OPINION:
For thousands of years, people typically had short lifespans and were at the mercy of bad weather, crop failures and tyrants. By modern standards, life was “nasty, brutish and short,” as philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it in 1651.
Today, we can barely imagine life before electricity, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, jet travel, automobiles, smartphones, modern medicine and dentistry, and the internet.
All of these things came out of the free market West, which for centuries after the Greco-Roman period was simply called Christendom. None of it came from socialism, which was born during the atheistic and murderous French Revolution in 1789.
Fifty-nine years later, socialism was given monstrous force by Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto.”
A perversion of Western philosophy, socialism operates like cancer in otherwise healthy tissue.
Socialism was weaponized by Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega and others who used it to tyrannize their fellow countrymen and spread misery.
Socialists refuse to acknowledge their debt to Western civilization. Beijing now has electricity thanks to Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. Much of the world has air conditioning thanks to John Gorrie, Willis Carrier and General Electric. Cars are affordable (at least, they were) thanks to Henry Ford. And so on, up to computers and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The free West’s inventions have benefited billions of people. Socialism does not create wealth or spawn original discoveries. It is why the Soviet Union had to steal and adapt. It is why the Chinese communists work so hard to hack Western technology.
At the heart of socialism, Nazism and communism is hatred of God. The Bible sacralizes life and marriage, defends property ownership and truth, and puts government under the authority of heaven.
The Old Testament proclaims the sovereignty of God over man and the promise of a messiah. The New Testament teaches that redemption flows from the wounded hand and side of Jesus Christ, not the grasping hand of government.
To this day, leftists portray Christianity as the enemy of science and equality. That view filters down to schoolchildren via Marxist-educated teachers. It is one of the main reasons that so many young people have benign views of socialism and negative views of Christianity and capitalism.
What the students are not told is that Christianity, far from being a hindrance, has been the key to progress, as explained by Stanley L. Jaki in his 1988 book, “The Savior of Science.”
Jaki was a Catholic Benedictine priest and physicist who earned his Ph.D. at Fordham under the tutelage of Nobel laureate Victor Hess, who discovered cosmic rays. The book explains that the biblical concept of a God-created, predictable order laid the groundwork for the scientific method.
Other societies, such as China, India and Egypt, excelled at some early discoveries such as algebra, architecture, paper and fireworks, but they hit a theological wall at some point.
“They all were dominated by a pantheistic concept of the universe going through eternal cycles,” Jaki wrote. In other words, why bother if it is just an endless cycle of rinse and repeat?
“The pattern is the stillbirth of science in each of them in spite of the availability of talents, social organizations, and long periods of peace,” Jaki said.
Islam, he noted, preserved Greek math and science, such as from Euclid and Archimedes, and created elements of beauty. However, Muslims became content with a capricious reality conferred by Allah — a God whose creation, according to some Islamic scholars, cannot be predicted.
As such, Muslim science began declining in the 11th century, never to recover.
By contrast, the biblical concept of an ordered, discoverable universe has propelled science, with Christians such as physicist Isaac Newton opening up new worlds.
Over the centuries, the West evolved, birthing the Industrial Revolution. In 1776, America’s founding was grounded in the understanding that people are created in the image of God and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
Against this, what did socialism offer? Divisive envy harnessed to political power aimed at making government a virtual god. This diabolical doctrine appeals to man’s vices, including sexual excess, while punishing virtues, such as forming God-centered families and self-governing communities. It hates independent thought and life.
Socialism is sold as fairness and compassion, but in practice, it spreads misery while enriching a few at the top. It operates like a man who watches another man build a house, then taxes him out of it, giving the home to people who hail the tax man as a hero.
It is also prone to violence. From the 2020 George Floyd riots to ongoing acclaim for Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in cold blood on a Manhattan street, the left hums with an undercurrent of savagery.
How else can you explain the coven of Democratic women happily applauding Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, as she signed a law allowing the killing of unborn babies right up to the moment of birth?
It is only by God’s grace that any of us can escape the urge to blame our problems on others and take what is not ours.
To the extent that it interferes with our growing in the admonition of God and opening our hearts to his offer of mercy, socialism is doing the devil’s work, and Americans need to put it behind them.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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