I leave our atheist friends for he time being with some interesting comments by the American science-fiction writer John C Wright, a recent convert to Catholicism. He is puzzling over the fact that a reviewer recently described a story he wrote as Catholic propaganda when in fact it was written before his conversion - i.e. it is the work of an atheist who adhered to Stoic philosophy a la Marcus Aurelius.
His view that the status of Reason in Western culture specifically derives from the way in which greek thought was taken up and developed by Christian monotheism, and that without the monotheist/incarnationalist belief in an intelligible universe we wind up losing reason aswell, is an interesting point.
I do not ncessarily agree with all Mr. Wright's views, but it's worth arguing with him. Enjoy!
johncwright.livejournal.com/319862.html#cutid1A reader comments: "One thing about Stoic thought is that in many respects it is more like Christian thought than it is like modern thought in general. If the reviewer is unfamiliar with Stoicism then the mistake would not be entirely surprising to me."
Aha! Your thought I fear is true and right. Modern thought is so eager to reject Christ, that it ends up rejecting paganism as well, not to mention logic, philosophy, objectivity, faith, hope, charity, temperance, moderation, fortitude and justice. It rejects everything, and leave us with nothing.
Modern thought is composed, with innumerable minor variations, with two great main streams: the revolt against the Church in the name of Reason, and the revolt against Reason in the name of Nothing. The first revolt we can call, with no violence to the term, Modernism. The second we can call Postmodernism. There may be more accurate uses of these two terms, but for the purposes of this essay, these are correct in denotation and connotation. The sum of these two streams taken together produces an odd, indeed a horrifically ironic, modern movement. Christianity so successfully adopted an explanation of the world and heaven, that the postmoderns find they cannot reject the heaven they loath, the place of mystic revelation, without also rejecting the world, the place of reason. They are left with an abyss, where neither revelation nor reason reach, a place of pure Nietzschean willpower, a void where the meaningless Self is utterly free to shape the meaningless Nothing into whatever form the empty Self desires. This void is fitliest called Hell. As if they cannot burn down the Cathedral without burning down the Academy.
Why should this be? In every bumper sticker slogan pasted to every half-empty brain, in every television show, paperback novel, and quip by Carl Sagan, science is proposed as the enemy of the Church and the victor over her. Why in the world would the pagan idolaters of science smash their own idols in the fury of their iconoclasm to trample our Christian icons?
The short answer is that the scientific worldview is as Christian as the Great Mass of Mozart, as Christian as Michaelangelo’s David, as Christian as Christmas. I submit that the one cannot be degraded and dismissed without degrading and dismissing the other...
We can take Mathew Arnold as a typical modern man, perhaps one with more insight than normal. [NB - This specifically referes to Arnold's poem "On Dover Beach" which Wright has just quoted in full. Arnold's overall worldview is somewhat more complex.] He agrees with Nietzsche on this one point: that when the sea of faith recedes, it leaves behind a world without joy, love or light.
Arnold draws the despairing yet perfectly modern conclusion that, in the tumult of a meaningless roar, the two lovers should cling to each other, because there is no comfort in the world, only in each other’s arms. We can imagine the lovers in Arnold’s poem clinging in embrace as desperate as the lover in Dante’s poem, where Francesca and Paolo are born aloft in the stormwinds of Hell, seeking each other’s arms, in a world whose gates, like Arnold’s words likewise say of our world, bid all hope be abandoned.
This despair is the link between Modernism and Hedonism. The reason why mere pleasure is regarded as sacred by modern thinkers (or, to be precise, thought-avoiders) rather than dismissed as the animalistic weakness stern pagan thinkers, men like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, held it to be, is because in pleasure, in the embrace of one’s beloved, is the only divinity to be found in the godless secular cosmos. Humans are not psychologically built for selfishness, but for love. This is the reason why a loveless and selfish person is found repellent by normal humans. (Even Ayn Rand, a perfect example of a modern thinker, an atheist seeking to use nothing but reason to establish her moral code, even though she praised selfishness in her philosophy, even she regarded love as something so sacred that, illogically, she felt the sacred nature of romantic love gave warrant to the desecration of marriage.)
The postmodernist, however, will not even allow the Hedonist his embrace with his beloved. Postmodernism parts the lovers with one additional bit of post-logical reasoning, and says that rape underpins all romantic love, and that the man imposing upon and exploiting the woman is what lies behind all Romance. Freud might say that incestuous love for the man’s mother, merely displaced by a type of subconscious fraud, is what Romance really is. Marx could say it is part of an ideological superstructure tied to economic interests. Others, less coherent than Marx (if that can be imagined) would say romance is merely chemicals. We are robots, the postmodernist will mindlessly repeat like a robot, and science has proven that neither consciousness nor free will exist; and if no will, no love.
Our Dantean lovers are now reduced to a condition entirely less dignified than hell of lust, because they are now merely animals programmed by Selfish Genes; no, they are less than this for, they are molecular robots, never really alive at all; no, they are less than this, for they are merely aggregations of atoms like sand dunes blown by random wind into a certain shape that has no consistency and no fixed boundaries, sand grains entering and leaving like aimless thoughts, until the dune is blown apart. There are no entities and no words to define them.
