How to Lose a War

The 18th century saw the rise of a new "theology," Humanism. The positive development enabling the growth of Humanism was the rise of modern science. But there was also an intellectual void that allowed Humanism to co-opt science. Christians have largely adopted three responses, all of which have left Humanism unchallenged to lay waste the surrounding culture:

1. Mainline (liberal) Protestants and liberal Catholics welcomed it and had no scruples in overthrowing tradition and Scripture in favor of scientistic doctrines.
2. Evangelical Protestants, for whom doctrine depends on private interpretation, clamped down on the interpretation of scripture.
3. Faithful Catholics, for whom doctrine has always been settled and constant, separated their metaphysics from natural philosophy. Many retreated into the philosophy of Esse (Being).

In military terms, these responses divide into two categories:

1. Switch sides and declare victory (n. 1)
2. Retreat behind siege walls (i.e., texts; nn. 2 & 3)

Faith found "safety" by walling itself off from the "really real" world of science, but in so doing abandoned all claims to that world. The natural world is where we live; it is life. To hide behind battlements, to cut oneself off from the natural world, is to banish oneself to the irrelevance of subjectivism. (Remember Gandalf's counsel in Moria: "We must not get shut in.")

Both categories of response leave Humanism with the field. Clearly there can be no victory over Humanism if there is no challenge to it.

The only way to win the war and take back the world is to challenge Humanism on the grounds of the objective world now occupied by science. Science is already turning to our side. Scientistic ideology is giving way to scientific data, for example (off the top of my head):

• Sociological studies show that children are gravely damaged by divorce,
• Ultrasound shows convincingly the humanity of the unborn child,
• Darwinism and its heirs suffer from tremendous empirical gaps.

Nevertheless the ideological root of Humanism remains untouched. Whittaker Chambers writes from his own experience with a most potent form of Humanism:

[Communism] is an intensely practical vision. The tools to turn it into reality are at hand—science and technology, whose traditional method, the rigorous exclusion of all supernatural factors in solving problems, has contributed to the intellectual climate in which the vision flourishes, just as they have contributed to the crisis in which Communism thrives. For the vision is shared by millions who are not Communists (they are part of Communism's secret strength). Its first commandment is found, not in the Communist Manifesto, but in the first sentence of the physics primer: "All of the progress of mankind to date results from the making of careful measurements."

If religious believers are to turn the tide, we need to seize the objective, natural world back from Humanism by developing an integrally realistic philosophy of nature.

If we want to lose, we need only continue hiding.

---

Benedict Ashley, Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (Braintree, MA: The Pope John Center, 1985), 61, 213, 231-232.

Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), forward. (Clipped from The Augustine Club)

All Scientists Believe in God

This quotation is from Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos. (The initial question is a little awkwardly worded, and though I include it for completeness, it is not essential to the point I'm making here.)

Question: Why does it make scientists uneasy that it appears to be the case that Homo sapiens sapiens, a conscious languaged creature, appeared suddenly and lately—when scientists profess to be interested in what is the case, that is, the evidence?

1. Because scientists are understandably repelled by the theory of the special creation of man by God, in Biblical time, say 6004 B.C. at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday [Friday?] morning.
2. Because scientists find it natural to deal with matter in interaction and with energy exchanges and don't know what to make of such things as consciousness, self, symbols and even sometimes deny that there are such things, even though they, the scientists, act for all the world as if they were conscious selves and spend their lives transacting with symbols.
3. Because scientists are uneasy with discontinuities, even when there is evidence of such discontinuity in the appearance of man in all his contrarieties. Revealed religion has its dogmas, e.g., thou shalt not kill. But so does science: thou shalt not tolerate discontinuities. The question is which is the more entitled.
4. Because scientists in the practice of the scientific method, a non-radical [radical = 'to the root'] knowledge of matter in interaction, often are not content with the non-radicalness of the scientific method and hence find themselves located in a posture of covert transcendence of their data, which is by the same motion assigned to the sphere of immanence. Hence, scientists operate in the very sphere of transcendence with is not provided for in science. Given such a posture, it is not merely an offense if a discontinuity turns up in the sphere of immanence, the data, but especially if the discontinuity seems to allow for the intervention of God. A god is already present. A scientist is god to his data. And if there is anything more offensive to him that the suggestion of the existence of God, it is the existence of two gods.

