Having Cake and Eating It Too

The Self Deceit of the Modern Mind

Chesterton writes the following on the indifference of nature.  As you read this passage, keep David Attenborough in mind, an evolutionist whose breathless reverent descriptions of the natural world and its inhabitants represents the stupidest sentimentality since stupidity first emerged (from the primordial slime, naturally.)

There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature.  Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value.  To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it.  Both aristocracy and democracy and are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.  But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject.  She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable.


We think the cat is superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death.  But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all.  He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first.  Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive.  Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence.  It all depends upon the philosophy of the mouse.  You cannot even say that there is a victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior.  You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring.  You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got. [G. K. Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 308.]

David Attenborough represents the vacuity of the modern intellectual--a vacuity skewered and punctured by Chesterton's remarks.  A rationalist and materialist and evolutionist, Attenborough is a card-carrying modern intellectual.  But he remains a poster boy for the emptying of the modern mind.  That so many can breathlessly and sentimentally emote over the natural world, while at the same time, maintain its random, accidental, brute blindness is a wonder to behold.  Attenborough would never have been successful, regardless of how breathless or lugubrious his utterances, if he had ever dared to depersonalise nature, as his underlying philosophy requires him to do.  No-one would bear listening to it for more than five minutes. 

Here lies the self-deceit of the modern vacuous intellect mind.  It cannot for a moment stand the reality and consequences of its presuppositions and assumptions about the world--that it is a mere brute and blind morass of impersonal matter, without significance or meaning of any sort.  Instead it rushes to attribute wonder, meaning, awe, beauty, or moral order to nature in complete self-contradiction.  It insists on personalising the impersonal and attributing moral order to it.  It is the grandest of the grand just-so stories, the Wonderland of make believe of the modern intellectual.  Behold, there are few things more dishonest than the secular materialist, the romantic, sentimental atheist who cannot live without attributing personality and personhood to nature and an inherent moral order to it, on the one hand, yet absolute impersonal randomness, on the other.

But if Attenborough is not to one's taste, maybe the only other alternative of secular quietism is more palatable. Chesterton, again:

. . . some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still.  Nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when.  We have no reason for acting and no reason for not acting.  If anything happens it is right; if anything is prevented is was wrong.  Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything.  Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs.  Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.  [Ibid., p.309.]

Behold the wondrous vacuity of  Unbelief.  How smart it is.  How purblind and lost it has become. Yet Unbelief persists in sitting around in a great big circle intoning how smart and sophisticated it all is.