philosophy

Where it All Went Wrong

Mark Noonan19 Comments

Some older folks will remember EvKL – he used to write a lot in National Review back in the days when it mattered. Upon this comment on X, another person noted that it really started with the Reformation. And then in the comments one wag noted it all started in the Garden. Which is true – it is because we’re Fallen that we’re ultimately in this mess…though we Christians believe we have been given the exit. But outside our hope in the life of the world to come, it is important to go back and see where the mistake was made. EvKL (who, like me, was a Monarchist at heart) believed it was in the tearing down of the old system of European Christendom with its monarchies and feudal loyalties. The problem being that the common people would not and really could not transfer their loyalty from their local lord and national king over to a parliament of fools endlessly arguing when they weren’t stealing. As the historian Edward Crankshaw noted, a king believing he rules by divine right is being pious…a elected official thinking he’s the only person in the world suited for the office is being arrogant. It is good to note here that EvKL fully approved of the American Republic at its founding. What happened since then he was much less pleased with but the concept of the Constitution with its king-like President, appointive Senate, popularly elected House and an independent but limited Judiciary combined the best of all government worlds.

All love to my Protestant brothers and sisters, I do fall into the camp where it was the Reformation which got the ball of destruction rolling. Not that reform isn’t periodically needed in the Church but that in denying there is a central authority outside of individual control it set the stage for all the destruction to follow. Sola scriptura might work if everyone always agreed on what the scriptura meant. Because we’re Fallen, we don’t. We can’t. And so a central body needs to exist which will decide in the end what it means. And to this decree all must bend. And that is how it was for a thousand years until some of the kings of Europe decided that backing Luther and the other Reformers was the way to go. This was mostly from mercenary motives (a Christianity lacking monks and nuns means there’s a huge amount of wealth available for confiscation) but the bottom line is that it worked. At the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the unity of Christendom was broken forever. At first, it didn’t seem like much but the fact that people could now argue endlessly about the nature of God opened up a can of worms…worms eagerly devoured a century later by the so-called Enlightenment philosophers who proceeded to argue about the very nature of humanity and reality. All in the name of Liberty, of course. But as for Liberty:

Nothing is more pleasant, nothing more flattering to our self-esteem, than wholly unrestricted liberty. Liberty is the word which has supplanted the word religion in our enlightened century when every one thinks and acts in the light of his own convictions or calculations…They condemn the past for its ignorance and prejudice, while knowing nothing at all about the past and not much more about the present. Should I ever see that these so-called wise men and philosophers were happier in the undertakings and more content in their private lives, then I should be guilty of bias, pride, prejudice and obstinacy if I did not follow their example. Unfortunately, however, the experience of every day convinces me of the contrary. Nobody is weaker, nobody more cowardly than these strong spirits: nobody more servile, nobody more cast down by the least unpleasantness than they. They are bad fathers, sons, husbands, ministers, generals and citizens. And why? Because they lack foundations. All their philosophy, all their principles arise only from their own self regard; the least mishap throws them down, with no resources to fall back upon. – Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, 1717-1780

Maria Theresa was not one of those massively educated people. She had the normal education of a Princess of her time but, my goodness, did she get some experience of life. That was written in a letter to her younger son in regards to her older son and heir who was very much a fan of the Enlightenment. Her older son was arrogant, self-centered and cruel…so, a very modern man. He was trying to tell her how badly she was governing the Empire…and you think about it in context and its this privileged rich boy telling his mother who had governed for decades and had navigated the Empire through two massive wars that she had no idea what she was doing. You can see why mom was irritated in that letter! And she was right – if the Enlightenment was producing the better man, then she’d be a fool not to sign up for it…but she saw in her own son and his associates just what sort of person was being bred by Enlightenment philosophy and she was very much dismayed by what she saw coming.

And she saw correctly – take a look at our Left today. Our Progressives. Our people who claim they just want to be free to do as they like. Have you ever seen more servile and cowardly people? People more easily thrown into despair by the tiniest set back? The blue haired ladies putting out videos of themselves screaming in their cars about Trump are the final result of the Enlightenment. For heaven’s sake, get over yourselves! But, they can’t – because they have no foundation. They don’t really believe anything and so have nothing to ground themselves on. For us on our side, the joy remains…because we know that even if the very worst thing happens to us, God is there…we will be rescued. This allows for a sense of peace…and builds into us at least some measure of courage. We don’t want to die. We don’t want to lose all we have. But we can do both…knowing that in the end death is the path to life and what we have is nothing compared to eternal life.