(CHECK ONE)

"A god is already present. A scientist is god to his data."

As we've seen, one of the conceptual foundations of modern science is Rene Descartes's erroneous idea that mind is completely separate from matter (or nature). This is the reason that the scientific observer is "unnatural" and always implicitly and absolutely excluded from scientific conceptions (though modern physics partially corrects this); this is why modern philosophies never incorporate the philosopher and can't justify the act of philosophizing.

Adopting a god-like absolute transcendence is only a small step from believing that "I am God, there is no other."

---

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 163-164. (Clipped from the Augustine Club, emphasis added)

Stanley L. Jaki's Means to Message (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 1999) is a great elaboration of the intrinsic inconstency of modern philosophy.

Science's Critical Missing Element

From Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:

Until recent years, I read only "fundamental'' books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as War and Peace, the novel of novels; A Study of History, the solution of the problem of time; Schroedinger's What is Life?, Einstein's The Universe as I see It, and such. During those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere and read fundamental books and only for diversion took walks around the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie. Certainly it did not matter to me where I was when I read such a book as The Expanding Universe. The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie called It Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next. (Copied from the Augustine Club)

"...though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over."

We find no meaning in the universe because modern science excludes all notion of purpose. Pia de Solenni's concise explanation of why modern science contains no notion of human dignity applies just as well here:

If the concept [of human dignity or purpose] is missing in the original, it can't be anticipated in the result

Should we be surprised at dancing clumsily when we refuse to follow nature's tune?

---

Added an addendum to post of of Feb 27 The ME Project's Contained Kenosis.

Elites and the Nanny State

According to a Jan. 7-10 [2002] Gallup survey,… support for abortion rights increases with formal education and household income.

Why is it that the well educated tend to be the most liberal?

Supple minds better able to absorb knowledge are by the same principle better able to absorb falsehood. Not only our educational system, but also our culture, are poisoned by a faulty picture of nature.

Modern science, based on Newtonian mechanics, says nothing about purpose in nature. Science's tremendous success at "mastering" nature gives it the appearance of presenting a complete conception of all reality, so that its silence on purpose is interpreted as a universal denial. This same success gives science a great credibility in the academy, so that all other disciplines aspire to pattern themselves in some way after science (physics).

But there is an additional, more radical factor at work. Natural science, even if unsuccessful, still mediates our understanding of the natural world. Notice that we humans take our knowledge primarily from our five senses. Knowing and thinking in sensible terms is most natural to us, so we understand even invisible things (like the human soul, God, and most of the universe) in analogy with visible, natural things. This means that scientific errors about the natural world will warp our conception of everything else: music, history, language, psychology, politics, etc.

Thus we see that both science's success gives it an unrivaled power in the modern world, but also its perennial place in human knowing makes it the foundation of any culture, including our own. Hence the "well educated," less "down to earth" elites tend to be more liberal because they have imbibed more of the spirit of the age, poisoned by materialistic science.

Why does the Elite use the Nanny State?

As we've seen, the purposeless (or chaotic) picture of nature removed the presumption that individuals can control and improve themselves, leaving the state to contain the necessarily ensuing chaos. We might call this the Hobbesian or negative Nanny State, after Thomas Hobbes, whose political theory called for an authoritarian Leviathan to contain the chaos of "The [Human] State of Nature."

Additionally the mistaken, purposeless view of nature takes on a positive or utopian form that encourages the Nanny State to surpress human nature in light of some arbitrary ideal. Karl Marx is the prime example. Despite our human propensity to act selfishly or stupidly, there is a basic goodness in human nature. In contrast, the liberal presumption that humans are not by nature geared toward their own happiness (in a broad, life-long sense) means the State must intervene to perfect society.

