A few thousand years ago the Roman poet Horace said that you
can chase Nature out with a pitchfork, but she always comes back. The point, of course, is that you can’t
really go against nature. Once the
pressure is off, things always get back to normal.
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| Horace: Nature always reasserts itself. |
The problem is that these days there are two very strong
“pressure points” keeping things from getting back to what is consistent with
nature, that is, “normal,” and preventing people from being honest, even with
themselves. One is the drift (sometimes
a gallop) into moral relativism in civil, religious, and now even domestic
society. That is, people’s conceptions
of both what the State, organized religion, and the Family are, and their
respective roles have become so confused that fewer and fewer people every day
can even define “State,” “Church,” or “Family” with any accuracy.
The other “pressure point” is what, in our opinion, led to
the drive toward pure moral relativism in the first place: the growing wealth,
income, and power gap, which is itself traceable to the failure to incorporate
sound principles of economic and social justice into our institutions. As a result, much of modern “social science”
has been obsessed not with working to discern the true principles on which a
just social order must be based, but with justifying either the status quo or whatever panacea they
propose.
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| Adler: You can't have your cake and eat it, too. |
This, in turn, means that people spend their time trying to
avoid the unavoidable consequences of their acts. As the Aristotelian-Thomist philosopher
Mortimer J. Adler explained,
“The positivism or scientism that has its
roots in Hume’s philosophical mistakes, and the idealism and critical constraints
that have their roots in Kant’s philosophical mistakes, generate many embarrassing consequences
that have plagued modern thought since their day. In almost every case, the trouble has
consisted in the fact that later thinkers tried to avoid the consequences without
correcting errors or mistakes that generated them.” (Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes.
New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985, 100.)
Or, in plain English, many of today’s problems result from
the fact that people insist on having their cake and eating it, too. Anything — anything — can be justified if the goal is to avoid being proven
wrong about a fundamental principle or treasured application of a
principle. All it requires is that you
surrender any claim to intellectual honesty.
As G.K. Chesterton pointed out,
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| Chesterton: Modern philosophy is trapped in its own bad assumptions. |
“Since the modern world began in
the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to
everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would
call common sense. Each started with a
paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would
call a sane point of view. That is the
one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and
William James. A man had to believe
something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to
his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to
a reality that is not there. The modern
philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant
him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he
is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.”
(Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New
York: Image Books, 1956, 145-146.)
Demonstrating that intellectual dishonesty is not a monopoly
of religious people and philosophers, the late physicist Richard Feynman
detailed some of his experiences with shoddy physical science in his essay, “Cargo
Cult Science.” As he related,
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| Feynman: Wished he really was joking. But he wasn't. |
“Now it behooves me, of course,
to tell you what they’re missing. . . . It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a
principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a
kind of leaning over backwards. For
example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other
causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that
you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure
the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
“Details that could throw doubt
on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and
advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that
disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to
make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits,
that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for
the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right,
in addition.
“In summary, the idea is to try
to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your
contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular
direction or another.” (Richard P.
Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr.
Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious
Character, As Told to Ralph Leighton. New York: Bantam Books, 1989, 311-312.)
Our leaders in Church and State rail about the problems of
modern society, and — at the same time — insist on displaying egregious
intellectual dishonesty, sometimes outright moral relativism. Is it any wonder that in Ireland, for
example, the electorate thumbed its collective nose at the Catholic Church and
voted to approve what a generation ago would have been unthinkable, or that
U.S. citizens under a government “of the people, by the people, and for the
people” have lost faith in their government — which means, ultimately, in
themselves?