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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 28, 2011
Root difference
One of the things the Christian Church taught, to a society that was once overwhelmingly Christian, is that no one has a monopoly on the good. Not even the Church has a monopoly, as for instance St. Paul reminds us, when he famously tells us to seek the good, true, and beautiful in all things, in the extended eloquence of I Corinthians 13. Faith, hope, and charity are presented; "and the greatest of these is charity."No one has a monopoly, or could have a monopoly in human affairs, since the source of these things is not human. Or rather, that is what was taught, to earlier generations: that there is a divine source for all good and virtue, which we may see even in this life, "though through a glass, darkly." We owe our very existence, from the moment of conception, to this divine creative force; we belong in an order that is ultimately divine. We can remain rightly ordered, ourselves, only to the degree we recognize and adapt ourselves to this divine order; this "Tao." I write this quite consciously knowing it will be mocked. In the main, children are not raised today under that system of indoctrination; nor anything like it. When I had children of my own, I was made quite aware of the system of indoctrination to which they were in fact subjected, from the moment they stepped outside my door. "Nature" was taken to be part of the divine order, by our believing ancestors. Contaminated herself by what was expounded as "original sin" - through which death was brought into the world - there was nevertheless good, truth, and beauty to be found in the very heart of nature. The alternative, "Darwinian" cosmology set itself, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, against this doctrine. A grand, eugenic order was conceived, by which creatures rose and fell, by "the survival of the fittest." The origin of life remained necessarily a mystery, beyond anyone's speculative powers, but the interpretation of life was radically changed. It could no longer have "meaning." The idea of man as "an accident of nature," and therefore the idea that everything we value has arbitrary, material causes, was hardly new. It flourished among the pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece; and anthropologists have discovered atheist and materialist cosmologies among some of the most primitive tribes. The Victorian innovation was only dressing this world view up in "settled science." Not all of our ancestors were believers, of course; and history assures us there were atheists in the trenches, even at the height of the Middle Ages. The notion that, in the state of nature, we find the barbaric warfare of "all against all" is to be found in the great English atheist philosopher, Thomas Hobbes: arguably the grandfather of all Englishspeaking liberalism. The habit, conversely, of discounting the overwhelming evidence of co-operation in nature, within and between all species, comes from this Victorian way of dressing it up. We flatter man, by crediting him with the invention of "enlightened" ways, without realizing that, logically, these must themselves be products of that supposedly arbitrary nature. We are, today, in many ways the graduates of a very long course in liberal indoctrination. Our Pavlovian attachment to "the spirit of the Enlightenment" - which gets lipservice even from the least educated - testifies to the power and plausibility of this primitive alternative to religious belief. We are actually trained to vilify, in our hearts, those who humbly turn to God for their enlightenment. In our own generation, this struggle between two utterly incompatible "world views" continues in the guise of an intensely politicized battle between "the Left" and "the Right." The real issues are not the superficial ones, though each of them carries the echo from the original crack of "modernity." The real issue isn't even, "What is truth?" (Pontius Pilate's phrase); and all parties at least pretend to be on the side of justice. The real issue is whether we attribute the good to divine providence; or think, instead, it is a human construction - and therefore capable of amendment, over time. ("Progress.") Everything falls out along that front line, which extends through every living heart. A number of people have written recently, asking me to explain what I think is at the root of differences between "left and right," between "liberals and conservatives," between any other factions essentially revolutionary, and essentially reactionary. (Of course, most people are a mixture, often very confused.) And this is as close as I can come to an answer. To complete it, I should mention that the "anti-Church," or if you will, the "party of the Left," has no monopoly on atheism, either, let alone upon the opposites of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Their "leftishness" deeply penetrates into modern Christian life; just as the old Christianity deeply lingers within the breasts of those expressly taught to reject and despise it - by the "zeitgeist," or what Christians traditionally called, "the Prince of This World." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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