Law, we should be reminded, is a description of the way in which a government proposes to exercise its monopoly on force. As such, we should demand precision, objectivity, and concepts based on protecting individual rights. Instead, as a result of this departure from proper principle we have been delivered law that is imprecise, and riddled with bogus concepts based on a particular religious worldview.

Author and researcher John Robinson lists 35 New Zealand laws that officially reference Māori spirituality, customs, and worldviews — using terms like tikanga, mana whenua, mauri, wairua, and more. Among them are many that might surprise you:

Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA)
Terms: Te Mana o te Wai, kaitiakitanga, mauri, wairua, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Gives legal status to Māori spiritual values when assessing environmental impacts and resource consent.

Water Services Act 2021
Terms: Te Mana o te Wai, kaitiakitanga
Context: Water regulation must consider Māori spiritual views on water’s life force and guardianship.

Local Government Act 2002
Terms: tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Requires councils to involve Māori in decision-making and give weight to their cultural practices.

Conservation Act 1987
Terms: kaitiakitanga, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Māori beliefs must be considered in conservation efforts and land access.

Waitangi Tribunal Act 1975
Terms: tikanga Māori, Treaty principles
Context: Empowers Māori customs and grievances to be judged by Māori cultural norms.

Environment Canterbury Act 2016
Terms: mana whenua representation
Context: Mandates tribal representation in regional governance based on ancestral authority.

Oranga Tamariki Act 1989
Terms: whakapapa, mana tamaiti, tikanga Māori
Context: Māori child welfare decisions must respect spiritual ancestry and cultural norms.

Education and Training Act 2020
Terms: tikanga Māori, Treaty principles, mana whenua
Context: Embeds Māori values and customs into the public education system.

Climate Change Response Act 2002
Terms: tikanga Māori, kaitiakitanga, Te Tiriti o Waitangi
Context: Climate planning must consider Māori spiritual guardianship of nature.

Crown Minerals Act 1991
Terms: tikanga Māori, mana whenua, Treaty principles
Context: Requires consultation with Māori based on cultural and spiritual claims to land and minerals.

Biosecurity Act 1993
Terms: tikanga Māori, mana whenua, Treaty of Waitangi
Context: Disease and pest control policy must consider Māori views on spiritual and land connections.

Public Health and Disability Act 2000
Terms: tikanga Māori, mana motuhake, Treaty of Waitangi
Context: Health services are required to reflect Māori beliefs and autonomy.

Wildlife Act 1953
Terms: customary rights, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Spiritual and cultural practices are recognized in hunting and wildlife protections.

Forests Act 1949
Terms: tikanga Māori, Treaty of Waitangi
Context: Forest use and protection must consider Māori customs and Treaty rights.

Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014
Terms: wāhi tapu, wāhi tūpuna, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Sacred and ancestral Māori sites are protected by law.

Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022
Terms: tikanga Māori, Māori Health Authority, Treaty of Waitangi
Context: Establishes a parallel Māori health system based on cultural values.

Kainga Ora–Homes and Communities Act 2019
Terms: tikanga Māori, mana whenua, Treaty obligations
Context: Housing projects must align with Māori cultural values and Treaty-based consultation.

Land Transport Management Act 2003
Terms: mana whenua, Treaty principles
Context: Māori cultural considerations must be included in transport planning.

Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Act 2000
Terms: kaitiakitanga, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Spiritual guardianship and cultural relationships must be respected in marine planning.

Walking Access Act 2008
Terms: tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Access to land and tracks must consider Māori spiritual and cultural significance.

EEZ and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act 2012
Terms: tikanga Māori, Treaty principles, mana whenua
Context: Deep-sea resource use must consult Māori cultural and spiritual perspectives.

National Parks Act 1980
Terms: kaitiakitanga, wāhi tapu, tikanga Māori
Context: Māori spiritual values influence park management and access.