Romance, I hope I need not pause to say, is a Romanish invention, something that springs out of Christendom and is as unique to it as the polyphonic diatonic music sung at Mass.
Now, if you are a Modernist, and are devoted to overthrowing the Church in the name of Reason, your reasoning faculty will rebel at this medley of nonsense. You will say: but if there are no words, the statement that there are no words refutes itself. You will say: but if there are no entities, the statement that there are no entities has no subject matter, ergo the statement refutes itself. You will say: but the statement that men are not self-aware, or possess no reason, or have no free will, if uttered voluntarily by a human being refutes itself: and if uttered involuntarily, it has no more truth value than an oath taken under duress. You will say: but if the Selfish Gene forces all human behavior, including love and reason, that the statement affirming this, if uttered by a human, is such a behavior, and once again has no truth value. A statement that a man is merely an animal, if taken seriously, is no more meaningful than the chattering of a monkey. The statement that there is no truth, if true, is false.
In other words, if you are a modernist, you will see that the postmodernist is like the cartoon-clown of carpenters, who sits on the branch he is busily sawing off. A like a cartoon-clown, he finds he will not fall as long as he does not look down and see that he is standing in midair. He pretends he has a coherent philosophy, but it is based on an error a schoolboy can see through. All of his axioms are self-refuting. We need not call any other witness to the stand once the prime witness takes an oath and confesses that he is lying, and all his testimony is a lie.
You may have noticed, O Modern thinkers, what happens when you ask simple questions of postmodern thinkers. They simply blank their minds, like a cartoon clown who dare not look down. They say “A paradox? Well, I am large, I contain multitudes!” or they wink and shrug and say, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Or they say, “In the long run, we are all dead!” Which perhaps has no more to do with your questions than it did to the question that originally prompted it.
This is why the Postmodern must throw out reason along with religion: natural philosophy made that promise that, if the discussion struck to matters that could be proved and disproved empirically (that is, material matters and nothing but) that nature would arbitrate the discussion, and experiment and observation would distinguish true from false, and the endless wrangling of schoolmen be left aside as unanswered.
And this bargain was kept, at least, as far as physics is concerned. With Newton and Kepler the most astonishing revolutions imaginable of the natural world were put forth, and with Einstein and Heisenberg and Schrodinger, revolutions beyond imagination.
The sciences that were somewhat less open to empirical investigation, naturally, kept the promise somewhat less well. Biology, for example, has not been neatly reduced to something like Maxwell’s four laws or Lavoisier’s Periodic Table. Economics cannot be reduced to empiricism at all. Pseudo-sciences like Freudian psychology or Skinnerian psychology have even less empirical methodology than Astrology. (At least astrologers look at the biographies of famous babies born under the same star-signs as their clients, and attempt to guess by astral influences are affect their clients' fates.)
Each of the paradoxes listed above, where the clown saws off the branch on which he sits, is based on the application of the scientific method to man. Darwin found a regularity in nature, and proposed that higher forms descend from lower through a blind natural selection akin to horsebreeding: horsebreeding without a horsebreeder. Hegel then applies Darwin’s idea to philosophy, and seeks to find a regular progression of schools of thought, produced by something like a natural selection of thesis and antithesis. Nietzsche applies Darwin’ s idea to man’s moral character, and reasons that, if man evolved from sub-man from apes, ergo continued evolution pressures will force men into higher forms, the supermen, whose supreme and transhumant moral code, conveniently enough, would allow Nietzsche to continue visiting whores.
The political revolutions of modernity were as successful as the scientific ones. The World Wars wiped out the ancient regimes of Europe, and the ideals of the American and French Revolution, the ideals of George Washington and Napoleon, overswept the world. The colonies granted independence by the Great Powers did not seek a monarchic system of government, but embarked, for the most part, on Socialist experiments, with the result that the Twentieth Century will be the bloodiest in history until the Second Coming. The belief in progress was so strong that the poor and barbaric places of the globe were not called poor and barbaric, but, optimistically, “underdeveloped nations” or “developing nations” as if such development were as inevitable as the human evolution of Hegel and Nietzsche.
Each political revolution either was, in the case of the American colonies, a step forward for human freedom, or was a step backward ironically performed in its name, as in the case of the French and Russian revolutions. The French under their Monarchs or the Russians under their Czars certainly enjoyed nothing like the liberties once known by Englishmen, but even a favorable interpretation of history cannot portray the terrors that followed as anything but a loss of what little liberty they had.
Philosophy meanwhile, like the Phantom of the Opera scalded by acid, was subjected to withering skepticism by Hume. Despite valiant attempts by Kant to place metaphysics back into her proper place, without religion Kant could not make the final step, and could not assert that certainty in the reason allowed the thinker to find true and original knowledge. Empiricism had swept the field. Then, like Saturn at his feast, Empiricism declared that the metaphysical roots of Empiricism themselves were invalid: from this springs the nonsense of the logical positivists, who boldly make the universal metaphysical statement that there are no universal metaphysical statements. Logical positivism is more likely to be studied in the future by psychopathologists than by philosophers.
