Chapter Eleven Our Society
Gradually that which had become the basic thought-form of modern people became the almost totally accepted viewpoint, an almost monolithic consensus. And as it came to the majority of people through art, music, drama, theology, and the mass media, values died. As the more Christian-dominated consensus weakened, the majority of people adopted two impoverished values: personal peace and affluence.
Personal peace means just to be let alone, not to be troubled by the troubles of other people, whether across the world or across the city—to live one’s life with minimal possibilities of being personally disturbed. Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren. Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity—a life made up of things, things, and more things—a success judged by an ever-higher level of material abundance.
For several generations the fragmented concept of knowledge and life that had become dominant was taught to the young by many of the professors in universities around the world. All too often when the students of the early 1960s asked their parents and others, “Why be educated?” they were told, by implication, if not in words, “Because statistically an educated person makes so much more money a year.” And when they asked, “Why make more money?” they were told, “So that you can send your children to the university.” According to this kind of spoken or implied answer, there was no meaning for man, and no meaning for education.
Much of the mass media popularized these concepts, pouring them out in an endless stream so that a whole generation from its birth has been injected with the teaching that reason leads to pessimism in regard to a meaning of life and with reference to any fixed values. This had been that generation’s atmosphere. It had no personal memory of the days when Christianity had more influence on the consensus. Those in the universities saw themselves as little computers controlled by the larger computer of the university, which in turn was controlled by the still-larger computer of the state.
The work ethic, which had meaning within the Christian framework, now became ugly as the Christian base was removed. Work became an end in itself—with no reason to work and no values to determine what to do with the products of one’s work. And suddenly, in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, the students carried these ideas about the meaninglessness of man out into the streets. Why should anybody have been surprised? Many of the teachers taught the ultimate meaninglessness of man and the absence of absolutes, but they themselves lived inconsistently by depending on the memory of the past. Was it not natural that one generation would begin to live on the basis of what they had been taught? And at Berkeley in 1964 the results were visible, full blast.
Because the only hope of meaning had been placed in the area of nonreason, drugs were brought into the picture. Drugs had been around a long time, but, following Aldous Huxley’s ideas, many students now approached drug-taking as an ideology, and some as a religion (see ). They hoped that drugs would provide meaning “inside one’s head,” in contrast to objective truth, concerning which they had given up hope. Psychologist Timothy Leary (1920–1996), poet Gary Snyder (1930–), author-philosopher Alan Watts (1915–1973), and poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) were all influential in making drugs an ideology. Timothy Leary, for example, said that drugs were the sacraments for the new religion. Of course, as we have seen in a previous chapter, this drug-taking was really only one more leap, an attempt to find meaning in the area of nonreason. Charles Slack (1929–), writing of his long relationship with Leary, reported in Timothy Leary, the Madness of the Sixties and Me (1974) that Leary had said to him, “Death to the mind, that is the goal you must have. Nothing else will do.”
Plate 57 Drug-taking. “. . . many students now approached drug-taking as an ideology.” Photos by Rex Features.
The utopian dream of the turned-on world was that if enough people were on drugs, the problems of modern civilization would be solved. With this in mind there was talk of introducing LSD into the drinking water of the cities. This was not vicious, for the people suggesting it really believed that drugs were the door to paradise. In 1964 and for some years after, the hippie world really believed this ideological answer.
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and Jürgen Habermas (1929– ). When he became the inspiration of the New Left, he was teaching at the University of California at San Diego.
For some time, young people were fighting against their parents’ impoverished values of personal peace and affluence—whether their way of fighting was through Marcuse’s New Left or through taking drugs as an ideology. The young people wanted more to life than personal peace and affluence. They were right in their analysis of the problem, but they were mistaken in their solutions.
The peak of the drug culture of the hippie movement was well symbolized by the movie Woodstock (1970). Woodstock was a rock festival held in the northeastern United States in the summer of 1969 (see ). The movie about that rock festival was released in the spring of 1970. Many young people thought that Woodstock was the beginning of a new and wonderful age. The organizer claimed, “This is the beginning of a new era. It works!” But the drug world was already ugly, and it was approaching the end of its optimism, although the young people did not yet know it. Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) himself was soon to become a symbol of the end. Black, extremely talented, and inhumanly exploited, he overdosed in September 1970 and drowned in his own vomit, soon after the claim that the culture of which he was a symbol was a new beginning. In the late 1960s the ideological hopes based on drug-taking died.
Plate 58 News photos of Woodstock. “But the drug world . . . was approaching the end of its optimism.” Photos by Rex Features.
At Altamont, California, in December 1969, the Rolling Stones had a festival. They brought in the Hell’s Angels to police the grounds in return for a certain amount of beer. But a man was killed, and Rolling Stone magazine in its next issue reported, “Our age of innocency is gone.” Soon afterward (August 1970), twenty-five hundred thousand people came to a music festival on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. It, too, ended in utter ugliness, and from that time on drug-taking changed.
Unhappily, the result was not that fewer people were taking drugs. The 1960s drew to a close, and in the 1970s and 1980s probably more people are taking some form of drug, and at an ever-younger age. But taking drugs is no longer an ideology. That is finished. Drugs simply are the escape that they have been traditionally in many places in the past.