Marine Reserves Act 1971
Terms: kaitiakitanga, tikanga Māori
Context: Customary guardianship and Māori beliefs influence reserve designation and rules.

Antarctica (Environmental Protection) Act 1994
Terms: tikanga Māori
Context: Even activities in Antarctica must respect Māori spiritual customs.

Building Act 2004
Terms: tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Local iwi spiritual and cultural views must be considered in development approvals.

Te Urewera Act 2014
Terms: legal personhood, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Grants a forest legal status as a living ancestor with spiritual significance under Māori belief.

Whanganui River Settlement Act 2017 (Te Awa Tupua)
Terms: legal personhood, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Declares the river a living entity with rights, based on Māori cosmology.

 Taranaki Maunga Settlement Act 2023
Terms: legal personhood, tikanga Māori, mana whenua
Context: Gives Mount Taranaki the same spiritual and legal status as a living being.

Criminal Cases Review Commission Act 2019
Terms: te ao Māori, tikanga Māori
Context: Māori spiritual and cultural views may influence justice processes and reviews.

Trade Marks Act 2002
Terms: mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori
Context: Māori traditional knowledge and customs can affect trademark approvals.

Patents Act 2013
Terms: mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori
Context: Patents can be denied or restricted based on spiritual and cultural beliefs.

Each of these inclusions undermines law, makes its exercise illegitimate and imprecise, and requires by law that all New Zealanders bow to a religion — one based on race — that is not necessarily their own.

As a commenter observes, 

There are also numerous reports/frameworks affirming the Te Ao Maori vision- a powerful and authoritative reference to guide action and establish norms, e.g. Te Rautaki Ao Maori—guidelines for NZ parliamentary process, Matauranga Maori in the Media, and many more.
     NZers are now enmeshed in a web of embedded "cultural references" which decree how to live their lives.

There is neither a moral nor a legitimate legal case for that.

Cities As Centres Of Innovation: Lessons From Edinburgh And Paris

Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity.

Amidst the turmoil of modern times, evidence reveals significant progress across various metrics, from rising life expectancy to declining global poverty. Throughout history, cities have emerged as epicentres of innovation and progress, fostering collaboration, competition, and freedom of thought.

By exploring the unique environments of cities like Edinburgh and Paris, where intellectual liberty thrived, Chelsea Follett uncovers in this guest post the vital role of peace, freedom, and population density in driving human achievement and societal advancement.

Cities As Centres Of Innovation: Lessons From Edinburgh And Paris

by Chelsea Follett

HAS HUMANITY MADE PROGRESS? WITH so many serious problems, it is easy to get the impression that our species is hopeless. Many people view history as one long tale of decay and degeneration since some lost, idealised golden age.

But there has been much remarkable, measurable improvement—from rising life expectancy and literacy rates to declining global poverty. (Explore the evidence for yourself). Today, material abundance is more widespread than our ancestors could have dreamed. And there has been moral progress too. Slavery and torture, once widely accepted, are today almost universally reviled.

Where did all this progress come from? Certain places, at certain times in history, have contributed disproportionately to progress and innovation. Change is a constant, but progress is not. Studying the past may hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present. To that end, I wrote a book titled Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, exploring the places that shaped modern life.

The origin-points of the ideas, discoveries, and inventions that built the modern world were far from evenly or randomly dispersed throughout the globe. Instead, they tended to emerge from cities, even in time periods when most of the human population lived in rural areas. In fact, even before anything that could be called a city by modern standards existed, progress originated from the closest equivalents that did exist at the time. 

Why is that?

“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” urban economist Edward Glaeser opined in his book The Triumph of the City. Of course, he was hardly the first to observe that positive change often emanates from cities. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”

One of the reasons that progress tends to emerge from cities is, simply, people. Wherever more people gather together to “truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, that increases their potential to engage in productive exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration, and competition with each other. Cities’ higher populations allow for a finer division of labour, more specialisation, and greater efficiencies in production. Not to mention, a multiplication of knowledge — more minds working together to solve problems. As the writer Matt Ridley notes in the foreword he kindly wrote for Centers of Progress, “Progress is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. It is a collaborative, collective thing, done between brains more than inside them.”

