Did the West Survive the 20th Century? |
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Alan Charles Kors, professor of intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania, frequent IHS lecturer, and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based civil rights institute that defends freedom of speech and conscience on university campuses, delivered this speech at the Philadelphia Society in 1999. Kors asks the question, "Did the West Survive the 20th Century?" He answers, "Has Western Civilization survived, its principle of reality justified and intact? Yes indeed." "The fruits of [Western Civilization] have been an unprecedented ability to modify the remediable causes of human suffering, to give great agency to utility and charity alike; to give to each individual a degree of choice and freedom unparalleled in all of human history; to offer a means of overcoming the station in life to which one was born by the effort of one's labor, mind, and will." |
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