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Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
THE
RIGHT BOOKS: Equipping the Conservative
 Unspeakable
A review of Os Guinness' Unspeakable. Facing Up to Evil
in an Age of Genocide and Terror
[Bruce S. Thornton] 5/4/05
As different
as they may seem, all the problems and crises afflicting us,
whether
social or political, domestic or international,
can be traced back to one historically unique development that
has defined the modern world, and that was memorably expressed
with brutal simplicity by Nietzsche: the death of God, or perhaps
we should say more accurately, the attempted murder of God. The
consequences of this phenomenon have been enormous, and were
first identified by one of the great battlers against this delusion,
Dostoevsky, who with equal simplicity said, "If God is dead,
everything is permitted."
The attempts to prove
Nietzsche right and Dostoevsky wrong by those committed to
Enlightenment rationalism and technique have
all failed. Their belief--a pseudo-religious, not a scientific
one--that humans are mere matter, to be explained and improved
by knowledge and techniques that adjust or alter the material
causes of their problems, should have crashed on the mountains
of corpses created by one of the most enlightened and cultured
civilizations in history. Yet even after Auschwitz, even after
the gulag, after mass-murderers like Stalin and Mao and the Khmer
Rouge, after Bosnia, Rwanda, the Sudan, after murderous autocrats
like Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein, and despite the daily horrors
of torture, rape, and murder filling their newspapers, the secular
materialists still persist in their superstition that evil is
just an outdated name for what is really the manifestation of
material causes, a glitch in chemical, genetic, social, economic,
or political structures that can be corrected if only the enlightened "technicians
of the soul," as Stalin called them, are allowed to work
their magic, and the quaint believers in various supernatural
truths are gotten out of the way.
Given the importance
of this problem and the inability of our public culture to
address it meaningfully, Os Guinness' Unspeakable is for that reason alone an important book, one that we all should
read and ponder, and whose ideas, even when we disagree with
some of them, should be at the heart of our public conversation.
Guinness, an Oxford PhD in the social sciences, is a world-renowned
speaker, author of more than twenty books, and a founding member
of the Trinity Forum, an ecumenical organization whose goal is
to shape leaders by introducing them "to the big ideas that
have shaped our civilization and to the faith that has animated
its highest achievements," as its mission statement puts
it. His eloquent, rich, yet in some ways disappointing book makes
a serious contribution to returning our sometimes floundering
and incoherent public discussions about evil to the tradition
that our culture depended on for centuries to make sense out
of our lives.
Guinness' correctly
identifies the source of our confusion: "The
modern world has marginalized traditional responses to evil--by
dismissing traditional categories and sidelining traditional
ways of responding." Sin and evil instead have become "sickness" and "dysfunction," anomalies
to be corrected by technical intervention by scientific experts
or by political, economic, or social transformation. Changing
the name of evil, though, has not altered the reality, and in
fact has made it more insidious: "When none dare call it
evil, evil does not disappear--it is all the freer to surprise
us and do its deadly work." Or as Baudelaire said, the devil's
cleverest trick was to convince us that he doesn't exist. In
addition, such a view of evil as sickness lets us all off the
hook, for now evil becomes something external to us like a bacterium
or virus, rather than an integral part of our humanity.
Guinness is astute
as well on how the "traditional barriers
to evil"--especially the recognition that it resides in
all our hearts and so we all must take responsibility for it--have
been eroded. The first reason is the fact that "'under God'
has been neutered in American life, becoming little more than
an amiable cliché in private life and a topic for controversy
and litigation in public life." That the removal of God
from the public and civic square has been in many ways disastrous
is an important point, particularly because of the anti-religious
bigotry that accuses religion of being the great source of human
suffering and misery. But as Guinness reminds us, "The worst
modern atrocities were perpetrated by secularist regimes, led
by secularist intellectuals and in the name of secularist beliefs," with
the result that "more people in the twentieth century were
killed by secularist regimes . . . than in all the religious
persecutions in history."
Indeed, the American
republic was founded "with the most
radical view evil at its core," a recognition of the human
propensity for depravity that generated the separation of powers
and the institutionalized balancing of factions. And even the
deists and atheists at the Founding knew that a free republic
could not survive without the support of religious sentiment:
as John Adams put it, "We have no government armed with
powers capable of contending with human passions unbridled by
morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry
would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale
goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral
and religious people." Thus we moderns, who have acquiesced
in the banishment of religion from the public square in a mistaken
reading of the First Amendment, have removed the civic bridles
on a human depravity now given greater scope by freedom and prosperity.
