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A materialist re-thinks the rejection of religion
Concerning the Swiss referendum that by a decisive majority banned the construction of Muslim minarets, the Human Biodiversity blogger OneSTDV (“one standard deviation”) writes:
One would imagine that the atheist community, a community which actively opposes the imposition of religion, would laud such a decision. Yet, the exceedingly liberal atheist blogosphere has largely criticized the decision.
After quoting the liberal atheists, who express complete contempt and horror at the Swiss vote, he continues:
I once believed secularism and reason could “save” the world, that discarding silly notions of the divine would rid us of our conceits and squabbles. Unfortunately, such a naive view overlooks the basics of human nature and how religion is not only an inevitable aspect of man, but that religious misbehavior only reflects the deeper “original sin” of man’s inherent composition. Thus, the chimera of “religion as all evil” obscures that man is an irrevocably broken entity.
The average atheist dismisses religion, and, as religion generally underpins conservatism, he usually accepts the injurious maxims of modern liberalism. He is then beholden to tolerance and democracy as the preeminent values.
OneSTDV seems to be moving toward a traditionalist view of the etiology of liberalism. Liberalism, as I’ve written, begins in rejection of God or any higher truth. With no truth higher than the human self and its desires and it beliefs by which some desires and beliefs are seen as closer to or farther from the truth than others, as better or worse than others, all desires and beliefs must be seen as equally good and equally true. This in turn leads to the idea that the most immoral thing is to make distinctions or discriminations between different desires and beliefs.The desires of one’s countrymen to maintain their way of life cannot be seen as better than the desire of Muslims to bring their alien and calamitous religion into one’s country and transform it into an Islamic country.
In short, rejection of God and higher truth leads to the liberal cult of non-discrimination, which leads to national and racial suicide.
Or, to put the analysis in the terms of my speech, “A Real Islam Policy for a Real America,” the denial of the vertical axis (the hierarchy of truth) leads to the demand for the denial of the horizontal axis (differences between people and cultures).
OneSTDV seems to be recognizing something along these lines. He also seems to be saying that while his fellow right-wing atheists believe that atheism is compatible with conservatism, the reality is that atheism has an inherent tendency to lead to liberalism. Therefore, if one wants to preserve one’s own society from a hostile alien religion, the last thing one should do is undermine the religion of one’s own society, as the right-wing atheists are doing.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, and, in my pleasure at thinking I have won an ally, am reading into OneSTDV’s comments what I want to see. If so, he can correct me. Also, there’s more to his article than what I’ve said.
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Note: An alternative way of understanding the etiology of liberalism is that liberalism begins in the belief in the equality of all selves, which then turns into a rejection of God and higher truth. But in whichever direction the etiology operates,—from equality to atheism, or from atheism to equality—the content of the resulting liberalism is the same.
- end of initial entry -
Gintas writes:
You wrote:
OneSTDV seems to be recognizing something along these lines. He also seems to be saying that while his fellow right-wing atheists believe that atheism is compatible with conservatism, the reality is that atheism has an inherent tendency to lead to liberalism. Therefore, if one wants to preserve one’s own society from a hostile alien religion, the last thing one should do is undermine the religion of one’s own society, as the right-wing atheists are doing.
And on the other hand Paul Gottfried answers Thomas Fleming:
There is, indeed, an egalitarian, universalist side to Christianity, unlike Judaism or Hinduism, and it can be found in the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles.
Gottfried also says the Enlightenment was a Western Christian thing,
But what seems to me undeniable is that some degree of connection does exist between Protestantism in its purest form and its current American liberal manifestations and between Christianity in general and the Enlightenment. Muslims or Jainists did not develop Enlightened or democratic ideas, except to the extent that they borrowed them from Western Christian cultures. Most of the leaders of the French Enlightenment were Jesuit-educated; and as Carl Becker shows to my satisfaction in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, the leaders of the Enlightenment in both Catholic and Protestant countries drew their millennial view of earthly rationality after a period of struggle from biblical visions of the end times.
It looks like Gottfried is pointing out Christian sources for Liberalism. Is it surprising that rightist atheists say Christianity must go, since it’s feeding Liberalism?
It’s not just liberalism that must be discredited, it’s Liberal Science, Liberal Christianity, etc. All the particular instantiations of liberalism must be discredited in turn.
