#1559 The Plight of a Secular Society

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Clay Jenkinson interviews Bruce Ledewitz, the author of The Universe is On Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life. Since Nietzsche's famous pronouncement that "God is dead," Euro-American culture has become profoundly secular--and it shows, according to Ledewitz. Without the great tradition of Christian culture, America has descended into radical individualism without any moral anchor for public or private behavior. Ledewitz rejects the Enlightenment's belief that secular culture is a sufficient restraining mechanism for humans who are, in the Enlightenment's formulation, capable of considerable perfectibility. Jefferson's belief in a "moral sense" is not enough to give American culture meaning or restraint. Ledewitz sees little hope for a restoration of a morally grounded American society.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the podcast introduction to listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.
0:05.1	I contacted Bruce because he has written about narrative. His concern is that human beings,
0:17.9	the secular world, the first world, doesn't have a narrative of a story of who we are,
0:23.7	how we got here, how the universe was created, what the universe signifies, where we are in it,
0:29.2	what our destiny is, why we die, what is it to be human and so on, that we don't have one anymore,
0:35.6	we're just at sea, we're just we shrug, there's nothing we can say, big bang and multiple universes
0:42.8	and so on, but we don't really have a story to tell, whereas in the Renaissance there was a story
0:49.1	to tell. Hamlet is all about this, where we are with respect to the universe is God in control.
0:57.6	What do we owe God as humans? What happens when we die?
1:04.1	What is the meaning of our lives? What is our responsibility to the community?
1:07.9	What are our responsibilities to our fellow human beings? And we take our cues from
1:13.7	pop culture mostly. So I wanted to interview Dr. Letovitz about this and I'm interested more,
1:20.0	of course I'm interested in that story, but I'm more interested at the moment. In America as it
1:24.8	approaches this 250th birthday, to my view is we don't have a narrative, that the American narrative
1:30.9	that we all thought we had, which sort of starts with the pilgrims in Jamestown and then the
1:38.6	lead up to the American Revolution and then the formulation of a republic in our Bill of Rights
1:44.8	and then the Constitution and then the Western movement and the frontier pioneer movement of
1:54.6	conestoga wagons and Daniel Boone and so on. The filling of the continent in the late 19th century and
2:01.9	then America's under the work of William McKinley and particularly Theodore Roosevelt, America
2:09.5	begins to assert itself in the larger sphere of the world and almost by accident in the 20th century
2:15.6	because of the the cataclysmic wars in Europe, America emerges as the hegemon and we've on the
2:22.9	whole handled our our dominion, the world with considerable responsibility and good sense,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Listening to America, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Listening to America and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.