Letter #235: Going Somewhere?

There may not be a middle ground between belief and anarchy.

Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dad,

For a while when I was growing up, people used to worry that all the cool kids were moral relativists. Then one day everyone kind of looked around and realized they weren’t, at all. The bawling Hamas groupies that trash Harvard Yard and Butler Lawn aren’t fired with the passionate conviction that nothing is either good or bad, right or wrong. They’re in no doubt at all that the good people—themselves—are right, and the bad people—Jews, mostly—are wrong.

It didn’t take Socrates or Aristophanes long to work out that easygoing relativism devolves very quickly, within a micro-generation, into violent certainty. The pseudo-sophisticates of Athens began by amusing themselves with word games and contradictions, “making the weaker argument the stronger.” They ended by glutting themselves with fear-mongering and bloodshed, on the grounds that “the strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.”

A man who says that “nothing is true” really means that one thing is true: the thing he says. But if he’s right, it can only be because he says so. Consequently if he meets with contradiction he can only scream, and bully, and fight. Which means there’s no such thing as unbelief—not in practice, and not for very long. There’s reasoned persuasion, and there’s violence. Everything else eventually turns into one of those two things, usually in short order.

I think what we’re seeing now is that religious belief is no exception to this rule. It may actually be the purest example of the rule in practice. My youth was the high noon of “New Atheism,” when Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins assured us that the way to enlightenment was abandoning faith. It took less than half my lifetime before Dawkins retreated to a defensive crouch he calls “cultural Christianity,” meaning he prefers carols and colored lights to radical Islamism and woke lunacy. And well he might. But if he were a serious thinker on these matters he might also have known how quickly a culture can go from worshipping no God, to inventing several, and fighting for them.

You and I, in our own ways, have also not stayed put. You with your paperclip and your string in the woods—what the ancients would have called “natural reason”—and me with my strange sensation of a world alive with spirits—what they would have called “natural piety.” It's turning out those are better starting points than the cutesy skepticism and equivocation produced by late modernity, whose natural development is toward the decadent aggression of Athens at her end.

Still, what we’re saying is that natural reason and natural piety are making a comeback, as we knew they must. The danger that these new energies will be misdirected is extreme. But then, what can be misdirected can also be well directed—and must be, since the one thing that’s for certain is it won’t stay put.

Love,
Spencer