LA replies:
While I agree with you on your final point, I don’t see the relevance of the Gottfried discussion to the OneSTDV discussion. To say, as Gottfried says, that “some degree of connection does exist between Protestantism in its purest form and its current American liberal manifestations and between Christianity in general and the Enlightenment,” is not to say that Christianity causes liberalism and therefore Christianity must go. It’s saying that Christianity can, though a mutation (a mutation that involves dropping most of what constitutes Christianity), result in liberalism, which of course is true.
The white race produced liberalism. Do the right-wing atheists therefore propose that the white race be exterminated?
Kristor writes:
You write:
Liberalism, as I’ve written, begins in rejection of God or any higher truth. With no truth higher than the human self and its desires and its beliefs by which some desires and beliefs are seen as closer to or farther from the truth than others, as better or worse than others, all desires and beliefs must be seen as equally good and equally true. This in turn leads to the idea that the most immoral thing is to make distinctions or discriminations between different desires and beliefs.
Yes! A concise, exact statement. Re the etiology of liberalism, you got me thinking. Careful with that, Lawrence! Well-meaning people may be sorted into four types: theist conservatives, atheist conservatives, atheist liberals, and theist liberals. They may be plotted on a coordinate system:
[Click here to see Word document with two tables. After reading the tables, return here and resume reading.]
Atheist Liberals and Theist Conservatives are pretty straightforward and easy to understand. The others are a bit tricky, because they are plainly incoherent. Theist Liberals face the problem that if no one can know Truth well enough to warrant authority, then so far as we are concerned there is effectively no Truth out there at all. Theist Liberalism must therefore collapse either into Conservatism or Atheism. Atheist Conservatives face the problem that if there is no Truth out there, nothing can be warranted; in that case, the notion of a warrant for one course of action versus another is simply inapposite to reality. Atheist Conservatism must therefore collapse either into Liberalism or Theism.
Atheist Liberalism is of course also incoherent. If there is no Truth, so that nothing is really better than anything else, then “foolishness” and “wickedness” are meaningless terms, and the Atheist Liberal has no way to justify his criticism of discrimination. Atheist Liberals, then, will sooner or later find themselves falling off this chart altogether, into anti-social existentialist nihilism and Nietzschean will to power.
LA replies:
Great. It has a lovely symmetry to it. I wonder if this particular taxonomy has ever been done before. I’ve often thought about conservative skeptics, e.g., David Hume and today’s conservative atheists. But I don’t remember ever seeing all four types defined and put into relation with each other as you have done here.
Kilroy M. writes from Australia:
You write: “rejection of God and higher truth leads to the liberal cult of non-discrimination”
Yes, and Christianity’s embrace of formal secular notions of “equality” push it along the path of oblivion too, whereby the universalism that should be understood as spiritual is transferred into the material. Spiritual equality before God then becomes formal equality before all men … and women … and homosexuals … and transsexuals … and (logically, in the future) paedophiles … etc. Essentially, man has lost his sense of boundaries and proportion by rejecting God, which brings me to the peculiar question of: has liberal Christianity constructively “rejected God” by adhering to liberal paradigms as the ultimate good?
LA replies:
Well put. I would just quibble on one thing. You refer to “Christianity’s embrace of formal secular notions of equality.” But a Christianity that embraces formal secular notions of equality is no longer Christianity. It has mutated into something else, namely secular liberalism.
That quibble aside, this is an effective restatement of the problem that Christianity has the potential of being radically reduced into material egalitarianism, a potential and danger that Christians must acknowledge, recognize, and zealously guard against.
According to various parables of Jesus and the doctrines of both traditional Catholicism and original Protestantism, a few will be saved, and most will not. How can any reasonable person say that such a teaching is compatible with egalitarianism? Joseph Sobran’s excellent article on how Jesus was not a liberal (written before Sobran became, first, a demented hater of the Jewish state, and second, a demented liberal who redefined Jesus as an open borders advocate) should be read by everyone.
Richard W. writes:
I like the chart Kristor created, but I’m not sure his reductions are correct.
Kristor wrote: “Atheist Conservatives face the problem that if there is no Truth out there, nothing can be warranted; in that case, the notion of a warrant for one course of action versus another is simply inapposite to reality. Atheist Conservatism must therefore collapse either into Liberalism or Theism.”
Isn’t one of the ideas of Conservatism that tradition and social norms have values that are nearly transcendent in and of themselves? The correct course of action can by known by understanding what is known to work through our history. (Strangely when described this way it seems almost a variation on Utilitarianism, hardly considered a foundation of Conservatism.)
What makes the liberal attack successful is that they target both of the conservative world views. Atheists attack belief directly, while liberal policies like mass immigration, and homosexual normalization, seek to make tradition and culture meaningless by cultural diffusion.
