Is Ideology Attractive?
To what end were 200 million human persons—created in the Image of God—murdered, one must ask? And, why did millions more suffer for being simply human persons, unique, unfathomable, unrepeatable? The answer, unfortunately, is not an easy one, and very few scholars—historians, philosophers, or theologians—have attempted to answer this question. In 1886 Friedrich Nietzsche, the mad prophet of the modern man, wrote, “The greatest event of recent times–that “God is Dead”, that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable–is beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” Like Lewis’s unnamed opponents in late February 1943, Nietzsche further argued that traditional morality and received understandings of character and virtue were merely a means to shackle the true individual, to restrain and attenuate his pagan self. Such constraints, Nietzsche contended, were culturally manufactured, not inherent in nature. By throwing off the artificial restraints, Nietzsche continued, one would discover his true self. Perhaps most important, as Nietzsche understood at the end of the nineteenth-century, men had forgotten God, establishing themselves as the highest authority in the universe. The results, he believed, were predictable. De-spiritualized, “Our whole European civilization is moving with a torture of tension, which increases from decade to decade, toward a catastrophe,” he wrote three decades before World War I. With the de-spiritualization of Europe, strangely enough, the mad philosopher argued, the coming destruction would result from a “war of the spirits.”[1]
This frightful destruction did not drop down from heaven; in truth it rose up out of hell! A culture marked by a true ordering could not have invented such incomprehensible systems of degradation and destruction. Monstrosities of such conscious design do not emerge from the calculators of a few degenerate men or of small groups of men; they come from processes of agitation and poisoning which has been long at work. What we call moral standards—responsibility, honor, sensitivity of conscience—do not vanish from humanity at large if men have not already been long debilitated. These degradations could never have happened if its culture had been as supreme as the modern world thought.[2]
Though neither a radical nor a Christian—nor, for that matter, even a romantic in the vein of Blake who feared the “dark Satanic mills” of Industrial England—Mark Twain identified the late-nineteenth century fear of the machine run amok perfectly in his last novel, the tragically whimsical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. One of the first to use time travel as a plot device, the story revolves around Hank Morgan, an engineer devoid of any poetry or sentiment. As his German last name indicates, he is the man of “tomorrow.” A practical man schooled in the servile rather than the liberal arts, Morgan can create almost any type of mechanism: “guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery.” A materialist, he “could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make a difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, [he] could invent one.” He was also, Hank assures the reader, “full of fight.” And, a conflict employing crowbars with one of his employees, a man named Hercules, results in severe blow to Morgan’s head, knocking him unconscious.
I’m not at all sure why so many of my social media friends are offended or upset about graduation protests this year. I did everything I could (including adding a line or two to the main protest speech) when Father Miscamble organized an alternative commencement when Barack Obama spoke at Notre Dame.
Stormfields 