The most important thing a person can have is humility. I can’t be emphasized enough how important it is to be humble. Remember, the most humble human being who ever lived was Jesus who is God. To understand that you can’t, on your own, figure it all out is the first step to sanity. We don’t bend to Authority because we’re slaves but because that is the path to real freedom. It is simply saying, “you know, I believe it might be this way and I won’t just accept what others say, but I admit that I may be wrong and I’ll accept reasoned correction”. That is what the arrogant moderns cannot accept. It is why we can argue with Progressives until we’re blue in the face and no matter the facts or logic provided, they won’t change. They have no humility – they believe they’ve figured it out. That they are the smartest people in the room.

I don’t know if we can, as it were, manufacture humility. That is, convince the arrogant to give up their pride. It might take events – lots of very bad events – to humble their pride. But no matter how you slice it, humility is the only path to victory here. That is, only by humbling ourselves are we going to find the right thing to do. That is what we lost between the Reformation and the Enlightenment…and that is what will be there when we do win.

Hey, Guys, How About Another Evolution Thread?

Mark Noonan62 Comments

We always seem to have fun with these – and the set-up asking Perry about evolution is an excellent place to start.

Perry answered the question well – no one knows how old the earth is, kid.  Rather disgusting that you can hear mom trying to prompt the kid to ask gotcha questions.  This is the level of the debate we’re going to have in 2012.

But, that aside, one of the more amusing aspects of the whole debate is the way the other side gets itself tied up in to knots.  Demanding that unless hard, provable science, it just has no place in the debate.  Missing is any understanding – any reasonable thought – about the fact that the person demanding that science be the measure of all things does not even begin to put the marvel of man in to the equation.  As G K Chesterton put it in The Everlasting Man:

It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides, is quite different. It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides we see of it the more extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle finding their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds, not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a summer house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.

Try as they might, the fundamentalists of evolution cannot get ’round the fact of man being what he is.  We don’t naturally follow from what came before.  We are similar to chimpanzees in a large number of ways except in those ways which make a man a man.  Elsewhere, Chesterton notes that it isn’t a matter of a chimp doing something badly and man doing it better – man does things that no chimp ever did, or ever could do.  Go back a million years and there is nothing in the simian species you can find which indicates that at some future date, quite by accident, one of them will randomly evolve a capability and a desire to decorate his body with paint or clothes…there is nothing in the animal world or the concept of evolution which prepares for the time when a creature will suddenly spend time and energy making art, that indelible signature of Mankind.

And as the evolutionists refuse to consider this – a plain fact – the debate grinds forward in a rather sterile manner, and ever more clearly becomes not a defense of science and truth, but a mere desire to suppress an uncomfortable thought:  perhaps it isn’t all an accident?  Maybe there is a design and a purpose in the universe?  Maybe there is even a Designer who wants something of us?

My thinking on this subject is rapidly leading me to the conclusion that, at bottom, this rigid, hysterical demand that we turn away from what common sense proclaims is, in the end, no more than a fierce desire to defend adherence to a lie.  As it turns out, the lie being adhered to is the first lie of hell – “you will be like gods”.  Beings who evolved by accident from a senseless universe of no purpose owe nothing to anyone…they need not serve, and they are free to rule as far as their own power and inclination leads them.  Introduce even the possibility of God and purpose in to the universe, and all of a sudden you become a debtor who owes someone every last thing you have.  Some of us react with joy to this discovery and eagerly seek to thank our Benefactor…others furiously reject this and demand not only their right to believe differently, but further demand that no one else even bring up a question which casts doubt upon the evolutionist viewpoint.

To me it is a matter of perfect indifference whether the world is 6 billion or 6 thousand years old.  It doesn’t alter in the least the actual facts I have to deal with every day.  I don’t care if someone teaches about a 6 billion year old world and a slow, purely accidental evolutionary development.  I also don’t care if someone teaches that the world sprang directly in to being as it is at the command of God in 6 literal days.  Far more important, to me, than the mechanism of existence is the fact of my existence, and what I shall do with it.  But regardless of what I think, the fact is that those who hold to a rigid, ideologically blinkered view of the creation of the universe are trying to advance a particular agenda – an agenda which doesn’t so much question God but seeks to ban His presence from the public square.  My view is that the fight between Evolution and Design is not about the relative merits of the viewpoints, but about the right of people of different views to engage in the debate.

The gotcha questions to Perry are part of that larger design – that effort to de-legitimize a different view.  The attempt was to try and trip Perry up and hold up Perry and the whole concept of a Divine order to ridicule.  And, so, we have to fight this out – if for no other reason than to defend human reason and liberty.  Reason because people who think can come to widely different views; liberty because if those widely different views cannot be brought in to the public square, then none of us are free.