As we have seen in this series, there is massive confusion
these days over the respective roles of faith and reason, charity and justice,
supernatural law and natural law, where rights come from, who has them, and the
meaning and purpose of life. (We don’t
get into the small issues on this
blog!)
Once we’ve done away with the primacy of the intellect
(reliance on reason as the foundation of faith, and of justice as the
foundation of charity), and gone with the primacy of the will (opinion), “anything
goes.” If you are strong enough or have
enough power, you can get whatever you want.
Might makes right.
Consequently, pinning modernists and positivists down to
anything specific becomes virtually impossible.
If you try to discuss a principle on faith, they shift to reason. If you talk reason, they shift to faith. Regardless what your principles may be, they
instantly take refuge in other principles, or even try to change yours —
whether or not you want them changed.
This makes modernists, like the legal positivists with which
Crosskey dealt, very slippery fish.
Calling it “the Manichean philosophy” (although it is far from being a
true philosophy in the Aristotelian-Thomist sense of the term), G.K. Chesterton
described this sort of thing in the following way:
“What is
called the Manichean philosophy has had many forms; indeed it has attacked what
is immortal and immutable with a very curious kind of immortal mutability. It
is like the legend of the magician who turns himself into a snake or a cloud;
and the whole has that nameless note of irresponsibility, which belongs to much
of the metaphysics and morals of Asia, from which the Manichean mystery came.” (G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox.” New York: Image Books, 1956,
106.)
With this sort of thing, whether in civil society, religious
society, or, increasingly, domestic society, the Family, the idea of absolutes
of any kind ultimately disappears.
Everything becomes expedient, depending on whoever is strong enough to
force his whim or will on others.
The result, as the solidarist political scientist Heinrich
Rommen observed, is pure moral relativism, even nihilism. (Heinrich Rommen, The Natural Law. Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1998,
52.) The media, catering to a market
that assumes moral relativism as a fundamental principle (or, more accurately,
non-principle), naturally tries to give the customer what it thinks it wants.