What Has Positivism Wrought?

Wauck recaps a series of lectures (Walgreen) at U of Chicago.

...[A reader] sent me a quote from Leo Strauss’s Walgreen lectures at the U. of Chicago, dating all the way back to 1949. Those six lectures became Strauss’s book Natural Right and History, in the same way that Eric Voegelin’s Walgreen lectures became The New Science of Politics. In these lectures Strauss takes on the usual relativistic arguments that Libertarians and others like to trot out in favor of moral relativism: History, they say, shows that different cultures disagree on moral norms so that must mean that there are no moral norms. It’s all relative so stop talking about it and lets all just do what we want provided what we want doesn’t interfere too much with other people’s wants. Or some such twaddle.

It’s too shallow to waste time on, but I did like the quote from the beginning of the lectures. What Strauss is saying, back in 1949, was that “American social science” had rejected the Declaration’s enunciation of God-given rights based on an intelligible knowledge of human nature, and had gone over to the Enlightenment view, espoused in England, France, and—above all—in Germany. The Enlightenment view, once the view of an elite minority, is now the default view in America as throughout most of the West. Human rights are not based on human nature as created by God, but are instead based on whatever legislatures and courts say they are. This is the view in which our young students are now indoctrinated, and Strauss viewed that prospect with trepidation.

Of course, the American elite’s infatuation with German thought has deep roots in the Progressive Era. It’s also true that these ideas of German thought resonated with the skeptical and relativist English thinkers like David Hume. The bottom line is the unknowability of anything called human nature and the reliance on the Will to create the beings that we want to be....

That red section is the guts of it.  "....whatever legislatures and courts say....." is known as Positivism, which (no surprise here) is endorsed by such as Althouse--a law-prof.

It is, conveniently, God-less, thus it appeals to many who are also God-less, whether deliberately or accidentally, and even to that segment of believers who want to be 'nice.'  The analogy that applies (mutatis mutandis) is RINOs, or perhaps the people who say they are anti-abortion but who argue for "life of the mother" or who don't have a problem with "morning-after" pills.

Either the Founders actually meant ".....laws of Nature and Nature's God......" or they did not.

We've found out what happens to this country assuming they did not mean it.  That should be enough to prove that they did.