We have breached the second "traditional barrier," what
Guinness calls the "triangle of freedom": "Freedom
requires virtue, virtue requires faith of some sort, and faith
requires freedom." And having done so, we have degraded
political freedom into selfish licentiousness, putting at risk
not just our souls but freedom itself.
Third, modernity
has idealized the "unbridled passion
to transgress, the drive to destroy traditions, flout standards,
and defy conventions." Abetted by high-culture mandarins
and the grubby purveyors of pop-cultural commodities alike, and
given increased scope by technology and consumerism, this celebration
of transgression facilitates an insidious process of escalating
corruption that quickly sates and just as quickly encourages "an
all-out race for the bottom in the name of the 'daring' and the
'edgy'--which always turns out to be the violent, the vulgar,
the explicit, and the tasteless." We are all cheapened and
dehumanized, reduced to the lowest common denominator of appetite
and unwilling to submit our desires to traditional restraints. "The
result is an entire society following the addict's piecemeal
slide into bondage and a civilization's descent into decay."
Two other consequences
of the secularist "sin as sickness" belief
inhibit our understanding of evil. The first is what has been
called the "Eleventh Commandment": "Thou shalt
not judge." Materialist determinism of course absolves us
of personal responsibility, and without that responsibility,
there can be no judgment but only therapeutic intervention. We
are all victims, whether of our genes or our parents or society,
and so we are all innocent. Additionally, the "exploding
pluralism" of the global village, along with its abundance
of values and lifestyle choices, seemingly ratifies the "relativity
of our own choices": "The result is that certainties
have evaporated, authorities have eroded, and seemingly permanent
traditions and apparently rocklike convictions have softened
into preferences and lifestyle options." This cultural and
moral relativism is abetted by a fashionable disbelief in objective
truth or any absolute standards from which to judge behavior.
That this position is false is demonstrated most obviously by
those who profess to believe it, for the apostles of moral pluralism
and tolerance do not hesitate to judge and condemn cultures like
the antebellum South, apartheid South Africa, or Nazi Germany,
or to judge and condemn racism, sexism, or homophobia.
Next, our culture's
belief in utopian progress makes us impatient with the idea
that evil is a defining possibility in every one
of us, for that stubborn reality will always subvert all attempts
to create a perfect world: "Belief in human perfectibility
and progress inevitably denies evil in human nature and views
history as the path to ever-upward improvement." This denial
of evil's reality, however, has contributed to ever greater evils
committed by those who believed "new men" could be
created through political technique: "As the last century
demonstrates, the most murderous tyrannies in history were the
fruit of ungrounded utopian confidence in politics, science,
education, and psychology and in what they could do to improve
human nature and society."
This constellation
of delusions--evil as merely a glitch in material reality,
the banishment of religion from the public
square, the proscription of judgment based on cultural and moral
relativism, the glamorizing of "transgression," and
the naïve faith in progress and utopia--is particularly
destructive to the American political order, which was founded
on quite different and more pessimistic assumptions. Thus Guinness
asks, "Are we on the verge of seeing secular liberalism
provide a fertile breeding ground for evil because of its own
ungrounded optimism? This could happen partly because of its
nonchalance about the seriousness of evil--and therefore about
the need for any ethical and cultural restraints--and partly
because its own values, such as human rights, depend on traditional
beliefs and have no sufficient foundation of their own." If
we are, as Unamuno suggests, "spiritual parasites," then
eventually we will suffer the fate all parasites suffer when
their exhausted host organism dies.
Guinness' analysis
of our predicament is timely and profound, and his suggestions
for reversing these trends are valuable as
well--accept the tragic limits of human life and action, recognize
the latent evil in all our hearts, make a commitment to work
against evil in whatever way one's circumstances allow, and most
important, work to restore religion to the public discussion
and discard the worn-out Enlightenment bigotry against faith,
a faith buttressed by critical examination: "Our challenge
today is not to resort to faith as a crutch because reason has
stumbled, but rather to acknowledge that reason, in its long
arduous search, has come up short and that where it has stopped
it has pointed beyond itself to answers that only faith can fulfill."
