-
Forever In His Debt
April 6, 2011 | 35 comments
Buy the Book
The Towering London
A brief but telling account of the soup of moral and intellectual confusion into which a significantly telling number of us Americans have currently gotten ourselves.
America’s Secular Challenge: The Rise of a New
National Religion
By Herbert London
(Encounter Books, 100 pages, $20)
G. K. Chesterton once observed that people who cease to believe in God will not then believe in nothing but will rather believe in anything. Who can offer better confirmation of what might have been Chesterton’s most brilliant aperçu than those of us living in the United States of America in the 21st century? For consider some of the many beliefs about man and his nature that have come with resounding passion to be adopted against all experience by otherwise intelligent and educated people among us. To mention only a few of the more “serious” articles of current faith that have replaced both hard-earned understanding of human experience and knowledge of the way the world has been fashioned to work: the belief that increasing government control of the economy will result in both more virtuous and more widespread forms of wealth; the belief that the various policies subsumed under the rubric of “affirmative action” will increase selfconfidence and hence a greater sense of equality among people formerly held in contempt; the belief that the ability to have an abortion is the truest sign of a woman’s freedom to control the circumstances of her life; the belief that little children can thrive equally with two fathers or with none; or the recently widely spreading belief that little boys who can’t sit still with hands folded are in need of daily, and what may very well turn out to be lifelong, psycho- medication. There are many more of these, of course. And about that ever multiplying collection of less serious articles of faith—call them fads—that bob to the surface of the culture, as it seems, every month, there is only this to say: these “beliefs” are seldom permanent, yet the need to subscribe to them seems to be growing ever more so.
Recently, as we know, certain highly educated thinkers in our midst—the name Christopher Hitchens comes prominently to mind—have made so bold as to eliminate the social-policy middleman and have taken on the issue of the nonexistence of God directly by writing books enumerating the various crimes and misdemeanors that have for so long and with such dire persistence been committed against their fellows by those speaking in His name. Hitchens and company are what were once known as “village atheists,” and their arguments have often succeeded in stirring among their audiences a considerable frisson of daring enlightenment. But such philosophers seem to recur in every time and clime and serve primarily as a kind of naughty entertainment. It remains that the far more consequential forms of substitute piety are those that have found their way into the current list of the country’s public truths. And it is primarily these that Herbert London has undertaken to spell out for us in America’s Secular Challenge, a brief but telling account of the soup of moral and intellectual confusion into which a significantly telling number of us Americans, otherwise to be accounted the luckiest people on earth, have currently gotten ourselves.
Herbert London’s catalogue of Chestertonian “anythings,” while brief, is impressively comprehensive. There is to begin with a seemingly everspreading conviction that unlike scientific truths, limited as every honest scientist recognizes they must necessarily be, the free-floating individual’s moral convictions are to be arrived at by no more humbling or instructive means than looking into his own conscience. Small wonder, then, as London points out, that this process so often results in an understanding not of what is good but rather of what is most convenient for him. And writ large, such a mindset (if one may for convenience be allowed to call it that) results with almost perfect directness in the idea that ultimately it is something called “the government” that must rightly be one’s brother’s keeper of first, last, and ultimate resort. Now, apart from a long and sometimes very costly process of learning that government cannot satisfactorily serve as mankind’s (or, for that matter, one’s own) keeper, London reminds us that the very idea can be transformed from a mere refusal of responsibility into truly positive ugliness. He cites for an example the early 20th-century enthusiasm for that so-called science known as eugenics, which set out to improve mankind by manipulating the genetic stock of the world’s inferior peoples, especially but not exclusively people of color. Eugenics fortunately went the way of faith in séances (except of course in Auschwitz). Nevertheless the idea that to make men healthy, wealthy, and wise is first and foremost the responsibility of government has if anything become more firmly entrenched. By now, indeed, the philosophical as well as psychological refusal of individual moral responsibility has become no less than the founding credo of the new national religion referred to in London’s subtitle.
