John C. Wright is one of the most insightful Christian writers I have encountered today. He is every bit as much worth reading as Chesterton or Lewis, and has very similar insights.
Because he
is Catholic, he does disagree with some basic accountings of history and
movements of philosophical thought that Protestants would adhere to (such as
his opinion of John Locke), but his broad assessment of the various problems
with post-Christian society and decline are correct.
Wright notes
in his book Transhuman and Subhuman about these stages of decline,
Rose’s scheme groups the schools of thought of Western man as
he falls away from Christianity into four general categories.
The first school of thought is the classical liberal position
of the pragmatic man, which says that religious opinion is a private matter
that ought not to disturb the public weal by insisting on any special or
central position in life. Instead of God as the source and center and summit of
civilized life, or precise theologically defined dogmas addressed to the last
nuance, we should have instead a rogue and vague dogma saying only that each
man should mind his own business.
In this school, each man is free to seek his own pleasures in
his own way, climb to the summit of his ambitions without necessarily stepping
on those below him, (but not necessarily giving him a hand either). We all must
agree only on general rules of civility and good sportsmanship needed for
public order; we need to encourage and obey the civic virtues of teamwork and
self-sacrifice where needed to keep the family, the city, and the market free from
fraud, trespass, or invasion, and perhaps to curb such gross immorality or bad
taste as pollutes the public weal. Each man must show respect for the religious
opinions of others without showing uncomely zeal for his own.
In this school, ideals are impractical, because the world is
imperfect and cannot be made perfect; but civic virtue and the prudent exercise
of liberty and civilized tolerance of the dissent of others, which is their
prudent exercise of their liberty, is crucial. A healthy respect for what are
called ‘Judeo-Christian Values’ is crucial to the civil order. God is not
crucial.
Ironically, this is the Liberal position as classically
understood, characterized by Locke and other Enlightenment writers, what would
now be called Conservative. That [it] is the diametric opposite of what is now
called the Liberal position is a source of confusion.
To avoid confusion, let us call this pragmatic and
man-centric school of thought ‘Worldliness.’…
…The second school of thought is the sharp rebellion against
this. Where the Worldly position seeks worldly wealth, civic peace, and the
comfort of conformity in opinion, the Radical rebellion seeks Heaven on Earth,
Utopian visions made solid, and all pragmatism is rejected as treason against
the Great Dream of the Great Cause. Religion and Worldliness are rejected with
scorn in favor of Ideology. Ideals are impractical, so this school holds, only
because men are weak vessels too selfish to practice them; all the world could
be made perfect if only sufficient force was used on weak men by a sufficiently
enlightened and despotic Glorious Leader.
The only Ideology to afflict the modern era is Socialism and
its various mild epigones, Fabianism, Leftism, Feminism, Environmentalism,
Political Correctness, and other Marxist offshoots. Nowadays they are
accustomed to deny their Marxist roots, but gaily and liberally use simplistic
Marxist myths about oppressors and oppressed to analyze human relations between
man and workingman, man and women, man and nature, man and ideas. The relation
is one of a ruthless Darwinian struggle for survival between man and
fill-in-the-blank, and even saying “he” rather than “he and she” is defined as
an act of oppression.
In this school, freedom is dismissed as selfishness and
sacrificed to the common good or the Great Dream of the Utopian vision. Man
lives for his neighbor, or, to be precise, for the Utopian vision. The only
rules demanded are those of loyalty to the Great Dream. Civil order is not the
paramount value, as disobedience, (either peaceful or violent or ultraviolent),
to established hence 'reactionary' civil authority is not just allowed but
required. All institutions of the state and church and civil society are to be
smashed, or, in the less violent version of the Ideology, subverted, suborned,
and subordinated to the Utopian vision. Only the Great Dream merits love,
loyalty, respect, honesty, courtesy; only the Great Dream has rights; anyone
disloyal to the Great Dream is an enemy. Life is Crusade…
…They are Socialists in economic issues, feminists on family
questions, Greens on questions of industrial policy, Race-baiters and
Hatemongers on questions of race, absurdist in art and vulgarians in culture,
totalitarians in politics but libertarians when it comes to questions of vice
and victimless crimes. They are materialists on philosophical issues,
secularists on religious issues, pacifists on military issues, (unless the
question is civil war and the overthrow of their own institutions, whereupon
they are bloodthirsty war hawks and apologists, nay, groupies and shrieking
bobby-soxers of the world’s filthiest dictators).
…To avoid confusion, let us call them Ideologues. They are
utterly unworldly, rejecting the pragmatism of the Worldly Man as cold and
loveless and unspiritual.