I tend toward the atheist/conservative quadrant and was told by an elderly conservative who was a mentor that: “This philosophy has been known for hundreds of years among the well educated, but was kept within the bounds of the Philosophy department and discussed only among graduate students until recently. That was good for society. Consider following that example.”
Famously Pope John Paul II was said to have replied to Oriana Fallaci when she told him she was an Atheist “That’s fine, just act like you are Christian anyway.” My mentor took it a bit further by adding: “Don’t talk about such things with people who are easily confused (which is most people these days). It does no one any good.”
Strangely this made perfect sense to me having been raised Catholic. The Catholic Church seems to support a higher level of skepticism about belief than many other sects. Few people talk openly about their “personal relationship with Jesus” in the Catholic Church. Many Protestants (especially the “born again”) interpret this as the Church is dead. But an alternate understanding is that the Catholic Church has actually shouldered a far greater burden of ordering society for far longer than any other Christian denomination.
I suspect that over the years it has understood that the best thing for society (and therefore the Church which is a part of it) is that it be widely inclusive and give full “credit” to belonging to anyone who chooses so to identify himself, regardless of the depth of sincerity of his belief. It is, again, a Conservative and utilitarian view of Religion.
To put it as simply as possible: many people who are in their deepest beliefs located in Kristor’s bottom right quadrant move into the upper right to the best of their ability, because any reasonable examination shows that it is in everyone’s best interest that we all reside there (despite whatever inner doubts we have about the unknowable).
Josh F. writes:
I would say there are really just two human types. Those who believe in One True God and those who believe in an autonomous God (or autonomous gods). This God autonomy then allows the various designations of liberal extremists to deny His existence and designate themselves as atheists. Yet, they must ALWAYS invoke Him before denying Him. And because the atheist purports to adhere to science, he must explain how he both invokes and denies a God in which no empirical evidence exists?
The reality is that the two human types are (1) believers in One True God, and (2) radical autonomists, i.e., increasingly extreme liberals. The extreme liberals merely use atheism to cover their god-like intentions. Intentions that evidence belief in Higher Power.
Edward L. writes:
You have often wondered when liberals will wake up and realize that the strict repressive social codes of Islam conflict totally with their hedonistic libertine inclinations. I’m not so sure, however, that orgiastic self-fulfillment really is a dominant prerogative of liberalism. If anything, I think it is more believable that left-liberals believe in an austere ascetic world view that is as joyless as Khomeini’s Iran or Lenin’s Russia (How else could they possibly harbor the slightest residual sympathy for such unattractive political systems?).
I think that the conventional association of liberalism with self-centered hedonism is short-sighted and historically ill-founded. It stems only from the context of blacks and women in the 1960s seeking new rights and privileges that brought them tangible feel-good benefits. But when has liberalism ever countenanced white men pursuing their selfish interests? On abortion, for instance, liberalism permits men to weigh in on the pro-choice side only by sounding chivalrous (e.g., “I adamantly oppose the government telling any woman what she can or can’t do with her body!”). Men have to pretend to be disinterested bystanders; what is absolutely verboten is for men to discuss abortion in terms of its impact on their own sex lives.
Even on the female side, feminists argue for abortion rights on the narrow grounds of bodily autonomy. They are very careful not to defend it directly in terms of sexual liberation. They appeal to the more lugubrious issue of women dying in childbirth (although in the vast majority of cases, we’re talking about perfectly healthy young women in their ’20s who either slipped up on birth control or who had the misfortune of a condom rupture).
LA replies:
It’s not really a contradiction. A key insight about liberalism, which resolves many problems, is that there are two main strands of liberalism, which we might call Romantic Liberalism and Social Engineering Liberalism. The first seeks expansion of the self through the liberation of desire and impulse. The second seeks the reconstruction of society to achieve a new social order where everyone’s desires and needs are met on an equal basis. What do these two liberalism, which are often in conflict with each other, have in common? They both stem from the liberal rejection of higher truth and objective value and the divinization of man’s will. In one case, this divinization takes the form of Romantic Self-Expansion. In the other case, it takes the form of Man as the God of History recreating his own nature through social engineering. But they both seek freedom, equality, and maximum fulfillment of human needs within an autonomous, man-created order.
The two types of liberalism were first articulated by Rousseau, who on one hand sought the liberation of the natural man from oppressive and unequal social institutions, and on the other hand sought a totalitarian state guided by the Collective Will. What do the two visions, which sound so different, have in common? Man’s will as the guiding force. And that’s why both types of liberalism, notwithstanding their occasional mutual conflicts, work together to destroy traditional society.