A higher population is sufficient to explain why progress often emerges from cities, but, of course, not all cities become major innovation centres. Progress may be a team sport, but why do certain cities seem to provide ideal playing conditions, and not others?

That brings us to the next thing that most centres of progress share, besides being relatively populous: peace. That makes sense, because if a place is plagued by violence and discord then it is hard for the people there to focus on anything other than survival, and there is little incentive to be productive since any wealth is likely to be looted or destroyed. Smith recognised this truth, and noted that cities, historically, sometimes offered more security from violence than the countryside:

Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. […] Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.

OF COURSE, NOT ALL CITIES WERE are peaceful. Consider Smith’s own city: Edinburgh. At times, the city was far from stable. But the relatively unkempt and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. It was only after things settled down and the city came to enjoy a period of relative peace and stability that Edinburgh rose to reach its potential. Edinburgh was an improbable centre of progress. But Edinburgh proves what people can accomplish, given the right conditions.

During the Scottish Enlightenment centred in Edinburgh, Adam Smith was far from the only innovative thinker in the city. Edinburgh’s ability to cultivate innovators in every arena of human achievement, from the arts to the sciences, seemed almost magical.

Edinburgh gave the world so many groundbreaking artists that the French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” Edinburgh gave humanity artistic pioneers from the novelist Sir Walter Scott, often called the father of the historical novel, to the architect Robert Adam who, together with his brother James, developed the “Adam style,” which evolved into the so‐​called “Federal style” in the United States after Independence.

And then there were the scientists. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton developed many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat. The anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus became the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson, admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia.

Two of the greatest gifts that Edinburgh gave humanity were empiricism and economics. The influential philosopher David Hume was among the early advocates of empiricism and is sometimes called the father of philosophical skepticism. [Not such an unalloyed boon - Ed.] And by creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including free trade and economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries.

That brings us to the last but by no means least secret ingredient of progress. Freedom. Centres of progress during their creative peak tend to be relatively free and open for their era. That makes sense because simply having a large population is not going to lead to progress if that population lacks the freedom to experiment, to debate new propositions, and to work together for their mutual benefit. Perhaps the biggest reason why cities produce so much progress is that city dwellers have often enjoyed more freedom than their rural counterparts. Medieval serfs fleeing feudal lands to gain freedom in cities inspired the German saying “stadtluft macht frei” (city air makes you free).

That adage referred to laws granting serfs liberty after a year and a day of urban residency. But the phrase arguably has a wider application. Cities have often served as havens of freedom for innovators and anyone stifled by the stricter norms and more limited choices common in smaller communities. Edinburgh was notable for its atmosphere of intellectual freedom, allowing thinkers to debate a wide diversity of controversial ideas in its many reading societies and pubs.

Of course, cities are not always free. Authoritarian states sometimes see laxer enforcement of their draconian laws in remote areas, and Smith himself viewed rural life as in some ways less encumbered by constraining rules and regulations than city life. But as philosophy professor Kyle Swan previously noted for Adam Smith Works:

Without denying the charms and attractions Smith highlights in country living, let’s not forget what’s on offer in our cities: a significantly broader range of choices! Diverse restaurants and untold many other services and recreations, groups of people who like the same peculiar things that you like, and those with similar backgrounds and interests and activities to pursue with them — cities are (positive) freedom enhancing.

The same secret ingredients of progress—people, peace, and freedom—that helped Edinburgh to flourish during Smith’s day can be observed again and again throughout history in the places that became key centres of innovation. Consider Paris.