The Ideologues are as nearly a pure evil as mankind has ever
produced or can imagine, but please note that their motives are the highest and
noblest imaginable: they seek things of the spirit, peace on earth, food for
the poor, dignity given to all men, and all such things which are the only
things, the holy things, that can electrify dull mankind and stir him to take
up the banner and trumpet and shining lance of high and holy crusade…
…A third school of thought is in sharp rebellion against the
first two. These are otherworldly types, Theosophists and Spiritualists and New
Age gurus and believers in various Americanized forms of Buddhism or Witchcraft
or Astrology who utterly reject both the materialistic worldliness of the
Worldly Man, and the fanaticism and bloodlust of the Ideologue.
The otherworldly men seek peace through renunciation, and
escape from the turmoil of life through the pursuit of inner tranquility,
perhaps aided by mystic visions, meditations, or voices from the outer worlds,
or hallucinogenic drugs.
Not for them the looming smokestacks of the scientifically
planned socialist utopia of the Ideologues, nor the loud billboards and hungry
strip malls of the Worldly. They want to live in Hobbiton, or Arcadia, or with
the tribes that only exist in the imagination of Rousseau, noble savages in
harmony with nature, or perhaps the movie Dances With Wolves or Avatar (not the
real one).
This movement has never been numerous enough to merit its own
name, and although they often combine with their enemies, the Ideologues
against their mutual enemies the Worldly Men, these otherworldly men have no
name. Call them Spiritualists.
The Spiritualists are utterly unpragmatic and irrational
about their religious sentiments. They are the type of men who believe in
angels but not in God. They have no use for theology or reasoning about
spiritual or moral issues, much less metaphysics. They are the dilettantes and
aesthetes of the spirit world, seeking sensation rather than understanding,
novelty rather than certainty, seeking a spiritual truth that will serve them
and flatter them and provide for them, not a God whom they must serve…
…The final school of thought is not a school of thought at
all, but an exhausted rejection of thought. This is Nihilism, and it is the
dominant philosophy of our age, and the unspoken assumption underlying nearly
every major social policy debated or enacted today.
Nihilism is the metaphysical posture that no truth is
actually true. If no truth is true, life is what you yourself have the strength
of will to decree it to be, like God separating Light from Darkness at the dawn
of time, by fiat. If no truth is true, no flag is truly worth dying for or
fighting for or even arguing about, and no marriage is final and no contract is
binding and your word of honor means nothing, and you owe your friends no
loyalty.
If no truth is true, the only impermissible sin is to believe
and preach and practice the truth…
…The Nihilist lives in a formless void, and believes only in
himself, his willpower, his self-image and his self-esteem. His motto is that
life is what you make it.
He sees the long and tragic history of man, with all its
kings and slaves and wars and empires and monarchs and democracies and despots
and with all its philosophers and saints and sages, and sees that none of these
things have brought peace.
And so he condemns all systems, all sagacity and all
saintliness to oblivion, and promises that as soon as men realize that there is
nothing in the universe, then nothing will be worth fighting for, and man will
have peace.[i]
This comes
from Wright’s essay Glory Game, which is a chapter in his book Transhuman
and Subhuman. I have shortened down the sections to highlight some of his main points, otherwise the excerpt would be very long. But I recommend reading
the whole essay. It is fascinating.
Wright
succinctly sees that there are only a few options left to the society which rejects
Christianity: spiritually void liberalism, rabid pursuit of human ideology,
spiritualism and nihilism. I think his accounting of Locke’s liberalism is not
strictly accurate. Locke was very clear that his version of liberalism, or
tolerance, could only work in a nation that was wholly Christian and
specifically Protestant. Locke offered a way for Protestants to live alongside
each other peacefully. Lockean liberalism was never intended to work in an
atheistic or pluralistic and multicultural society, and the removal of the
Christian pre-conditions for it to work has created disaster for Western
nations, like England, Canada, America, Holland and Australia. I think it is
clear from Locke’s Concerning Liberty that he foresaw the dangers of
removing Christianity from being the central guiding touchstone of society.
But that
quibble aside, Wright is spot on about how one moves away from Christianity. You
either have the Christian morality removed from its religious base, which leads
to an unanchored moral civility which can only crumble around you. Or you have
the Christian heavenly eschatology removed from its basis in salvation in Jesus
which his moral guidance and the creation of human utopias which are anything
but utopian. Or you get the vague spiritualism of a paganism that no longer
really believes in the pagan gods vanquished by centuries of Christendom. Or
you get dead meaninglessness, nihilistic fatalism, that cannot believe in
anything, good or evil, and promotes a self-destructing society that no longer
even believes in its reason to exists or assert its identity anymore.
Without
Christianity, you end up on these four dead-end roads.
So, which
way Western man? You either have Christianity, which offers a rational,
spiritual and practical guide for humanity to structure a society. Or you have
the various barren versions of rejection of Christianity? The best choice is to regain
your western heritage and lift up Jesus as Lord of yourself, your family, your
nation and more.
The only options
for a post-Christian society are repentance and returning to our Lord, or these
four dead-end roads.
So, which
will you choose?
[i] Wright,
John C.. Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
(pp. 137-145), from "Glory Game". Still Waters Books. Kindle Edition.
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