Daniel R. writes:
Regarding atheist conservatives: They (or “I,” since this more or less describes me) basically accept your position on the origin of liberalism, but have a world view which provides something like higher truth without God.
This is not to deny Kristor’s point. Arguably, any world view providing an acceptable higher-truth-substitute is either incoherent (i.e. it’s the sort of blind faith atheist conservatives ascribe to ordinary religion), or contains metaphysical commitments equivalent to faith in God.
I think what OneSTDV is picking up on is the fact that atheists typically do not simply disapprove of religion, but minimize its significance. That is, they see an alien religion attempting to muscle in on the local religion as an alien culture attempting to muscle in on the local culture. They do not see religion as the backbone of the diverse practices and customs that jointly constitute the culture. Instead, religion is just one more custom, to be judged along with the rest. He imagines that his home culture will be just as able to resist the alien culture without religion. In fact, it will be better able, since there’s no chance of the people trusting in God to get them through the troubles. And it will make the culture ever so slightly more desirable in his eyes anyhow. In other words, fighting religion is all upside and no downside.
I suspect it would be quite easy to convert genuinely conservative atheists to the position of “I won’t fight your religion if you don’t bother me about my atheism.” The main obstacle, besides the minimization of the significance of religion, is the conservative atheist’s reaction to the same debasement of Christianity that bothers you so much. Earlier in my intellectual development, though I saw plenty of left-Christian criticism (i.e. left-simpliciter criticism) of mainstream Christianity, the idea of right-Christian criticism of the horrible mainstream of Christianity did not even occur to me. I always assumed that the horrible mainstream of Christianity was the right-Christian position.
Jeff W. writes:
I would like to thank Kristor for his chart. It helps me understand things more clearly.
The only observation I would add is that Theist Conservatives are the only group who can really have the courage of their convictions. They know that truth exists, and they believe they know what it is.
I observe this in the world. A Theistic Conservative like Sarah Palin (say what you will about her) has shown courage at times and has been willing to stand against the crowd.
But liberals and atheists always work in a pack. They feel unsafe and insecure if their views do not mirror those of all the others. That is why they have sometimes been called “the Hive.”
LA replies:
You wrote: “The only observation I would add is that Theist Conservatives are the only group who can really have the courage of their convictions. They know that truth exists, and they believe they know what it is…. But liberals and atheists always work in a pack.”
Great point. I would add that even when liberal atheists appear not to be in a pack but to be more or less standalone spokesmen, like Richard Dawkins or that awful Dennett person, they are bullies, relying on a scornful attitude plus the authority of a supposed unquestionable consensus (e.g. “Only a babbling idiot could doubt Darwinism”) to marginalize and crush their opponents. In those cases, the established liberal secular ideology functions as the “pack.”
Kristor writes:
Richard W. writes:
Isn’t one of the ideas of Conservatism that tradition and social norms have values that are nearly transcendent in and of themselves?
This is the Atheist Conservative idea. It is laid out in more depth in Alan Roebuck’s Statement of Conservative Darwinism. This essay was not an expression of Mr. Roebuck’s own ideas, but his formulation of what a genuinely conservative Darwinism would consist of, if it existed. He wrote:
However, it is also my belief that while human morality is in no sense absolute or absolutely binding upon us, it is the product of a long process of natural selection; that the human feelings of right and wrong, of moral obligation and duty, of fair dealing and proper behavior as a member of society, are the result of dearly bought, deeply tested, and carefully refined discoveries of our species over millions of years, and of our cultural forebears over the course of millennia. Our basic moral notions are thus grounded in and fitted to physical reality, in the same way that our sensations of vision and hearing are grounded in and fitted to physical reality. In this sense they are objective, and therefore authoritative. For these reasons I believe that traditional mores are not to be jettisoned lightly. Rather, it is prudent to conserve them as our default responses to changing situations. That is why I am a conservative.
It is indeed a venerable tradition, going all the way back to the Classical era. But that doesn’t mean it’s coherent. Either traditions and social norms are rooted in a transcendent moral truth, or not; there is no middle ground. If they are not, then however valuable we may feel them to be, they are nothing more than conventions; they have no basis in reality. Thus when an Atheist Conservative says, “Murder is wrong,” he cannot mean that murder is wrong in any absolute sense, but only something like, “Human societies all think that murder is wrong, even though it really isn’t; it’s just that societies wherein murder is approved have not survived.”
