It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World

It's The Way the Electrons Are Configured

It's a mad, mad, mad world.  Every so often the inanity and madness of Western ideology strikes one afresh.  Yes, it really is that mad.  For most of the time, we cope.  We make our compromises.  We come to terms with the way the world is structured and ruled.  We shrug our shoulders and move on.  In many ways, for day-to-day existence this is the appropriate and best response. Ignore the idiots and the idiocy.  Get on with doing our duties and fulfilling our responsibilities to our Lord. 

The madness of the modern world is due to the "big ideas" that dominate, and, therefore, govern our culture and society.  One is materialism: the belief that matter is all there is; there ain't nothing else.  One application of this quasi-religious ideology is that property and possessions are part of the essence of life itself--since matter is all and everything.  Therefore, it is inevitable that social policies, government, and politics degenerate into endless debates about who has what and how much is it worth.  The most important role of the state (in a materialistic world) is to ensure "fair" distribution of stuff, or matter.

Materialism is a thoroughly Big Idea, which is a true world-and-life view.  It affects everything.  Take just one prosaic example: crime.

The single most serious mistake made by modern democracies is to imagine that criminality can be contained or discouraged by being more considerate and kind to criminals.  By doing so, they make it plain that they think crime is caused, and thus excused, by bad conditions.  They imply that they do not believe crime to be  absolutely wrong in itself.  The next step in this logic, which is supporters tend to hide from themselves, is that everybody is a potential criminal whose good behaviour depends only on his good fortune.  In that case, those who are prosperous are good only because they are prosperous, rather than prosperous because they are good. 

This belief demolishes the whole idea of a middle class, open to all who are diligent and self-disciplined, who will then be rewarded by a more abundant life.  It helps explain the modern left-winger's contempt for middle-class values, such as respectability and conventional moral and social behaviour.  It also explains our cultural elite's withering scorn for the lower middle-class, the most aspirant group of all, the most respectable and conventional of all because they are so close to the frontier.  [ Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Liberty: the Decline of Order and Justice in England (London: Atlantic Books, 2003),   p. 31.]

Whenever the issues of law and order, crime and justice are raised in our society the discussion rapidly morphs into a debate about (socio-economic) inequality.  Crime and criminality becomes the front line of the incessant conflict between the haves and the have-nots.  The only explanation for such a stupid reduction is the prevailing, controlling influence of a pagan ideology--in this case, materialism--of which Marxism and neo-Marxism is but one manifestation.

It also explains why debates about crime--and so much else--reveal a deep angst of guilt and pity on the part of the haves toward the have-nots.  There is only so much matter to go around; stuff is finite.  If one is relatively wealthy, one has more stuff than others, and, worse, having more stuff than the average means that others are, therefore, being deprived.  The "haves" are the cause of deprivation--of others not having enough stuff--and so guilt clings cloyingly to the debate as methane to a sewer.  But pity also pervades the atmosphere of debate: if only one could ensure more stuff for the "have nots", they would be redeemed from all human misery--violence, criminality, anger, lust, envy, cruelty, ignorance--in fact, all human suffering and degradation.

In a materialist world, the greatest sin of all is inequality.  It is the very devil itself, the cause of all evil.  Yes, the Western, post-Christian world really is that mad, that dumb, and that stupid.  In the Scriptures, God, through the prophets, lampoons and mocks the folly of people in Israel who made graven idols out of wood, then bowed down to them as if they were the greater power (Isaiah 2:8). The creator bowing down to the creature he has made.  Modern Western idolaters are no different, no less risible.  Having made an idol out of matter, their constant genuflections to it are both ridiculous and self-degrading.

But the Scriptures also issue a solemn warning to all idolaters.  In the end, a culture becomes like the idols it adores and worships. (Psalm 115:1-8)  Increasingly depersonalised, Western society is becoming more and more like the matter it worships, reveres, and adores.  There is no longer true moral guilt for anything: it's all just a matter of a depersonalised distribution of stuff.  Even anger, envy, and guilt about an alleged imperfect distribution of matter eventually fades into nothing, for materialism, if it represents anything, declares everything is impersonally determined by matter.  So, why get wound up about haves and have nots?  It's all in the way the electrons were and are configured. 

If someone were to object, saying that such a view or philosophy is utterly foolish, we would readily agree.  The folly of making idols, then bowing down to them in reverence and devotion, is palpable and risible. Worse, it is utterly wicked, bereft of all sense.  Unless the West repents, we have no other future than to await the inevitable judgment of a holy God upon such wicked foolishness.