Without a clear picture of nature by which to judge the purpose of our existence, the standard of happiness shifts with the winds of fashion, or any crazy idea that enters some intellectual's head and catches on. Usually an idea's appeal comes from rebellion against some traditional stricture that feeds into an physical impulse.* At one point the "revolutionary idea" was extra-marital sex, then it became homosexuality, but recently it's been the (rather unextraordinary) pairing of older women with younger men (do you get the idea that they're running out of traditions to transgress?). Almost always these ideas presume that only the knowledge (gnosis) possessed by an elite can save mankind from languishing in its "natural" imperfection. This presumption against nature is why liberals treat the family, which no civilization in history has ever survived without, as by nature disordered and requiring the intervention of government (in particular of unelected judges). Parents are presumed incapable of raising their children without the help of "the village"—doublespeak for those who think they know better than you or your neighbors. Communities are presumed incapable of governing themselves without trampling on rights of minorities (however defined by the elite). In the minds of the Elite, the Many are unfit to direct their own lives and need Nanny to do it for them.

---

*Doing away with an objective (natural) notion of the good leads to subjectivism. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis masterfully describes the results of subjectivism:

But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism. The impulse to scratch when I itch or to pull to pieces when I am inquisitive is immune from the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honour, or care for posterity. When all that says 'It is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains. It cannot be exploded or 'seen through' because it never had any pretentions. The [elite] Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. I am not here speaking of the corrupting influence of power nor expressing the fear that under it our Conditioners will degenerate. The very words corrupt and degenerate imply a doctrine of value and are therefore meaningless in this context. My point is that those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.

.... By the logic of their position they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature. It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationalism, by 'seeing through' all 'rational' motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behaviour.

"Freeing" ourselves from nature actually leads to total enslavement to "nature."

---

Priests for Life, “Prolife Infonet News Update” (Jan 25, 2002) [accessed 2005-02-10]

Peter Pan and the Nanny State

Call me slow, but I realized just this morning the intellectual underpinnings of the modern expansion of the state and its bureaucratic organs. Of course, it has a lot to do with the vision of nature, or else it'd be rather off-topic for this blog.

We've already seen how the transition to the modern era brought a new conception of nature as lacking any inner dynamic and being a purely passive recipient of human molding. We can call this way of thinking the Philosophy of Control.

If there's any tendency characteristic of (fallen) human thinking, it is the implicit exemption of one's self from the burdens one places on others. From this fault the modern age is by no means immune. The person subscribing to the Philosophy of Control (each of us) seeks to control the external world, while exempting himself from self-control. One's original, immature state is held up as somehow sacred and "natural" (as if growing up weren't natural). Self-control is "unnatural" according to this new conception of nature. (Recall the "state of nature" in Enlightenment philosophies is definitionally chaotic.)

Individuals are absolved of any expectation to control themselves. Chaos would result, but no one likes chaos; no one wants "the other" or "everyone else" to arbitrarily restrict his unformed, "natural" impulses. So the state must intervene to control "everyone else." In a democratic society we are all equally part of "everyone else", so we all together become prisoners of our individual lack of self-control. As self-control deteriorates and individuals come to rely on state control (and litigation), state interventions can only grow more necessary and meddlesome.

The result is an inexorable tendency for the individuals and institutions that comprise society to shuffle off responsibility and transfer control to the state. In the name of public order and security, the state's authority expands ever more comprehensively into private life.

In sum, the state takes up control where the individuals fail, and individuals fail to control themselves because maturity and growing up are "unnatural." If self-discipline could be reinstituted as a natural attribute of a civilized human being—if "Peter Pan" weren't subject to such low expectations—there would be no need for the "Nanny State."

But this can only happen once the conception of nature has been restored to its dynamic reality.

Infant Formula, "Neo-Emotions," and the Incredible Melting Celebrity

When humans come to see nature as lacking any internal activity of her own, they come to view her as an obstacle to realization of their desires, one that can be reshaped without concern (let alone reverence) for any pre-existing reality.