It’s no good to point to the good of cultural survival as a warrant for the proscription of murder, because adducing any good at all begs the question whether the good is such absolutely or not. Since the Atheist Conservative disbelieves in the reality of the Transcendentals, he must answer, “not.” Thus the project of warranting one course of action versus another, or of discriminating among cultures, is foreclosed to the consistent Atheist Conservative. [Newly added text:] And this means precisely that the Atheist Conservative cannot justify his conviction that traditional society should be conserved, rather than destroyed. It means that, so long as he remains an atheist, he cannot be a conservative at all (except perhaps in his heart and guts). This is why I say that Atheist Conservatism collapses either to Theism or Liberalism.
That doesn’t mean Atheist Conservatives don’t try to justify one thing versus another; it just means that in doing so they are inconsistent.
The dissonance at the heart of the Atheist Conservative’s doctrine may be found in the following excerpt from the Statement of Conservative Darwinism:
Our basic moral notions are thus grounded in and fitted to physical reality, in the same way that our sensations of vision and hearing are grounded in and fitted to physical reality.
If the moral law is simply not a feature of objective reality at all, as a nominalist would argue, then how could the notion of morality arise anywhere in the world—including our brains? The mere fact that we have moral intuitions, and that traditional morality seems to be fitted to physical reality, would seem to imply the objective reality of the moral law—would seem to indicate that morality is a property of the physical universe. I.e., it would seem to contradict nominalism.
Gintas replies to LA’s earlier reply:
Atheism vs. Christianity is being brought up all over on the right; the atheists are busy rejecting Christianity. OneSTDV is an exception, he sounds like he is re-thinking religion (not embracing it, though).
Gottfried and Fleming are starting a back-and-forth, and Fleming identifies Gottfried as making stupid arguments about Christianity:
I wrote this piece in great haste, wanting only to make the basic point that the attack on Medieval Christianity, which goes back to Nietzsche and beyond, is fundamentally stupid. The arguments are being repeated by tiresome young men on the Internet and a guru [he means Gottfried] perpetually in search of disciples. What is truly amusing is to see these aspiring anti-Semites sitting at the feet of a Jewish intellectual.
Gottfried returns fire by bringing up Christian connections to Liberalism, he’s been working his thesis for a while. Gottfried doesn’t approach it as “what took over Christianity?” but “what is inherent in Christianity that leads to Liberalism?” I have no idea whatsoever if he believes in God, is it safe to assume he’s an atheist?
LA replies:
I’m barely aware of this discussion and have not following it at all. I had no idea that Paul Gottfried was attacking Christianity. Of course he constantly excoriates liberal Protestantism. But I never heard him attacking Christianity as such. I’m kind of shocked.
Kilroy says re Gottfried and Fleming:
I’m shocked as well, but only because I thought they were both Paleocons.
Gintas writes:
LA wrote:
“I’m barely aware of this discussion and have not following it at all. I had no idea that Paul Gottfried was attacking Christianity. Of course he constantly excoriates liberal Protestantism. But I never heard him attacking Christianity as such. I’m kind of shocked.”
In Gottfried’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy, Chapter Two is titled “Religious Foundations of the Managerial Therapeutic State,” but he writes about, as you noted, liberal Protestantism. But in the latest article at Takimag, he said (I’ve added the bolding):
I would further note that contrary to what some have suggested, my book on multiculturalism is not a blistering indictment of Calvinist theology. My work attacks the collapse of Calvinism into the American politics of guilt. It most definitely does not consider Luther and Calvin, who were brilliant and learned Christian theologians, as precursors of our current antiracism or antisexism. Although certain Protestant attitudes and sentiments have survived in modern leftist reformulations, it would be foolish to assume a close continuity between this replacement theology and what it replaced.
But what seems to me undeniable is that some degree of connection does exist between Protestantism in its purest form and its current American liberal manifestations and between Christianity in general and the Enlightenment. Muslims or Jainists did not develop Enlightened or democratic ideas, except to the extent that they borrowed them from Western Christian cultures. Most of the leaders of the French Enlightenment were Jesuit-educated
The title of the article is “Christian Heresies”, and if you said it with emphasis on “Christian” as in “Christian heresies” you get the idea of what I read. Maybe Gottfried is just too subtle for me, with his endless references to obscure European rightists.
LA replies:
As I said before, this is not an attack on Christianity as such or a statement that Christianity must turn into liberalism, therefore it’s bad.
Gintas continues:
Extremely sharp wording from Fleming on Gottfried. I’ve added bold, because it describes why Gottfried was dismissed from Chronicles’ editorial board.
