God does not exist. Evil is not intrinsic to the soul of man. The cosmos is evolving. Man can take control of his own evolution and perfect himself. These were the doctrinal foundations upon which the West built its Tower of Babel at the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. These same doctrines remain regnant in the West to this day.
Back in the day combating evil had two main fronts of engagement. The first focused upon human conditions. Improve the external conditions and mankind would be made more perfect. The second front was an overt attempt to alter human beings themselves by means of psychology, eugenics and education.
The campaign to improve the external living conditions in order to perfect mankind had two main lines of attack.
The first was to deploy science to conquer disease and by means of technological discovery improve the lot of mankind. Standards of living rose dramatically as the steam age moved to the age of coal and then to electricity and oil. Longevity was increasing, diseases were being overcome, diets were improving. It was widely believed that merely through such changes human nature would progress from brutishness to sophisticated enlightenment. Crime would disappear. Wars would cease. Disease would become non-existent.
The second line of attack to improve living conditions was an active, positive progressivism whereby governments would seize the means of production and the profits of businesses and distribute them in the attempt to make living standards more equitable. This was regarded as a scientific way of organising society.
The Marxist creed in its essence proclaimed that the being of man depended upon the relationships that existed between men, which in turn depended upon the relationship between man and things (or property). As C.E.M. Joad recounts:
Thus the relationship between man and man is determined by the relation between man and things; and the individual's psychological consciousness, including, therefore, his moral consciousness, is determined by the relations prevailing in society between man and man. [C.E.M. Joad, The Recovery of Belief (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p.57.]Joad goes on to cite George Bernard Shaw, under whose influence he became a Socialist. Writing against capitalists in the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw says:
Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the nation's manhood in scrofula, cowardice, cruelty, hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still less deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself not treasures in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth. . . .As Joad adds--in short, the matter with the poor is their poverty. Change that, and all else bad in their nature will change. (Incidentally, one cannot leave Shaw without noticing the arrogant condescension toward the poor and the lack of compassion displayed in this piece of invective. Shaw reflects the attitude of most politicians of our day. They despise the poor and the ignorant. Why? Because the application of someone else's property to them should have changed everything. By now the poor should have become "just like us"--and if they don't they have committed the ultimate blasphemy and deserve only execration. Sound familiar? It should. It is the common ground of the Right and the Left and it is a vast plain.)
The evil to be attacked then is not sin, suffering greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty. (Ibid., p. 59.)
These doctrines remains prevalent everywhere in the West today. Is society breaking down? It's because there are haves and have-nots. The relationship between humans is moulded and effected by external circumstances and conditions, by the relationship between man and things. Is there crime? Same diagnosis, same solution. Is there disease? Same old.
Name any social problem or human difficulty and a myriad reflexive voices will call upon the state to distribute property from some to others to solve the problem. In the drive for human perfection every Western nation now sings from the Marxist hymnbook. Marxist doctrine has become so successfully inculcated that there are few remain who are aware of it. It's everywhere assumed to be self-evident and axiomatic. That's how complete the ideological victory has been. Thus the power and strength of our very own Tower of Babel.
But, lest any Christian lose heart, remember the first Babel and what happened to its Barad-Dur on the Plain of Shinar. It's time to turn to the imprecatory Psalms, such as Psalm 31, and begin to pray.
The belief in science to perfect humanity's living conditions is perhaps less compelling in our day. The enthusiasm for science as saviour and redeemer in the early twentieth century now seems to be naive and foolish to many. Science has been demonstrated to be a two-edged sword. It can kill as well as save. The image of Hiroshima looms large. Thus, there is a persistent scepticism over science and technology reflected in Greenist ideology today. But even as a purblind faith in science-as-Redeemer has faded, the hope in socialist redistribution of property has become stronger and stronger. Progressive, planned, administrative, bureaucratic states where all own more and more equally will progressively perfect the human race--or so we are told incessantly.
The second front in the battle for human perfection was the belief that human nature could be changed internally, rather than relying just on improving external conditions. This battle front had three lines of attack: psychological analysis, eugenics, and education. Each would play their role in perfecting the new model man. We will turn to these in our next piece.
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