Examples of this thinking abound. One was the infant formula craze of the last century. We were told to believe that a technological concoction was not only an adequate replacement for, but even better than mother's milk. Somehow the medical establishment, along with many of the public, saw nothing incredible about a committee of guys in lab coats outwitting—if not the Infinite wisdom of Alimighty God—then at least millions of years of Almighty Evolution. Now we have ample empirical evidence that breastfeeding is better for babies, but even without such evidence, it is difficult to understand how anyone could think himself wiser than Nature. Do we need further evidence for post-lapsarian darkening of the intellect?

Ah, but our intellects are not so dark that they can't pull themselves up by their own boot-straps! Or at least that's what the transhumanists would have us believe.

Neo-Emotions

One of my hypotheses right now is that emotions often seem irrational to us simply because many of them are outdated to work with modern situations, culture, and technologically-enabled existence. The solution is to develop neo-emotions. A neo-emotional system would take whatever beneficial roles existing emotional systems provide, and extend and modify these roles to better suit the environment. [more...]

Yes, perhaps we can change our emotions to better suit our competitive environment. We'll get rid of pity and love, and replace them with ruthlessness and hatred. Sounds like "Genesis of the Daleks." Or maybe just your NOW feminist.

And we haven't even touched on the weirdest "improvement" on nature : the incredible self-mutilation of Michael Jackson. This would be funny if it weren't true.

1979 (age 21)

The Post-human Future? 2002 (age 44)

A graphic warning for those who think they can outdo nature.

Peter Singer, Hypocrite

Just got back yesterday afternoon from Chicago where I attended a mini-conference on "Science, Faith, and Law". I hope to write a little about it in a later post. Among the speakers were Cardinal George, Pia de Solenni, Nigel Cameron, and Peter Lawler. The Thing Is linked a great Godspy article by Peter J. Colosi on the gap between the ethical ideas of Peter Singer and his personal behavior. Recall that Singer is a utilitarian who believes that the vulnerable (unborn, aged, retarded) should be killed in order to minimize suffering and maximize pleasure. (Notice that these weaker members of society have less power to oppose his ideas—that's what a "brave man" Singer is.)

Peter Singer broke all of his own rules when his mother became ill with Alzheimer's disease. Michael Specter reported on this in a profile of Singer titled, "The Dangerous Philosopher" (The New Yorker, September 6, 1999). Singer's mother had reached a point in her life where she no longer recognized Singer, his sister, or her grandchildren, and she had lost the ability to reason. In this state, according to Singer's theory, she did not meet the definition of a person. According to his ethical theory, she ought to have been killed or left to die. Certainly no money should have been spent on her care, since the money could be better spent lowering the suffering of the greatest number of other people. Instead, Singer and his sister hired a team of home health-care aides to look after their mother, spending tens of thousands of dollars in the process.

The contradiction was glaring.

The many people who wrote against Singer said, in effect: "Look, you didn't follow your rules when it came to your own mother, doesn't that mean your rules are wrong?" Paraphrasing, his answer is basically this: "No, that doesn't mean my rules are wrong, it only means that I disobeyed them in the case of my mother, and acted unethically."

That seems reasonable. For example, whether or not a majority of Americans think that stealing from one's employer is wrong has no bearing on the wrongness of that principle. That's only reasonable. But Singer is trying to "have his cake and eat it too":

In making this defense, however, Singer forgot to look on page 2 of his book Practical Ethics, where he asserts, "...ethics is not an ideal system that is noble in theory but no good in practice. The reverse is closer to the truth: an ethical judgment that is no good in practice must suffer from a theoretical defect..." It seems that not only his critics think his action towards his mother negates his ethical theory, he does too!

So Singer has acted hypocritically. In acting against his principles and rejecting the possibility that his principles are merely unattainable ideals, he calls those principles into question (if not voids them). As Emerson is often quoted as saying, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." We can at least give Singer credit for avoiding a "foolish consistency" with his heartless principles and treating his mother humanely. But perhaps it is not too small minded to hope he aim for a greater consistency: humanizing his philosophy to match the natural law written on his heart.