Look at the last hundred years. According to recent scholarship, when you count up everybody who was killed in the gulags, the Holocaust, the killing fields, something like 205 million people were executed by their own governments. The U.S. population right now is about 315 million. Imagine if two of every three people you know were gone. That’s the death rate of the 20th century.
In a century when warfare took 50 million lives, governments killed four times that many. The state did that. So these questions of left and right are not merely academic questions. They are literally questions of life and death. These matter.
...What are the virtues anyway? On opening day at Hillsdale, I ask my students to tell me the seven virtues. Someone will say happiness. I tell them no, happiness may be a goal in your life, but it’s not a virtue. Then one of the students from a religious background will say faith, hope, and love. Good, those are the highest ones. But remember that before those emerged in Christianity, the pagans had already identified prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.
...The worst thing I could do as a professor, right, left, or center, would be to expect my students to be little clones of Brad Birzer at the end of the semester. That would be diabolic. Those of us who go into the classroom have this responsibility never to try and conform those who trust us. Never. We teach them what we believe to be true, but the most important thing is teaching them to question and to think
Birzer has found that his students
are tired of platitudes. They want to search for something deeper. They long to hear stories of greatness. No matter how cynical this generation of college students may seem, at the core they want truth.Read more here.
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