NOW, IT MIGHT JUST BE that this condition is actually less severe in the United States than in other Western countries—the process of research needed to ascertain whether this is so being something almost too depressing even to contemplate—but, as London reminds us, our very particular history as a willed-into-being nation, an invention, with a founding Declaration and a Constitution spelling out what the government is required to do and, perhaps even more important, required not to do, has provided us with a set of governing principles intended to leave us as a nation of individuals both politically free and morally responsible. It is the latter, as London so graphically illustrates, that the secularism which has been overtaking us as a nation is making fair to destroy. “Take away the precept of an ethical structure whose genesis and moral authority is external to man,” writes London in what is perhaps the book’s key sentence, “and he is left with a pernicious relativism of his own making or with a cold, all-encompassing scientism unable to give sufficient answers to man’s ontological questions.” Thus, he continues, “…in our time ‘self-actualization’ and ‘reaching one’s potential’—which elsewhere in history would have seemed clichés nearly devoid of meaning—have come to represent a significant, if not the most significant, goal of human existence.”
Examples of what this goal has come to mean in various areas of our national life—economic, educational (if one can actually use such a word nowadays), and cultural—provide most of the material of the book. (The reader is constantly tempted to wish the book had been longer, for the author has been an educator, a figure in New York State politics, and is currently the head of a think tank, and he has thus undoubtedly experienced many vividly concrete examples of what he writes about, as it were, on his own pulses.)
Chesterton, of course, did not specifically mention that there might be contradictions among the “anything” substitutes, but, as London illustrates, they do abound, from the ridiculous to the sublime. There is, for instance, the contradiction, which to judge from the current state of our politics seems to have taken hold among the rich more than among the poor, between the ambition to grow ever richer and the avowed belief in a fairer income distribution (to be accomplished, of course, without undue effect on the country’s economy by the federal government). Then there is this writer’s own favorite among London’s examples—seemingly less important but in a cultural sense important indeed. And that is the way the well-to-do, who by means of a very expensive and time- and energy-consuming process euphemistically called “cultural and pedagogic enrichment” ensure their children’s acceptance into one or another of the country’s elite universities while at the same time believing themselves to be ardent supporters of a process euphemistically called “diversity”—again, of course, to be undertaken by means of government policy. Nor need it be said that the diversity so sought has not in the smallest degree been extended to that desired university’s, or just about any American university’s, teachings. And to cite just one more example among many, perhaps in its way the most penetrating of all, there is the way that for what will soon be half a century the ideas of courage and honor have been associated with the refusal of the most privileged of the country’s young to defend it, either in warfare or even merely in rhetoric. Since the onset of the war in Iraq, to be sure, many kind things have come to be said about those killed or wounded in battle, but rather more in tongue-clucking sympathy than in gratitude, let alone honor.
And now with this book Herbert London too has waded into battle. Though truth to tell, warring against the cultural enemy has long, probably forever, been his occupation of choice. And he, as Shakespeare once put it, has done the state some service.
Great, great service, actually. Nevertheless, one finds it hard to imagine that the ideas whose perniciousness he has devoted his political and intellectual life to battling will soon, if ever, be given the burial they deserve and we need. But as Irving Howe once remarked about waiting for the Messiah, it is steady work. And in the meantime, the author of America’s Secular Challenge has cleared a heap of refuse from the ground on which others, and may our tribe increase, can take our stand.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (30) | Leave a comment
More Articles by Midge Decter
More Articles From Buy the Book
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/04/10/the-towering-london
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
The Spectacle Blog
Democrat Dan Maffei Blames Budget Cuts for Girl’s Rape, Mother’s Murder
Robert Stacy McCain | 4:12PM
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
ADVERTISEMENT
Hal G. P. Colebatch| 4.10.09 @ 10:49AM
While I agree with the thrust of this article, although this quotation is frequently attributed to Chersterton, scholars seem unable to locate it in his very large body of work (which has never been comprehensively indexed). However, Edmund Burke, who we know Chesterton admired in many ways, said something very similar much earlier in "Reflections on the Revolution in France" in 1790. I believe it is Burke who deserves credit as author of the idea:
"If we should uncover our madness by throwing off that Christian religion which had hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of Civilization amongst us, and among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious and degrading superstition, might take the place of it."
ccd| 4.10.09 @ 1:10PM
We have a capitalist democracy which necessarily means that peoples time and money goes where it is most rewarded. Christianity and other religions promise a lot but deliver little, secularist materialism promises nothing and delivers health, wealth, and power. It is therefore predictable that cultures walk away from such superstitions.