AS THE CAPITAL OF FRANCE, Paris attracted a large population and became an important economic and cultural hub. But it was an unusual spirit of freedom that allowed the city to make its greatest contributions to human progress. Much like the reading societies and pubs of Smith’s Edinburgh, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th‐​century Paris provided a place for intellectual discourse where the philosophes birthed the so‐​called Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a movement that promoted the values of reason, evidence‐​based knowledge, free inquiry, individual liberty, humanism, limited government, and the separation of church and state. In Parisian salons, nobles and other wealthy financiers intermingled with artists, writers, and philosophers seeking financial patronage and opportunities to discuss and disseminate their work. The gatherings gave controversial philosophers, who would have been denied the intellectual freedom to explore their ideas elsewhere, the liberty to develop their thoughts.

Influential Parisian and Paris‐ based thinkers of the period included the Baron de Montesquieu, who advocated the then‐​groundbreaking idea of the separation of government powers and the writer Denis Diderot, the creator of the first general‐​purpose encyclopaedia, as well the Genevan expat Jean‐​Jacques Rousseau. While sometimes [rightly - Ed.] considered a counter‐​Enlightenment figure because of his skepticism of modern commercial society and romanticised view of primitive existence, Rousseau also helped to spread skepticism toward monarchy and the idea that kings had a “divine right” to rule over others.

The salons were famous for sophisticated conversations and intense debates; however, it was letter‐​writing that gave the philosophes’ ideas a wide reach. A community of intellectuals that spanned much of the Western world—known as the Republic of Letters—increasingly engaged in the exchanges of ideas that began in Parisian salons. Thus, the Enlightenment movement based in Paris helped spur similar radical experiments in thought elsewhere, including the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. Smith’s many exchanges of ideas with the people of Paris, including during his 1766 visit to the city when he dined with Diderot and other luminaries, proved pivotal to his own intellectual development.

And then there was Voltaire, sometimes called the single most influential figure of the Enlightenment. Although Parisian by birth, Voltaire spent relatively little time in Paris because of frequent exiles occasioned by the ire of French authorities. Voltaire’s time hiding out in London, for example, enabled him to translate the works of the political philosopher and “father of liberalism” John Locke, as well as the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. While Voltaire’s critiques of existing institutions and norms pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond even what would be tolerated in Paris, his Parisian upbringing and education likely helped to cultivate the devotion to freethinking that would come to define his life.

By allowing for an unusual degree of intellectual liberty and providing a home base for the Enlightenment and the far‐​ranging Republic of Letters, Paris helped spread new ideas that would ultimately give rise to new forms of government—including modern liberal democracy.

Surveying the cities, such as Edinburgh and Paris, that built the modern world reveals that when people live in peace and freedom, their potential to bring about positive change increases. Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centres of progress, and that doing so sparks many intelligent discussions, debates, and inquiries in the Smithian tradition about the causes of progress and wealth.

* * * *

Chelsea Follett is the managing editor of HumanProgress.org, a policy analyst in the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and author of the book Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World (2023).
Find her on Twitter at @Chellivia.
Her article previously appeared at Adam Smith Works, and the Cato at Liberty blog.

THE LONG READ: A Christian Nation?

WHAT’S THE BASIS OF western civilisation? A commenter here at Not PC suggested that the foundation is religion —specifically Christian religion.

Now that's a widespread view to be sure, but being widespread doesn’t mean it’s not totally wrong. Which it is.

As I said in response to that commenter, "I suspect the Classical Greeks might raise some objections to the proposition, as might several historians of both the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment." 

If the basis of western civilisation can be described as a focus on reason, individualism, and happiness on this earth — ideas that were a product not of theologians but of Classical Greeks — ideas which were fortunately rediscovered for the west in the Renaissance, and then developed further in the Enlightenment — then, far from being any sort of foundation for these ideas, Christian religion is at odds with all of them. (More on that below.)

My commenter however suggested that as leading proof of his thesis was the observation that the USA is a "heavily Christian country" Which is true. As one data point in that thesis's favour he notes that "the US produced 173,771 patents in 2006. Check all Islamic countries since 1700 and you might get 1000.” 

