There is a really good piece from Scot S. Powell up at The American Spectator, and you really should read it. Some excerpts:
[…] The Reformation and Renaissance set in motion a cultural awakening as well as an unusual concentration of human genius and extraordinary wisdom that culminated in the birth of a new nation, the United States — dedicated to the rule of law, separation of powers and limited government, and accountability to its citizens whose rights were God-given and thus unalienable and not subject to infringement by the state — a truly revolutionary model that subsequently influenced other nations worldwide well into the 20thcentury.
Copernicus, followed by Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, and more were key figures in the scientific revolution that expanded the frontiers of understanding the physical universe. Collectively, they gave birth to the scientific method, which became the most reliable and powerful means of pushing the envelope of discovery and invention through hypothesis testing that involved compiling and rationally evaluating empirical evidence and results to arrive at facts.
What is striking about the modern age compared with all previous ages is the speed at which progress was made. Coming on the heels of the Dark Ages, which encompassed nearly a millennium of relative stagnation and punctuated with the Bubonic Plague in the mid-14thcentury, the modern age made rapid progress applying science and harnessing innovation and discovery, reviving and pursuing cultural excellence, and addressing and solving people’s common needs and problems.
That’s worth thinking about. When the US was founded, a Roman farmer would have been completely at ease on an American farm, very little had changed, but before the Civil War, pretty much everything had, it would again before the Spanish-American War, and again before World War II, and still again now.
These successive waves of revolutionary change have transformed the world, they are the reason why the world’s population has multiplied, and all those people are living better than ever.
It’s a logarithmic rate of increase because it has built on itself. Tractors and electricity before World War II begat telephones and computers, which begat the internet. Building on the shoulders of what came before.
[…] We are told that our culture and the way we live is now post-Christian and that the need for redemption by God has been replaced by the imperatives of a secular redemption defined by political correctness. That new framework is largely based on the one-two approach of promoting guilt among largely successful white males for their alleged biases and misdeeds, past and present, and then providing them a solution in the form of relief and good feelings through making amends and accommodation to new groups and minorities.
In short the path of the new P.C. redemption has nothing to do with character improvement and everything to do with identity politics — races, classes, gender and sexual identity — and also the relationship that man has with the environment. And there is simply no end to atonement, role reversals, and reparations to fix things. As a result, we have come to a point where seemingly endless manufactured injustices are crowding out the joy of everyday life, stripping people of their spontaneity and their humor.
And that is the perniciousness of the PC culture, it tries to make us feel guilty for our positive accomplishments. It’s not my place to tell you what to do, but as for me, I simply refuse to play their game. I recognize that white men in concert with all the other colors, and yes, with women as well, who are essential in our culture, have improved our common world by orders of magnitude, in my lifetime certainly, but also in my father’s, and his father’s and so on for about 500 years. There is nothing, nothing in that record of which I am ashamed.
Have mistakes been rectified, wrongs righted, all that stuff along the way? Sure, that’s the point. Everything has gotten better for everyone.
And that’s why the regressive left has to try to destroy history so they can destroy freedom which is our greatest legacy.