Grand Utopian Projects

 Human Progress and Its Fruit

The quotation below is from David Bentley Hart: it is a brief de-construction of the pathogens in modern Unbelief.  Bowing to the freedom of autonomous human will has resulted in barbaric cruelty and crushing tyranny.  When the human will is regarded as sacrosanct, the State's fangs grow long and sharp.

Idealism becomes ruthless.  The concept of freedom becomes savage.  The autonomous utopias of Man devolve into bloody dystopias. 

If the quintessential myth of modernity is that true freedom is the power of the will over nature--human or cosmic--and that we are at liberty to make ourselves what we wish to be, then it is not necessarily the case that the will of the individual should be privileged over the "will of the species". . . . (W)ith the disappearance of the transcendent, and of its lure, and of its authority, it becomes possible to will a human future conformed to whatever ideals we choose to embrace. 

This is why it is correct to say that the sheer ruthlessness of so much of post-Christian social idealism in some sense arises from the very same concept of freedom that lies at the heart of our most precious modern values.  The savagery of triumphant Jacobinism, the clinical heartlessness of classical socialist eugenics, the Nazi movement, Stalinism--all the grand utopian projects of the modern age that have directly or indirectly spilled such oceans of human blood--are no less results of the Enlightenment myth of liberation than are the liberal democratic state or the vulgarity of late capitalist consumerism or the pettiness of bourgeois individualism.



The most pitilessly and self-righteously violent regimes of modern history--in the West or in those other quarters of the world contaminated by our worst ideas--have been those that have most explicitly cast off the Christian vision of reality and sought to replace it with a more "human" set of values.  No cause in history--no religion or imperial ambition or military adventure--has destroyed more lives with more confident enthusiasm than the cause of the "brotherhood of man", the post-religious utopia, or the progress of the race.  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 107.]