Truth to Power| 4.10.09 @ 1:28PM
When one stops to consider how many people secular materialists murdered last century (100 million), ccd seems to be living in a fantasy world.
David Govett | 4.10.09 @ 2:39PM
America unchallenged has the luxury of allowing any breathing and blathering nitwit to lead it. Once challenged, however--as it undoubtedly soon will be--America will abandon its childish petulance and turn helplessly to adults with experience and with America's best interests at heart.
ccd| 4.10.09 @ 2:57PM
Truth to power,
You put forth an interesting straw man argument and an ad himinem attack.
I did not say that secular humanism was right or wrong, good or evil; I said it was a predictable development. Superstitions simply don't deliver on their promises. When an alternative arises that is measurably more rewarding, it is predictable that it will gain support. Similar to capitalism, support flows to endeavors that are productive.
If religions want to compete and regain lost ground, then they will have to deliver. Thinking otherwise is the fantasy.
ccd| 4.10.09 @ 3:07PM
In the above note i should have written secular materialism not secular humanism.
Further, I don't think Stalin, hitler, mao or pol pot qualify as humanists. They behavior indicates they were anti-humanists.
Vaemar| 4.11.09 @ 4:10AM
Christianity ALONE of all the religions and non- religions which have come and gone, gave man scientific and technological civilization, rescued humanity from dependence on slavery, animal power and sails, and gave the mass of humanity a life-expectancy of more than about 30 years.
Christianity has not been superceded by science, technology and capitalism. As the only religion which accorded a high place to Reason rather than mystery, it was Christianity alone which made scientific and technological civilization and capitalism possible.
If you want to look at a non-communist secular society, look at Russia today. Every generation has a shorter life-expectancy than the last. That's what you get when you marinate a society in communism/atheism for 70 years and dissolve religion (save for a State-controlled vestige) out of it.
No other civilization has delivered the goods in terms of human progress and welfare in any way even remotely comparable to Western Christianity. I challenge "ccd" to name one that has.
Peadar Roe | 4.11.09 @ 8:53AM
Vaemar,
Well done! I was about to write much the same to the inaptly named ccd. Perhaps, he (or she, to be truly PC) should take a closer look at what passes for culture and society in these increasingly secular, tolerant and diverse Untied States..the subject of the book under review and comment.
Spend Sunday at a large shopping mall and wonder whether the alternative that has there arisen is measurably more rewarding. Yet, that has become the default position of a Sabbath for multitudes of folk whose only religion is, as London points out and Dector affirms in his review is "being all you can be".
Tom Black| 4.11.09 @ 9:01AM
In response to ccd, who wrote, "Superstitions simply don't deliver on their promises" and "..support flows to endeavors that are productive," let me make two points:
1) Religious faith, which you refer to as "superstitions," often DOES deliver on its promise. Speaking as a Christian, those who truly follow the Ten Commandments and Jesus' teaching about looking out for others rather than putting your own selfish desires first, tend to have more peace of mind, less drug and alcohol abuse, better marriages, no AIDS or other sexually transmitted disease, fewer legal problems, better health, and a better outlook on life. Note I did not say ALL persons of faith reap these benefits; I am referring to the most sincere and committed individuals. And persons of faith still will have difficulties, trials, failures and sickness. No one escapes those facts of life. However, God gives us the strength and fortitude to deal with them. God's laws were not intended to be imposed in the "party pooper" mindset, but rather, because he created us and knows what's best for us.
2) As for "endeavors that are productive," there are countless faith-based charities that run hospitals, health clinics, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, shelters for abused women; provide assistance to pregnant single women; build homes (Habitat for Humanity); provide food for the hungry in Africa, etc. And untold volunteers who help inner city kids stay on the right track and out of trouble. One does not have to be a Christian or even have any faith to do productive things that benefit other people, but faith certainly makes that course of action more likely.
