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Modern Unbelief and the Curious Faiths of the Antihero
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13990 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1988 |
6,989 Words |
| Author
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George Roche
George Roche is president of Hillsdale College, Hillsdale,
Michigan. |
In the playwright Bertolt Brecht's famous work Galileo, one of the main protagonists asserts, "It is an unhappy country that needs heroes." In my opinion, these few words easily get to the heart of the pernicious humanist vision that has grown so widespread and influential since the days of the real Galileo Galilei. For the record, we should recall that Brecht finished Galileo in the late 1930s during a period of peak revolutionary sentiment, that after the war he forsook his refuge in America to live out his years in East Germany, and that he won the Stalin Peace Prize. There is no doubting the pedigree--not that we should judge his ideal on that account. From the empiricism and concept of absolute time of the original Galileo it grew; from Newton's infinite, dead, uncaring clockwork universe it gathered momentum; from classical mechanics, and from the positivist and "God is irrelevant" philosophies of the last century--of Feuerbach, Comte, Kant, Marx, Darwin, Hegel, and Nietzsche--it reached flood stage. The sentiment rapidly spread that "philosophers have explained the world; now men must change the world." It is with us still. Not heroes, but instead all men of conviction, are called upon to usher in a great new secular and enlightened age. Their commandment, Whittaker Chambers once remarked, is found not in the Communist Manifesto, but in the first sentence of a physics primer: "All of the progress of mankind to date results from the making of careful measurements."
The natural universe, their vision holds, is all there is, and there is no good or evil in it; only natural events. But why, then, does the fictional Galileo exhort his flock to its duty? What drives real men like Brecht to embrace communism? What kind of goal is a better world, when their own doctrines deny any possibility or betterment? It is the fact, known to all men even if they deny it, that good does exist in this world. Every act of heroism, kindness, mercy, charity, and fair play affirms this truth. For Brecht and his ilk to be right, the naturalistic universe would have to be built upon a monumental contradiction. Ours would be an irrational cosmos conceived by rational men and, even more improbably, a dead, uncaring, amoral existence for living, moral men. If they were right they would destroy the basis of their preachments, for one can no more deduce goodness from natural events than one can fathom the meaning of the Sistine Chapel by analyzing its component minerals. Furthermore, in a determinist universe conceived by willful men, how could they have chosen to study the universe and declare that we are all automatons, mindlessly responding to the dance of the atoms? B.F. Skinner says this is possible but, by his own premises, he has no mind to say
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