I am going to close this discussion and begin preparation for a fresh installment. I should like to make one or two concluding observations. First, this is not about personalities. I have always liked Paul Gottfried personally, though his eccentric and willful conduct makes it difficult to remain on friendly terms. He has a way of making ill-considered and fallacious statements which he then converts into incontrovertible truths. When this is applied to long dead people, it is simply poor scholarship, when it is applied to the living it can be libelous and when it is applied to living or recently deceased friends it is a form of betrayal. It was because of false and malicious things he wished to publish about Sam Francis that I dismissed him from our editorial board–that on top of a long history of intrigue I find distasteful. His current attempt to get out in front of an anti-Christian movement is simply his latest folly. If he thinks, really, that any amount of rhetorical obfuscation can obscure his anti-Christianity or that his Christian friends are going to pretend he has not said what he has said, he is very much mistaken.
LA replies:
I repeat, I see nothing anti-Christian in the passages of Gottfried that you quote. I see the standard criticisms of liberal Christianity that any traditionalist Christian would make. Further, Fleming’s fact-free personal attack on Gottfried for insubstantiated personal misconduct (absolutely typical of Fleming) puts the onus on Fleming and not on Gottfried.
Kilroy replies to LA’s earlier reply:
You are right when you say that a Christianity that preaches formal secular equality is no longer Christian as such. This also answers the pagan nouvelle droite (European New Right) movement by illustrating that the cultural AIDS of liberalism is not so much the result of the presence of Christianity in the West, but the West’s ostracizing of Christianity from the public sphere.
The debate then really centres on what the “true” nature of Christianity is. Is it the Christianity of Charles Martel, Jan Sobieski III and those that died defending Europe at Lepanto? Or is it Rowan Williams and the peace-at-all-costs, acknowledging-any-difference-between-people-leads-to-the-gates-of-Auschwitz kumbaya crowd?
To me, the drift from the former to the later is the result of confusing the spiritual with the material: it is a heresy insofar as it attempts to establish the Heavenly Order on Earth without addressing the very real nature of Original Sin. It is pure Utopian liberalism and alien to the teachings of Christ. The resulting confusion turns everything on its head while pretending its the right way up. [LA replies: that’s it.]
For example here Joseph Sobran makes an amusing quip about the bastardised concept of “greed” and “need” under liberalism. Incidentally, you refer to an “excellent” article of Sobrans’, but I cannot find it online. Could you provide us with a citation or a link please.
LA replies:
I was looking for that Sobran article earlier on my computer, at VFR, and elsewhere online and could not find it. Its title is something like, “Was Jesus a liberal”?
N. writes:
“A materialist re-thinks the rejection of religion” prompts me to bring up John G. Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism.” If not, here is a bio of him that so far as I can tell is accurate.
Here is the book in online form, it is also still in print.
As a Presbyterian, Machen was a Calvinist. Do not let that throw you, most of his critique in “Christianity and Liberalism” does not depend upon that particular theology. I will state that he did not pad his writing. It can be challenging to read Machen, because he wrote in more of a 19th century style, and very densely. Every word is there for a purpose, there’s no padding.
LA replies:
But the 19th century style is often a padded style.
Josh F. writes:
To Richard W.:
An atheistic conservative is almost certainly a radical autonomist in
disguise. If conserving Absolute Truth IS NOT the essence of
conservatism then and only then can atheistic conservatism have any
meaning.
Markus writes:
N.’s link to the online version of J. Gresham Machem’s Christianity & Liberalism is welcome, and should serve as proof that Protestantism, which relies far more heavily on the Bible than Catholicism, is perfectly capable of mounting a rigorous defense of the conservative moral order.
For the Bible-believing Christian (and that’s what Machem was), Christianity is found not merely in the teachings and precepts and wonderful example of a historical man named Jesus, but in the totality of His divine Person and his sin-atoning work on Calvary’s cross. If you take away all of the assumptions that underlie the gospel narrative—the existence of a creative, personal and holy God, the sinfulness of man, the revelation of God in the world, the reality of miracles, the incarnation and virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, his resurrection, the Great Commission, etc., etc.—you’re no longer operating within the sphere of Christianity. The liberal who rejects these assumptions, and who seeks with what can only be called a missionary zeal to put in place a secularized system based on Christian concepts such as mercy, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, etc., has not merely strayed from the faith; he has rejected the faith.
I guess I’m saying that Christians are not reliant on Jesuit-trained scholars in order to mount a strenuously resistance to liberalism.
