Taylor Weber’s Reviews > Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West > Status Update

"If you put control-oriented, analytical people in an individualistic, urban environment, give them a sense that the world will one day be better than it is now, and suffuse them with a conviction that there is an intelligence behind all things whose secrets are just waiting to be unveiled, then you would expect such a society to value novelty and discovery - even if most of them remain religiously devout farmers."

Gradually, churches would replace the Church, which would lead inexplicably to calls for religious tolerance and then religious pluralism, and ultimately the privatization of religion. It would also contribute to the rising prestige of experimental science… [which gave] the same results whether you were Protestant or Catholic, [and] made it a prime candidate to replace the church as the empire of modern thought.

Reading this book several months after finishing Trueman’s “Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” is unintentionally timely. Lotsssss of tie-in between the two (Wilson has even referenced Trueman’s book several times).

“In the late 18th century, concepts like rights, consent, choice, and equality were used to discuss questions of government... By the late 20th century, they were being used to settle questions of morality in general; my right to x your freedom to choose y, equality for z, and so forth. In many debates, they serve as conversation stoppers, axioms with unimpeachable moral authority.”

“The rate of change in the last two centuries makes the past feel much further away than it actually is, which inclines us to fawn over the future, and either patronize that past or ignore it altogether.”