Fine. But observe that a leading cause of scientific inquiry is the Enlightenment focus on reason and this earth. It is not being “heavily Christian.”  And the fact is that theocracy — any theocracy — is bad for free-wheeling scientific research.  

It's equally true that religion — any religion — is a hindrance rather than a help to scientific research. (Faith and mysticism are twin handmaidens of religion, but not handmaidens to truth—they so-called shortcuts to knowledge that are nothing but short-circuits destroying the mind, and destroying science if we would let them.) 

To properly assess causes for the claim above then, we might observe that the number of patents issued during the Dark Ages, over which the Christian church presided, can be counted on the fingers of one foot. Given that Islam is now enduring its own Dark Ages, it’s no surprise to find that their religious darkness (and patent production) is just as stultifying as the west's.

Fact is, the reason for the disparity in those quoted figures above is not because there are different religions in the US and in Islamic countries; it is because the influence of religion is far less and far less all-pervasive in the US than it is in the Islamic theocracies. The separation of religion and state was well done by America's Founders.

NOW I CAN ALREADY HEAR the claim that "the US was founded as a Christian country." Well, it simply wasn't. The Founding Fathers themselves were quite clear that they never intended that. John Adams for example declared explicitly, 

“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

Read that again just so you take it in:

“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

You can't get too much more of a blunt declaration than that.

Fact is, America's Revolution was not founded on the Christian God or upon any religion at all, but upon a view of human freedom and a declaration of rights that were both a product of the Enlightenment. As Thomas Jefferson explained (and he would know):

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, no more than on our opinions in physics and geometry...”

So declared Thomas Jefferson.

Fact is, the US was not a nation founded on religion at all. It was fully a Nation of the Enlightenment, that proud and unique era in human affairs that represented an overthrow of religion, and a renaissance of reason. [More quotes in this vein here] In fact if religion is anything to America it’s not a bulwark but a handbrake . It’s a threat, not a foundation—which is a what philosopher Leonard Peikoff maintains. 

Think about it: Just what exactly did religion bring to history? Founding Father James Madison has the summary:

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise....During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

Ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution. They do not describe western civilisation, but they do describe the Dark Ages to a 'T'; that ordure-strewn wasteland of crosses and graves and misery; those dark centuries over which the Christian church so dolefully presided.

As philosopher Leonard Peikoff explains, 

"The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art;  he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as 'the lust of the eyes'. . .
    “As the barbarians were sacking the body of Rome, the Church was struggling to annul the last vestiges of its spirit, wrenching the West away from nature, astronomy, philosophy, nudity, pleasure, instilling in men's souls the adoration of Eternity, with all its temporal consequences.""

The church made Augustine a saint for his views. No wonder. Augustine distinguished between what he called the City of God (based upon faith) and the City of Man (based upon reason) – he praised the former and damned the latter. Concern solely with life on Earth was a sin, he said. For Augustine, man was "crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous." 

"Intellectually speaking [concludes Peikoff], the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man's entire mental life. ‘I do not know in order to believe,’ he said, ‘I believe in order to know.’ In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion.
    "What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith. Thus, Tertullian's famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God's self-sacrifice on the cross: ‘Creo quia absurdum. (‘I believe because it is absurd.’)
    "As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare - a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to
jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.
    "What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self- denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn't unfair to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine's answer is: what else befits creatures befouled by original sin, creatures who are, as he put it, 'crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous'." ['Religion vs America,' Leonard Peikoff]

In his book A History of Knowledge, historian Charles Van Doren points out that

"God was the last of the three great medieval challenges [note: others being the “struggle for subsistence” and a “world of enemies”], and the most important. Human beings had always been interested in God and had attempted to understand his ways. But the Greeks, and especially the Romans, had kept this interest under control…In the early Middle Ages it overcame the best and the brightest among Europeans. It can almost be said that they became obsessed with God." [A History of Knowledge, Charles van Doren, p. 100]

What were the practical results of this approach to life? You won't be surprised.