(I don’t know if that’s what Gottfried is implying … I do know he really has issues with the teaching known as Dispensationalism, which is a large strand within Evangelicalism that many pay lip service to, while also pursuing this or that liberal social goal. But the teaching itself has absolutely nothing to do with liberalism.)
Mark A. writes:
Kristor’s taxonomy is helpful and basically accurate, but I think he makes a mistake with not obvious but serious implications by labeling Theistic Conservatives “Epistemological Fideists.” I generally discourage students from citing dictionary definitions of philosophical terms, but I think we can here reference the OED definition of fideism: “Any doctrine according to which all (or some) knowledge depends upon faith or revelation, and reason or the intellect is to be disregarded” (it also labels this view “Traditionalism”).
According to this definition, neither Plato nor Aquinas, both of whom I would categorize as Theistic Conservatives, were fideists. Aquinas famously argued that natural reason alone can demonstrate the existence of God; Plato employed reason alone to make a similar point in Book 10 of his Laws. According to the premodern point of view, we can acquire (faith-independent) knowledge of the metaphysical. The modern view typically altogether denies the possibility of metaphysical knowledge; from this starting point people either outright deny the metaphysical or they affirm it based upon “faith.” The latter option of course generates the problem of competing faiths. But, more importantly, it reduces our epistemological relationship to the object of our concern. Affirmation based upon knowledge independent of faith is, when possible, if not more certain at least more “objective” (certainly it is more objective from the perspective of someone who does not share one’s faith) than affirmation solely or partially dependent upon faith (“objective” isn’t the best, or the most relevant, word here; but it would require too much space to (try to) formulate the matter as precisely as it should be formulated).
In short, fideism already concedes too much to the modern, materialist/empiricist, perspective. In certain matters (philosophical as well as theological matters), fideism may be appropriate—and Aquinas (and possibly Plato, too) would insist that it is not only appropriate but necessary. But to reduce all our acquaintance of the metaphysical to a matter of faith independent of knowledge is too go too far in the wrong philosophical direction.
Kristor writes:
For all the reasons Mark A. elucidates, I was quite unhappy with the term “Epistemological Fideist” when I used it in my grid. But I was in a hurry, and while I just knew the correct term was out there (as a neologism, if nowhere else), I could not for the life of me come up with it. Mark is quite right that “Epistemological Fideist” concedes too much to the modern skeptical perspective, by seeming to grant ab initio that confidence (there’s that root, “fidere,” again) in our capacity to know reality might in fact be only one of the available options, rather than being, as it is, a sine qua non of thought (and life, for that matter). I considered “Epistemological Rationalist,” but that had problems of its own.
Yet “Fideist” may nevertheless be not wholly inapt. Modern nominalist skepticism so completely pervades the academy that most people come out of university devout Humeans, Kantians, or Ockhamians, even if they never took a philosophy course. So among people who might be interested in pursuing abstract reflection—such as the VFR community—I think it overwhelmingly likely that pre-modern epistemology is credited by very few—though this is less likely to be true for the VFR demographic than it is of the larger population who consider themselves thoughtful and educated. The puerile modern skeptic looks back at the ante-Humeans with a feeling of pity, or even scorn, as philosophical innocents, unsophisticated rubes. His professors taught him to do so. So, like most of his professors, he has never actually read or grappled with the pre-moderns. He has never considered that his skepticism may be sophistical.
There is a zen saying, popularized by the singer Donovan: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” It refers to the three stages of spiritual development. When he begins, the student looks at Fuji and sees a mountain. This is the default position of humanity; an innocent confidence in our experience. But as the student progresses in zen, he comes to realize that there is no mountain there at all. On the contrary, the monastic sophomore realizes, the experience of the mountain is an illusion; all reality is an illusion; his own existence as a disparate entity is an illusion. But when he attains Samadhi, he understands that the child’s innocent perspective is after all correct. Mount Fuji does really exist, is in fact more real than he had ever been able to understand, either as a novice or a sophomore. I have often thought that the West has since the Enlightenment been in the sophomore stage of its cultural development.
There are lots of other problems with the grid. How, for example, would we treat John Paul II? He believes in the existence of the transcendentals, believes we can know them, believes he himself has privileged knowledge. Is he a Theist Conservative? Most theist conservatives would probably say, “no;” but I’d bet a week’s wages that 100% of people falling into the other three quadrants of my grid would say, “yes, absolutely, J2P2 is a hard-line Conservative Theist.” Let’s just say that my grid is not quite so granular as the reality it addresses. But what theory is?