Empiricism having invalidated empiricism, we are left with nothing. There is neither joy nor light, nor, it seems, is there truth, validity, or honesty left.
What is left is raw willpower, raw rebellion, raw iconoclasm. In the same way that the British taxes and arrests without warrant, or the censorship laws were a limitation on human freedom to the American Colonists of the Enlightenment, now enlightenment is regarded as a limitation on human freedom by those dark dwellers in what can only be called a Post-Enlightenment, a Benightenment...
Because the topic of the Christian religion is surrounded with a hellish fog of misbelief and disbelief, let us emphasize that the rationalism of the pagan world, the law of the Romans and the logic of the Hellenes, exists, if at all, in the modern age because of Christian adoption of these things. Christian monks assiduously copied Aristotelian manuscripts; Christian saints assiduously merged it with Jewish doctrine to produce the unique combination of natural and supernatural, rational and mystical, that informs the Christian spirit. Christianity is Hellenized Judaism, that is, like the child of a rational Aristotelian philosopher, and a mystic Jewish prophet.
The Age of Reason is a specifically Christian heresy. It is an attempt to erect and defend a Christian World View without Christ. It can almost be done, as long as the Christian axioms, such as the rationality of the universe and the sacredness of the individual, the belief in free will and the dignity of man, et cetera, are accepted without question by the non-Christian philosophy. The mystical religions of the East do not have sufficient respect for logic to attempt to erect a logical version of their world without their mysticism (I do not include Confucianism as a mystical religion: but on the other hand, Confucius has no respect for the individual, nor does he propose the universe is rational, so the system that springs from his logic is rather less human and humane than the attempt of the Age of Reason.)
Once the attempt to erect a world of Christian values on a non-Christian basis is proved futile, once history cruelly has demonstrated the folly of socialism in a fashion no honest man can deny, we are left with nothing but nihilism, an assertion that the world is meaningless and that the Ego is all. Unfortunately, no man can serve two masters. One cannot have a world erected on reason and also a world erected on blind emotion. Once the paradoxes and folly of the Modernist attempt to have empiricism without metaphysics, or Christian conclusions without Christian axioms, shows itself to be illogical, then the only two options possible are (1) return to the Church and (2) abandon logic.
That, and no other reason, is why Reason, the idol of the Modernists, must go overboard when the Modernists throw Christ overboard.
END OF EXTRACT
For other Catholic posters who might be watching this thread - this comment on Wright's entry by another poster is a reminder of the kernel of truth that unbelief derives from:
EXTRACT
genesiscount
2010-03-10 02:45 am UTC (link)
"...in STAR TREK: VOYAGER, Mr. Tuvak of Vulcan is dismissively criticized by Captain Janeway with the words, 'Logic! You can prove anything with logic!'"
Thing is, this is actually true, in one sense: recall the old computer programmer's acronymic axiom GIGO: "Garbage In, Garbage Out." Logic can establish a proof-chain of deduction that is 100% valid and indisputable at every step, and which can still be utter bosh if its initial premises are erroneous or nonsensical.
I think the ultimate draw of the nihilistic spirit you talk about -- though in fairness I would argue that it's a reductio ad essentiam of something considerably more tangled, confused, and well-intentioned in most of its actual adherents -- is a kind of paranoia. And like all paranoias, it's an irrational magnification of a fear that in itself is not always unreasonable. It is the unshakeable, terrible suspicion that anyone who tells us what duty commands us to do, what morality obliges us not to do, what tradition, loyalty or decency demand that we do, is actually telling us to act in the ways that will be most convenient and beneficial for him. It is the (in itself) perfectly accurate perception that, to riff on Bertrand Russell, the man with the most interest in ensuring that everyone else is honest is the would-be thief. And it is a fear that would be much easier to eradicate if it were not, from time to time, justified. The general who commands his men to stand their ground in the last ditch while he escapes, the Marxist leader who lives like a tsar while the workers he claims to champion huddle in huts, the tycoon who preaches carbon and energy conservation while flying around the world in his private jet... we recognize them all, over and over.
Duty, reason, morality, tradition; sometimes they're rejected because people hate them in themselves, but more often they're rejected because the people who preach them lose the trust of those they preach to. It's not nihilism; it's the pain of discovering that speaking the perfect truth does not make the speaker true or perfect, and being unable to separate messenger from message.
I think the modern age is simply the majority of the West's latest generation reaching a saturation point with this bitter disappointment, and vowing never to be hurt again by broken faith by simply never having faith, to never be deceived by reason again by simply distrusting reason. "To obey is to be lied to, used, and discarded," goes the reaction, "therefore I shall no more obey anything, even the so-called 'dictates' of reason, which I strangely never hear except from those who seek to benefit by my believing them."
The pride, and the irrationality -- things I like to think I understand because I know bitterly how much I possess of both -- is as much the consequence of pain as its cause.
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