Man As Animal

 Unleashing Sin

One of the abiding lusts of Western pride is the lure of a perfect society brought into being through human ingenuity, planning, and enlightened application.  No matter what problem we face, throw enough resources at it, study it to death, put a management plan in place, and hey presto, the problem will be solved. 

Such approaches may work well when we are dealing with problems arising out of the non-human natural order.  They fail miserably when we are dealing with human beings.  Why?  Precisely because man is not a cipher.  He is not the impersonal product of impersonal natural forces.  He is altogether more wonderful and complex: he is a moral agent made in the image of God.  When sin entered the human race through Adam and spread to all mankind "descending from him by ordinary generation" the wondrous complexity and moral agency of mankind became perverted.  The sophisticated complexity of humanity became a spectacular resource for cunning, duplicity, and evil.  

But modern man has "advanced" to the point where he sees himself as a sophisticated animal, nothing more.

The Humanist Millennium

Dashed Hopes and Bitterness

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.

Without God, Without Creed, Part VI

Christianity's Trojan Horse

The West has experienced prodigious economic growth and increasing living standards for over six hundred years.  The two world wars of last century appear now as a mere blip in a distant horizon.  This has encouraged the secular narrative of life constantly improving and getting better.  In turn, this has supported the just-so story propounded by evolutionism that the world is progressing higher and higher.

Natural calamities, however, when they occur, teach a very important lesson: the future can be worse than the past--much worse. Because one decade succeeds another does not necessarily mean that it will be better.

In the West, Christendom has been overthrown.  It has been replaced by an atheistic materialism that purports to interpret, justify, and explain all reality.  Its hand maiden is naturalistic science.  Because it has succeeded Christendom the conclusion is facilely drawn everywhere that atheistic materialism is better than, an advance upon, the Christian faith.  It is smarter, evidentially based.  It is true and real.  Christianity is a myth, a relic of an ignorant and superstitious past.  And so on. 

But the Word of God itself provides a different narrative.

Drip, Drip, Drip

 Experts as Augurs

An old saw has it that an expert is a drip under pressure.  Nevertheless our modern world loves experts--demands them, in fact.  The modern expert has taken the place of the ancient soothsayer, or rune reader.  The most worthy and vital contribution that experts are required to make is predict the future.  This is why they function in our Unbelieving culture as the modern equivalent of augurs. 

Most of their predictions are stupid superstitions, appealing to the more base human emotions of fear and greed.  The more lurid the prophecy, the more valued.  The status of "expert" buoys up its certainty and credibility.  As G. K. Chesterton astutely observed, when men stop believing in the Living God, they do not believe in nothing;  they begin to believe in everything.  Credulity characterises an Unbelieving culture, such as now dominates the West. 

There is an irony in this.  The West prides itself on its knowledge, its scientific rigour, its evidence-based governments.  In reality it has become suborned to superstitious speculations gilded with a veneer of academic rigour and research.  The role of the expert in our world is to provide the gilding. 

In a recent article in The National, Robert Matthews takes a much needed sceptical look at experts and their auguries.  It turns out that the more famous the expert, the worse his predictive abilities. 

Only Fools Go Where Angels Fear to Tread

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

One of the seductions of "social science" has been the assumption that human life and society is as regulated and controlled as the non-human natural world. Even as we work out the "rules" that control the movement of the planets, or the mating behaviour of the fallow deer, the hope has been that similar rules-based behaviour could be discovered in the human species.

Upon discovery, these rules and relationships would enable us to make a quantum leap not just in our understanding of human history and current society, but (more importantly) would facilitate our shaping and manipulating and controlling it. Once we knew the rules about the mating habits of fallow deer, we could set things up to ensure greater fecundity--that sort of thing. The achievement of universal peace, happiness, and prosperity--that is, nirvana or salvation--lay just around the corner. Right on, you social scientists!

Now we move from the make-believe world to the real one. Here is Francis Fukuyama, commenting on Samuel Huntingdon's, Political Order in Changing Societies (Huntingdon, by the way, was a card-carrying member of social-science orthodoxy.)

"The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level. Contemporary macroeconomics, despite dealing with social phenomena that are inherently quantified, is today in crisis due to its utter failure to anticipate the recent financial crisis.

"The part of social change that is the hardest to understand in a positivistic way is the moral dimension—that is, the ideas that people carry around in their heads regarding legitimacy, justice, dignity and community. The current Arab uprising was triggered by the self-immolation of an overeducated 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller whose cart was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. After Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped by a policewoman when he tried to complain, he reached the end of his tether. Bouazizi’s public suicide turned into a social movement because contemporary communications technologies facilitated the growth of a new social space where middle-class people could recognize and organize around their common interests. We will probably never understand, even in retrospect, why the dry tinder of outraged dignity suddenly ignited in this fashion in December 2010 as opposed to 2009, or ten years before that, and why the conflagration spread to some Arab countries but not to others."

This does not mean that scholars like Huntingdon have nothing to teach us. What is does mean is that what they teach is of very limited utility in programming other states and nations. We believe that this is a very, very good thing. The more we understand that human affairs are inordinately complex and unpredictable, due to the fearfully complex nature of man himself, the less likely we will be presumptuously to interfere, as nations, in the affairs of others.