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The Death of Humanity | Richard Weikart

Categories
Season 1
Episode
5
With
Michael Medved
Guest(s)
Richard Weikart
Duration
00:21:20
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The title of our program is Great Minds with Michael Medved, and it really does take a great mind to survey the sweep of Western intellectual history and pick out in all of that a disturbing trend. That’s what historian of modern European history Richard Weikart does in his latest book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life.

A Surveying Mind

Dr. Weikart teaches at California State University, Stanislaus, and is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture.

Video

Show Notes

  • 01:35 | What does “the death of humanity” mean?
  • 02:40 | The Enlightenment and the decline of the imago dei
  • 03:40 | Materialism and two ideas: “just a machine”, “just an animal”
  • 04:45 | Two kinds of soul in Hebrew
  • 05:50 | Bertrand Russell’s “accidental colocation of atoms”
  • 06:25 | Created from animals
  • 07:20 | “The Descent of Man” and the ascent of man
  • 08:35 | Biological determinism, environmental determinism, and eugenics
  • 09:40 | Lysenkoism and “building a new man”
  • 11:30 | Doesn’t the religious view sanction poverty, asceticism, and self-denial?
  • 12:20 | Moralizing without morality
  • 14:00 | Why does materialism undermine the human project?
  • 15:50 | The one area we’ve failed to reduce death tolls
  • 16:50 | The Enlightenment and the idea of suicide
  • 18:25 | Materialism and the obsession with sexuality

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Richard Weikart

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Richard Weikart is Emeritus Professor of History, California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to HitlerHitler’s EthicHitler’s Religion, The Death of Humanity, and Darwinian Racism. His most recent book is Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (2024). His PhD dissertation, Socialist Darwinism, earned the biennial prize of the Forum for History of Human Sciences as best dissertation in that field. He has lectured at many universities and other venues in the US and Europe. He also has been interviewed on dozens of radio shows, podcasts, and TV, and appeared in seven documentaries, including Expelled. Some of his lectures and interviews are available on YouTube.
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