The quest for the ideal is a human predisposition that shapes every social movement, political program, and religious communion. As we survey a world mired in war and social upheaval, we note seminal and competing conceptions of the ideal in human affairs. The socialist ideal of human perfectibility has failed everywhere it has been tried, and is currently failing wherever we look. The Islamic ideal of a humanity acceptable to Allah has resulted in oceans of bloodshed, insoluble antagonisms, and political dysfunction on a global scale. The Judeo-Christian ideal in its various forms, religious and secular, while quixotic in its progress, has enjoyed considerable success in providing for human happiness and prosperity. Is there a single factor that distinguishes the philosophies that enable human flourishing from those that inevitably produce mass misery and political disarray? To simplify in the interests of clarity, we can say that acceptance of human limitation is key to the...(Read Full Article)