Green Cathedrals: Environmentalism’s Mythological Appeal
“Capitalism—the social system based on the values of reason, individualism, and liberty—produced the greatest material abundance the world had ever known. And not only in America: Every country and culture that adopted Enlightenment premises progressed dramatically, while every society mired in the pre-Enlightenment muck of mysticism and collectivism continued to stagnate and suffer.
It would seem that this demonstration of the extraordinary practical benefits of reason, individualism, liberty, and capitalism should have been enough to convince the whole world—certainly, its intellectuals and leaders—of their unarguable merits. Yet today, Enlightenment ideas that have brought the world so much good are considered suspect, if not evil. And not only the ideas themselves, but the agent whose rational faculty generated them. “