JGP writes:
I’m not sure where Kristor gets the idea that conservative atheists don’t believe in truth. Truth is an extraordinarily complex subject that, quite frankly, gives me a headache. But to put it simply, we believe truth is what is empirically verifiable. Why there is order and pattern in the universe is a subject for books not emails. I’m simply pointing out that Kristor’s analysis is based on an incorrect assumption.
Conservatism is a more adaptive response to the world and human nature. That’s as succinct as I can be on the subject.
LA replies:
Is it wrong to steal?
Kristor writes:
JGP writes: “[Conservative Atheists] believe truth is what is empirically verifiable.” Has that belief been empirically verified? If not, is it false? Is it susceptible to empirical verification in the first place? How would you go about designing an experiment to verify verifiability as the sole criterion of truth? Even if you could design such an experiment, wouldn’t the argument from a positive experimental result to the conclusion that only empirical verification yields knowledge be circular in form?
Pretty difficult questions. No wonder JGP’s head hurts when he thinks about truth.
All that said, and not wanting to belabor JGP overmuch, I get his point. I am sure that most conservative atheists are people of good will, and believe in practice that there is an objective truth out there, and that we can know it through science. But this has to be an unprincipled exception on their part, for “there is an objective truth” contradicts “there is no God.” Perhaps I should explain why that is so.
If there is no God, there is no such thing as an absolutely perfect perspective on reality. This in turn entails that no entity’s perspective is quite adequate, for each of them necessarily fails to take adequate account of some aspects of things that have been adequately apprehended by others, if only on account of their idiosyncratic locations—or in Einsteinian terms, on account of their idiosyncratic inertial frames of reference. No creature can be everywhere at once. There being in the atheistic case no entity that can possibly understand the whole of the truth from every perspective, the best that a supremely powerful but non-omniscient intellect could do would be to comprehend seriatim each of the creaturely perspectives (how?) that in their countless trillions make up each moment of history; an incompletable task. What cannot be completed cannot completely happen. I.e., there can’t be such a thing, in the atheist case we are considering, as a completely specifiable, perfectly accurate and adequately comprehensive understanding of things—which is to say, exactly, that there cannot be an objective truth.
Only a divine omniscience can overcome this inherent defect of creaturely knowledge.
So, if there be no God, there can be no objective truth, but at best only partially adequate subjective perspectives. And this is another way of saying that if there be no God, there can be no truths at all, but only varieties of error, some worse than others.
December 6
D. from Seattle writes:
I think that the categorization Kristor put together is very useful. I have thought about it in the past, prompted by some discussions on your site, but more along the lines of categorizing political movements, not human types. I haven’t spent enough time on it nor do I have formal education in philosophy, so I didn’t get very far in that effort.
Nevertheless, I think it would be very useful to categorize political movements along the same or similar dimensions, i.e. liberal vs. conservative on one axis, and belief in higher truth vs. no higher truth on another axis. Clearly, traditional conservatives would belong in the Theist Conservative quadrant, and Communists would belong in the Atheist Liberal quadrant. I’m not sure if I can properly categorize right liberals, and I would think that many social democrats may belong to Theist Liberal quadrant. As for Fascists/Nazis, I’m not sure if they should even be lumped together and if so, would they belong to the Atheist Conservative quadrant? That would avoid the error that some of your commenters made in the past of putting Nazis in the extreme left category.
I would be interested to see your comments on this topic.
LA replies:
“Nevertheless, I think it would be very useful to categorize political movements along the same or similar dimensions, i.e. liberal vs. conservative on one axis, and belief in higher truth vs. no higher truth on another axis.”
I’m confused by the question, because I thought that one axis was believe in truth / doesn’t believe in truth, and the other axis was believe truth is accessible / doesn’t believe it’s accessible.
Kristor writes:
I think D has pretty much nailed it, except for the Nazis. I think they fall into the Atheist Liberal quadrant, because they are Nietzscheans. The idea that the Nazis were leftists has long made a fair bit of sense to me, but then I don’t know that much about them.
Social Democrats can be either atheist or theist—bit of a spectrum there.
The grid as it stands does not capture the dimensions of statism versus subsidiarity (expressed in the economic realm as dirigisme versus laissez faire), or of nationalism versus globalism. But I’m not up to trying to render a three or four dimensional coordinate system.
LA replies:
I disagree that Nazis are liberal or left, but this is a subject I do not want to revisit. Here is the last thing I wrote on the subject, and I hope it is the last.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 02, 2009 12:09 PM | Send
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