Yet despite the value
of these insights, there are certain aspects of Guinness's
book that give one pause. Perhaps for tactical
reasons and a desire to reach as many people as possible, including
unbelievers, Guinness indulges at times an ecumenical pluralism
and individualism that keeps him from more positively asserting
the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of evil that has
informed Western culture. For example, his discussion of Buddhism
clearly explains its inadequacies in dealing with the question
of evil, that it "falls short in answers to such questions
[regarding evil and our response to it]," but then Guinness
says, "each of must make up our own mind about questions
like these." So what happens when one of us makes up his
own mind that Buddhism doesn't "fall short"? Do we
just let the sleepwalker stroll over the cliff?
Guinness' anxiety
not to be "exclusive" or perhaps
sound too preachy leads to other difficulties with what he calls "examined
pluralism" as a way out of the Scylla of "monistic
universalism" and the Charybdis of "multicultural relativism." But
either there is one spiritual truth or there are many, and if
there is one, then the others are wrong or at best partial. Nor
is Guinness' call for moral and spiritual goods to "be justified
with arguments that are publicly accessible and persuasive to
others" likely to convince those holding erroneous or destructive
spiritual beliefs that they are in error. Indeed, this faith
in the power of rational persuasion smacks of the one of the
premier Enlightenment delusions, that people do evil out of ignorance
and only need to be educated in order to do good. But there are
no rational arguments that are going to convince an Islamist
fanatic that the truth revealed to him by Allah justifying the
slaughter of innocents is actually an ignorant delusion, especially
when historically Islam has been such an aggressively expansionist
and chauvinistic faith convinced of its world-historical role.
Guinness is certainly
no relativist: he asserts plainly that "the
differences [between understandings of evil] make a difference," and
a careful reader will see his preference for the Judeo-Christian
tradition as offering the most coherent answer. Yet to my mind
he neglects some of the fundamental ideas of that tradition that
have for twenty centuries taken account of evil and that could
have clarified Guiness' argument. For contrary to Guinness' frequently
repeated assertions in his book that evil is an inexplicable
mystery, Christian classics like Boethius' The Consolation
of Philosophy and Dante's Divine Comedy offer perfectly coherent
explanations for evil. I find it interesting that in Guinness'
book, Nietzsche is quoted more frequently than Dante, and Boethius
not at all.
For example, at the heart of the modern world's delusions about
evil is a determinist materialism that dismisses evil as dysfunction
or sickness. Thus any approach to the problem of evil must start
first in an accurate understanding of the nature of human beings.
We are not just a material body or its material goods, but an
immaterial immortal soul. Contrary to modern secularists, we
are spiritual creatures, and so the issue of good and evil is
a spiritual problem. Recognizing this fundamental truth would've
kept Guinness from the mistake of talking about sickness, disease,
famine, and all the other accidents that afflict the body as
evils. They are not, for they concern only a body that is going
to die in any case.
In contrast, evil is a spiritual problem, a consequence of human
choice. God created us with an instinct to love Him and find
our fulfillment and joy in that love, but he also made us free.
When we don't choose God, then whatever we do choose is evil,
which is simply then the absence of God, as darkness is the absence
of light or ignorance the absence of knowledge. Evil then is
bound up with the issue of free will, something else the secular
materialists tell us is just an outworn superstition, a figment
of our imaginations, since all causes are material and hence
determined at some physical level. Yet I don't recall Guinness
discussing this central issue of free will-- which lies at the
heart of the Christian tradition's understanding of evil-- in
the detail it deserves.
Again, I imagine Guinness' approach reflects a tactical decision
to be as inclusive as possible and to avoid sectarian preachiness.
But I for one will have to be convinced by evidence and argument
before I accept that the Christian tradition as embodied in great
Christian classics like those of Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas,
Dante, Dostoevsky, and numerous others is no longer adequate
for helping us to understand the problem of evil, particularly
as that tradition offers powerful alternatives to the modern
world's secularist materialist assumptions.
This reservation,
however, does not diminish in the least the value and importance
of Guinness' book. He has initiated the
conversation that we must be having and recognized the fundamental
crisis that we all are facing--the decline of faith, a decline
that if it continues will be catastrophic. For as Guinness concludes, "In
the face of the horror of the unspeakable, only such faith can
provide the best truths to come to terms with evil, the highest
courage to resist evil, the deepest love to care for those caught
in its toils, and the profoundest hope of the prospect of a world
beyond evil, beyond hatred, beyond oppression, and even beyond
tears." tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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