Charles Thomas| 4.11.09 @ 4:47PM
Ah! but christianity does offer much in the here and hereafter, One must only take a step of faith and the heart will see what the eyes cannot.
ccd| 4.12.09 @ 12:16AM
As said above religions (ie christianity) promise alot in the way of miracles and afterlives, but it doesn't detectably deliver. Materialism doesn't promise anything, but looking for material causes and material solutions has cured the sick and healed the lame, it can even enable walking on water and trasforming water (and a simple assortment of hydrocarbons) into wine.
Materialism may lack in poetic imagery, but it delivers to a statistically repeatable measure. It is therefore predictable that people will invest time and energy to what will verifiably work rather than what doesn't deliver on promises.
If you want a resurgence in religion, an awakening, don't just bemoan the spread of secular materialism deliver some reliable miracles.
Vaemar| 4.12.09 @ 8:03AM
ccd
It is a pity you don't appear to know anything about history. When Christianity was first legalised in the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century, the Fathers of the church laid down that every diocese must support a hospital. When did atheism do that? When was there anything like it in the whole of preceding history? Where are the atheist equivalents of David Livingstone or Father Damian? That's before we ask where are the atheist equivalents of Dante, Shakespeare, Descarte, Raphael, Newton, Locke, Boyle, Planck? Christianity does not merely deliver miracles, Christianity is a miracle. And what do you think the Creation which you are standing in is, if not a miracle? What is the DNA in your own cells if not a miracle? Reliable miracles have been well and truely delivered.
Bill| 4.12.09 @ 11:13AM
ccd,
Christians have a different frame of reference. Life is not about taking it is about giving. Taking the blessing's God has bestowed and passing them on to the less fortunate. The miracle you seek is a touched heart by our Redeemer which totally changes life. Governments can never duplicate the work of God through his people. Christians do not look for rewards on this side of God's kingdom for we know that we are moving on to bigger and better things. Christ paid the price for all our short falls (sin), the perfect payment for the imperfect. Our focus is up to God, inward for growth and outward to the word that is hurting.
Enjoy this Easter Sunday. Easter totally changed the world forever.
Blessings from one of God's humble people.
ccd| 4.12.09 @ 11:21AM
Vaemer,
Christians are in general nice enough people with a nice enough history, the same can be said about all religions. But all I read is people bemoaning the rise of materialism and the fall of supernaturalism. What I never see is evidence for those supernatural superstitions.
You can explain DNA, stars, and flowers as miracles or materialisticly. The former gives you some symbolic imagery the latter gives you cures, power, and food. Everything that can be claimed as a miracle can be explained materialisticly.
Many of the people in the pews today attend out of habit, or boredom, or to socialize, or a vauge sense of "just in case."
Religions don't deliver, materialsim does; people will tend towards what delivers.
El Wayne| 4.12.09 @ 6:53PM
Vaemar
"Christianity does not merely deliver miracles, Christianity is a miracle."
Your posts very well could serve as a primer to rebut the assinine suppositions that ccd ascribes to. I know, it might be "ad himinem"(sic) but such as his ilk are shackled to darkness. Its no use arguing with them as they simply have been educated beyond their intelligence.
Well done sir.
Rich Rostrom| 4.13.09 @ 4:21AM
Chesterton may not have said it, but Dorothy Sayers, another famous Christian apologist, once wrote this passage (in "The Documents in the Case"):
"The [First World] War," said Perry, immediately. "It has taken the heart out of people"
"Yes. It showed things up a bit," said Mathews. "Made it hard to believe in anything."
"No," replied the priest. "Made it easy to believe and difficult not to believe - in anything. Just anything..."
ccd| 4.13.09 @ 2:04PM
It does really matter. The secular will ask for some evidence of miracles, the religous will not provide any, and the materialists will get on with the "assinine" (sic) work of studying the world around us so that A/C will turn on and food will be in the pantry.
Lamenting secular materialism will not stem the spread, people want results. After a while "thou shalt have treasures in heaven" loses it's novelty.
ccd| 4.14.09 @ 1:35PM
sorry typo, "it doesn't really matter."
Bob Cook | 4.28.09 @ 5:24PM
Chesterton’s most brilliant aperçu ? See the following site for a resolution of these frequently misquoted words. http://chesterton.org/qmeister2/any-everything.htm
gfdgf| 11.30.09 @ 4:12AM
TOD Converter Mac,
TOD File Converter Mac