Dutch economic historian Angus Maddison points out that from 500 to 1500 AD Europe suffered from zero-percent economic growth. Zero percent! This in a period in which onea slice of bread per day could be considered a good meal. In which the average infant had a life expectancy of just 24 years -- if, that is, they weren't of that third who failed to live beyond their first year. [See Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development, pp 4-7, and Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective]

Says French historian Fernand Braudel of the pre-eighteenth century era, 

"Famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into ma's biological regime and built into his daily life..." [Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, pp 73-78]

Everything human took a dive, only re-emerging centuries later with the Renaissance (which represented the rediscovery by the west of Aristotle and the Classical Greeks), and then the Enlightenment (which represented the application of Aristotelian reason to human life).

Life during the Dark Ages was shit. Almost literally. Sanitation collapsed, and disease rocketed; agriculture barely fed those who worked the fields, and that in good years; literacy and education plummeted; learning almost vanished; scientific research itself was almost non-existent, replaced instead by arcane theological explorations into the nature of the supernatural; life expectancy as we've said was just barely above the teens ... and the ethic of faith, sacrifice and suffering oversaw it all. The only thing that flourished in this time was the church, and its churchmen.

The result was not at all a flourishing of reason and a devotion to life on earth. Quite the opposite. For that we had to wait for the rediscovery of Aristotle (for the west) in the Renaissance – and for that we do have to thank the world of Islam (whose scholars had preserved Aristotle’s works, and during the period those works and their secular focus were valued Islam enjoyed its own Golden Age.)

W.T. Jones, the 20th century's leading philosophical historian, summarises the state of the west at this time: 

"Because of the indifference and downright hostility of the Christians ... almost the whole body of ancient literature and learning was lost... This destruction was so great and the rate of recovery was so slow that even by the ninth century Europe was still immeasurably behind the classical world in every department of life... This, then, was truly a 'dark' age." [W.T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 2, The Medieval Mind' pp141-142]

And so it was: An age in which ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution flourished. 

In no way do those qualities describe western civilisation — but they do describe the Dark Ages to a 'T,' those centuries over which the Christian church so dolefully presided, and whose shackles the west had to break to emerge, like a butterfly, from its pagan chrysalis.

And those qualities also describe to a ‘T’ the present-day Islamic theocracies—who like the west of that Dark era rejected the sunlit secularism of the Greeks only to embrace its polar opposite. We can see in them now what the west's Dark Ages was like then (and, in reverse, see in the West now what the Islamic Golden Age may have become, if not for its destruction by theology.)

SO IN SUMMARY, the basis of western civilisation is not Christian religion. Sure, Christian religion in its Enlightenment clothing contributed art, music, literature and much more. But the foundation on which those contributions were made was contributed by the rediscovery and then the application of Greco-Roman thought and Aristotelian reason. 

Because the leitmotifs of western civilisation are not ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution —all the things so associated with the Christian-dominated Dark Ages —but their polar opposites: reason, freedom and individualism.

We got these beneficient ideas from the Greeks. And we had to shake off centuries of religion to rediscover them.

RELATED LINKS: 

• Murdering tall poppies - that's what Easter is all about - NOT PC
• The Founding Fathers on religion - Ayn Rand Institute
• Religion vs America - Leonard Peikoff
• The Universalisability of Western Civilisation - George Reisman
• Christianity’s War against the Mind – Aristotle Versus Religion - Andrew Bernstein
• Gimme That Old Time Religion! - James Valliant
• The Nature of Western Civilisation - George Reisman
• The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages. A Critique of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason. – Andrew Bernstein (with responses)
• “So, How Come You Keep Bashing Religion?” - NOT PC

NB: This is a 2007 post, re-posted here slightly edited (and with links updated) from a 2010 update. There's a pretty good comments thread back there, if you'd like to check it out.