Last Monday, the 18th, I caught the last few minutes of a Claremont Institute forum “Five Years After September 11,” as part of their Constitution Day events, which was shown on CSPAN. The panel was made up of: Mark Helprin, Christopher Hitchens, William Kristol, Brian T. Kennedy. The end was very interesting in itself. Hitchens, in reply to a question I can’t remember, stated the same thesis, in a somewhat different form, he ended his column also from last Monday titled “Papal Bull” on the Popes speech that has yet again stirred up the death worshippers. Hitchens made the point that one does not fight one form of unreason with another, in this case, Christianity. As he concluded his Monday column that is posted at Slate:
He pretends that the word Logos can mean either "the word" or "reason," which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of "revealed" truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates.
One of the few bloggers to comment on the deeper philosophic meaning of the Pope’s address is Gus Van Horn. Van Horn notes that the main point of the Pope’s message was about the danger of secularism. Of course, what else is the Pope going to say but that faith and reason are comparable? Since Thomas Aquinas that has been the Church’s position. Catholic World News has made the Pope’s entire speech available.
Back to Hitchens’ latest for another moment. Hitchens, in the panel discussion, frames the issue not just as reason versus unreason but also as religion versus secularism. There is a serious problem with the latter dichotomy. The problem is that there are many Christians who are far more rational that many in the secular Left. When it comes to undermining reason the Catholic Church is a piker compared to Post Modern nihilists. An impressionable nineteen-year-old after hearing his professor “prove” that certainty is impossible and that truth and values are all relative may start to think, “if this is reason, then to hell with it.” (Quote from Ayn Rand in a slightly different context) It is the modern skeptics and sophists who have done the most to undermine reason in the last several decades.
The Post Modern types had the ground prepared for them by the Marxists. Marxism is a secular cult that undermines reason by masquerading as a scientific social theory. The hard Left has degenerated to the point by obtaining an informal “Unholy Alliance” with the arch-enemies of reason and freedom. Follow the link and read the quote of George Galloway. The irrational left has the same goals and enemies that it did prior to 1989. There goal was described by Orwell in 1984 by Big Brother spokesman O’Brien:
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?...If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.
And the thing is this, many of the secular left, including environmentalists, do not care who is wearing the boot.
The Pope seems to believe that a stable compromise between reason and unreason is possible. All one has to do is look at the descent of the secular left into militant irrationality to see that this is not possible:
When a tradition which began as an alleged expression of “pure reason” and stern morality ends up fooling with LSD, “Saint Genet,” and “polymorphous perverse sexuality,” its breach with cognition and with values is complete. The growing disillusionment of the early postwar years marked the beginning of the Kantian end. The convulsion of the sixties was the next step: the declaration of bankruptcy. (Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, p. 309)
In this case both the “soft” relativist and “hard” subjectivist wings of the left are either running interference for or ignoring Jihad. For their part Moslem Jihad is pure mysticism straight from the Middle Ages with its complement of hatred for reason and all that reason makes possible.
The Pope for his part would render to mysticism the whole area of values:
We shall return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be “scientific” would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science” and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter.
This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.
Read this passage carefully, a little later in his talk the Pope states that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. It is the modern secularists who have made it so. All the Pope has to do is point to the fact the modern philosophy has consigned ethics to the realm of the subjective and then declares the New Testament as “the imprint of the Greek spirit.” It is not. But, who in positions of leadership or public prominence even understand much less emulates the “Greek spirit?”
Crossposted at The Dougout
2 comments:
Some excellent points that I was hoping to bring up at some point. Actually, I have in passing:
“The [religious] traditionalists didn’t achieve this philosophical triumph on their own – it was handed to them on a silver platter. For decades, post-modern philosophers had argued that values (i.e. ethics) could not be founded in fact. In fact, they argued, no arguments can support one system of ethics over another. If there is no law-giver, then there is no law. God is dead, was the oft heard post-modern reframe, no ethics is possible in a barren materialistic world of mere physical objects. You are now in God’s shoes; make the rules as you please. With such a confession, the traditionalists needed do little but point to the resultant horrors of the 20th century totalitarian movements.“
But it’s a point that needs to be made again and again. One can refer to Aristotle or Rand as counter examples to the view that ethics can’t be found on a naturalistic basis. I’ve pointed that out but it is difficult when the main standard-bearers for a secular approach are completely absurd.
Still when the Pope embraces Aristotle, I find common ground for a good discussion and in many cases agreement. I don't find that on the left.
That was a great essay.
I've long touted 1984 as the second most important book (behind the Bible) written for western civilization. It's unfortunate that people:
-have forgotten or never knew the lessons Orwell was trying to teach.
-Abuse terms like "Orwellian" and "Big Brother" to the point of making them cliches.
-Disregard the fact that Orwell was describing governments of the extreme left and try, instead, to make inappropriate parallels.
Post a Comment