Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Christianity’s invention of the cultural idea of children as treasured human being was an outgrowth of its most stupendous and revolutionary idea: the radical equality, and the infinite value, of every single human being as a beloved child of God.

France is in the throes of a unique cultural moment — one that stretches way beyond the soul-searching debates over Islamist violence and Muslim integration, or arguments over its economic travails, fractious labor politics and troubling brain drain.

Well-meaning lefties reassure themselves that they are doing God’s work by punishing landlords and passing well-intentioned regulations, while the very people they are trying to help are left poorly housed (or not housed at all) by their policies.

Whether Iran’s leadership are just apparatchiks, or whether they truly believe what they say they believe, no one can say. But this risk is severely underestimated in the West relative to the evidence.

The critics are right that reformocons don’t believe that policy alone will fix things. That’s because reformocons live in the real world, not the world of Vulgar Marxism.

In the end, our refusal to accept that we know – and can control – less than we think is a refusal of our own extremely precarious human condition.

The modern age included a laudable squeamishness against tyranny, but it also included a nice dose of utopian hubris, and the special horrors of the modern age are incomprehensible without this Enlightenment idea.