Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave
The Gods of the Mind
David W. Breese
The means by which one person is able to rule many others is a fascinating subject of study. Invariably, the explanation of such control is that it is a matter of the mind. Any ruler, no matter how numerous his weapons or great his wealth, must finally rule by other means.
Biology Is Destiny: Charles Darwin
David W. Breese
“After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty’s ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Fitzroy, RN, sailed from Devonport on the twenty-seventh of December 1831.…
Those are the opening words of a diary. Similar entries have been made in similar diaries in the early days of many a voyage from many a port down through history across the world. This entry, however, is something special. It is the beginning of a diary that was to become one of the most important in history, a diary that would chronicle a set of experiences that led to a decisive shift in thinking about the natural sciences, a change that would, in turn, influence the world of thought outside the natural sciences, leading ultimately to changes in the entire culture of many a nation.
Thinking Further About Science
David W. Breese
As we have noticed, Darwin presented the concept of natural selection as the latest discovery, even a law of science. The initial impact of Darwin’s research was upon the scientific community of his day, but that influence continues to be felt in the reverence the scientific community of our day gives to Darwin’s ideas.
It is useful, therefore, for us to consider this matter we call science and to investigate what we mean by the term. For indeed, science has come to be thought of as a mysterious entity beyond the intellectual capabilities of the average man; it is assumed that only rarely are the mysterious inner chambers of science penetrated by ordinary people.
Social Darwinism
David W. Breese
How, then, does Darwin rule from his grave?
The answer has to do with the questions everyone at some time or another asks: What makes the world continue? Where did I come from? Why are things as they are? These are important, perennial questions.
As is so often the case with an intellectual construct, Darwinism has moved out from its original platform to operate in a wider world. The ideas of evolution have left the confines of biology, botany, and paleontology and are now thought to apply to the social structure at large. This application of Darwinism to social structures is called Social Darwinism and is foundational for our culture. It represents the way Darwin rules our society from the grave.
The Ruling Principle for All Humanity: Karl Marx
David W. Breese
Beneath the leaden skies north of London met that day a small and sober group of mourners. It was Saturday, March 17, 1883, and the faithful had gathered for the funeral service of the man who was to be called by some the greatest thinker in all of history. The accolades concerning his life and thought border on idolatry, and the promises believed by many as to the future he had created amount to little short of heaven on earth.
The body in the casket was that of Karl Marx.
Thinking Further About Marxism
David W. Breese
Marxism has produced the greatest degree of social, physical, and moral ruin the world has ever known. Wherein does it err?
Dave Breese explains that Marxism errs in four ways.
More than the remains of Karl Marx lie today in Highgate Cemetery. There also are buried the hopes, the dreams, the human possibilities of more millions of pitiable souls than the world will ever be able to imagine. But, also, the ghost of Karl Marx continues to move across the world.
Closing the Book: Julius Wellhausen
David W. Breese
The Suicide of the West! That is the title of a book by James Burnham we would all do well to read. It is the statement also of a condition that Burnham sees as coming to pass in our time. One of the interesting points in Burnham’s book is the assertion that the West remembers enough about Christianity to feel guilty for its sins but not enough to recall where forgiveness comes from. He believes there is evidence of a profound deterioration in the most important entity on the face of the earth today, an entity the world cannot do without, the Christian religion.
There are many who now convincingly argue that the Christian religion, as it exists in the world today, is but a shadow of its once proud former self.
The Coming of Strange Fire
David W. Breese
“I have just seen what hell is like.”
The date was August 6, 1945. The words were expressed by an observer on a military aircraft that had just turned away from a city whose name would be printed in every subsequent history book. The event was the explosion of the first atomic bomb ever dropped over a populated area of the world. The experience of discovering what hell is like was the last remembered moment for 90,000 people whose lives were extinguished from this world in that living instant. Almost 130,000 people were killed, injured, or missing, and 90 percent of that industrial city was leveled by the bomb blast.
From that moment on, the world would never be the same again.
Looking Within: Sigmund Freud
David W. Breese
“The wellsprings of the human personality!”
Those words represent the object of a quest conducted by most of the human beings who have lived in the world. Who has not, at one time or another, stopped to ask, Who am I? Why am I like I am? For many, this quest has not been a happy one, for it has led them to feel as if they are reaching into unknown passages in the dark labyrinth of the soul.
The true nature of man and the shape of his spiritual being has been defined in more ways, shaped by more theories, and analyzed by more psychic approaches than probably any other entity on the face of the earth.
The pursuit of answers to those questions has been infinitely complicated by the fact that few have known what they truly seek, and fewer yet have conceived of themselves as having any kind of road map by which to do the seeking.
The Vast Emergence: John Dewey
David W. Breese
Have we really moved into the dawn of a new age?
That was the prevailing question throughout the Western world at the opening of the twentieth century. As the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth, there was an all but universal sense that a new wideness, wonder, breadth of vision, and abundance of opportunities had come upon the world. All of civilization appeared to be blossoming into a fullness of flower that would make the past seem like the dark ages and the future filled with dimensions of thinking and living unanticipated by even the most happy optimists. Few of us who inhabit the years at the close of the twentieth century can sense the euphoria our forebears felt when they contemplated the future in the nascent years of “this fabulous century.”
The attitude that characterized the culture of the time grew out of many streams of influence that were thought genuine and world-changing by both the thinkers and the common citizens of the West in that day—and there was some accuracy in their assessment. The streams of influence they observed were significant and world-changing. But few of those influences changed the course of history in exactly the way those living at the time thought they would.
New Hope for the Nations: John Maynard Keynes
David W. Breese
“But we only owe it to ourselves!”
The world after the turn of the twentieth century was an optimistic place. The Industrial Revolution was coming on strong, promising an expanded measure of prosperity for the nations of the West. For the left, a fair degree of percolation was promised by the widening dissemination and impact of Marxist theory. For the right, the expansion of capital, with its promise of wider industrialization, seemed to be a good omen for the future. By 1910, the first airplane was flown above the beaches at Kitty Hawk. The first automobile was to belch and wheeze its way down a narrow street in one of America’s cities. The railroad system had been expanded to unforeseen dimensions, reaching from coast to coast with its promise to unify a young, robust nation called America.
The Advent of Diffusion: Søren Kierkegaard
David W. Breese
“I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.”
The man who spoke those words produced in the world a wide result that is measurable and yet mysterious. Born in 1813 and dying in 1855, he said what he said, lived as he lived, and wrote what he wrote before the time of most of the other historical provocateurs who are the object of our attention. The others knew little about him; and if they did know, cared even less. Nevertheless, he built a secret tunnel under their lives and years that was to surface and bring his ideas to the fore long after they were gone. The writings of this man were sometimes clear, but more often they were frustratingly cryptic. An interesting fact about the products of his facile pen is that they needed to wait one hundred slumbering and inattentive years before they were even translated into the English language. When they appeared in English, they made a stunning impact, for they were just the ideas for which the world was waiting.
Who Shall Overcome?
David W. Breese
The generation that now stands at this point in history dare not move blithely onward as if, as the existentialists claim, there has been no instructive yesterday and will be no tomorrow that matters. Rather, perceptive souls of this era have the right, the responsibility, the fascinating opportunity to study the past and make a genuine attempt not to repeat its tragic elements.
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