In the United States the New Left also slowly ground down, losing favor because of the excesses of the bombings, especially in the bombing of the University of Wisconsin lab in 1970, where a graduate student was killed. This was not the last bomb that was or will be planted in the United States. Hard-core groups of radicals still remain and are active, and could become more active, but the violence which the New Left produced as its natural heritage (as it also had in Europe) caused the majority of young people in the United States no longer to see it as a hope. So some young people began in 1964 to challenge the false values of personal peace and affluence, and we must admire them for this. Humanism, man beginning only from himself, had destroyed the old basis of values, and could find no way to generate with certainty any new values. In the resulting vacuum the impoverished values of personal peace and affluence had come to stand supreme. And now, for the majority of the young people, after the passing of the false hopes of drugs as an ideology and the fading of the New Left, what remained? Only apathy was left. In the United States by the beginning of the 1970s, apathy was almost complete. In contrast to the political activists of the 1960s, not many of the young even went to the polls to vote, even though the national voting age was lowered to eighteen. Hope was gone.
After the turmoil of the 1960s, many people thought that it was so much better when the universities quieted down in the early 1970s. I could have wept. The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions. How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents—personal peace and affluence. Now drugs remain, but only in parallel to the older generation’s alcohol, and an excessive use of alcohol has become a problem among the young people as well. Promiscuous sex and bisexuality remain, but only in parallel to the older generation’s adultery. In other words, as the young people revolted against their parents, they came around in a big circle—and often ended an inch lower—with only the same two impoverished values: their own kind of personal peace and their own kind of affluence.
In some places the Marxist-Leninist line or the Maoist line took over. This was not so true in the United States, but these ideologies have become a major factor in Europe, South America, and other parts of the world. But Marxist-Leninism is another leap into the area of nonreason—as idealistic as drug-taking was in its early days. The young followed Marxism in spite of clear evidence that oppression was not an excess of Stalin, but was and is an integral part of the system of communism.
No one has made this more clear than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) in The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I (1974). He takes great pains to point out that the foundations of lawless expediency were firmly established by Lenin. Summarizing the trials up through 1922 and looking ahead to the famous “showcase trials” of 1937, Solzhenitsyn asks, “What, then, were they surprised at in 1937? Hadn’t all the foundations of lawlessness been laid?” But if this preceded Stalin, it is clear that it also survived him. Solzhenitsyn says that the salamander, by which he means the prison-camp network, is still alive. In The Gulag Archipelago, vol. II (1975), he says that the prison camps held up to fifteen million inmates at a time, and he estimated that from the Revolution to 1959 a total of sixty-six million prisoners died.
Even if this salamander is not so obviously voracious now, Solzhenitsyn is not appeased. He correctly identifies the root cause of the lawless expediency as the willingness to assure internal security at any cost. And he sees that when his contemporaries now urge him to “let bygones be bygones” they are making the same choice. “Dwell on the past, and you’ll lose an eye,” they say. Solzhenitsyn adds, “But the proverb goes on to say: ‘Forget the past, and you’ll lose both eyes.’”
Tellingly, he contrasts the West German effort since World War II to track down and punish major, known Nazi criminals (of which 86,000 had been convicted by 1966) with the total absence of such a procedure both in East Germany as regards Nazis and in Russia as regards the active agents of the officially condemned crimes of Stalin. He selects Molotov as a symbol of this mentality—a man who lives on comfortably, “a man who has learned nothing at all, even now, though he is saturated with our blood and nobly crosses the sidewalk to seat himself in his long, wide automobile.” Reflecting upon these facts, Solzhenitsyn writes, “From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept: virtue triumphs and vice is punished.” In contrast, Solzhenitsyn concludes about Russia, “Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.” He then adds, “It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!” And this is the case not only in Russia but wherever communism has attained power. China probably had less internal freedom than Russia.
Communists have also used external oppression: think of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland (see ). I’ll never forget the day—November 4, 1956—when Hungary was taken over. Listening in Switzerland to my shortwave radio, I heard the students repeatedly pleading in the English language for help, hoping the outside world would listen. I have a newspaper picture of one of the girls arrested in Hungary. It is a portrait of a lovely Hungarian girl on trial. Her name was Ilond Troth. She was hanged in July 1957. I keep her picture to remember: “Forget the past and you will lose both eyes” (see ).
Plate 59 Prague, 1968. “. . . external oppression.” Photos courtesy of Gamma and Popperfoto.
Plate 60 Ilond Troth at her trial. “. . . hanged in July 1957.”
How romantic, in a negative sense, is the leap into the area of nonreason to Marxist-Leninism! It is a different kind of leap from that of the existentialist and others we considered in the previous chapters, but it too is without a base in reason. Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet it attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base—the dignity of man—and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic-sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
As we said in the first chapter, men have presuppositions and will live more consistently with these presuppositions than even they themselves know. People’s presuppositions rest upon that which they consider to be the truth of what exists. With a whole state consciously resting upon philosophic materialism, there is no base for “communism with a human face,” for which have pleaded some of the reformers in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Communist controlled countries (and some Communists in non-Communist controlled countries).
In 1975 when André Malraux was asked if there really can be communism with a human face, he pondered a while and then replied, “Historical experience suggests that there can’t be.” With no base for the dignity of the individual, only arbitrary expediency gives whatever dignity is given. And being only arbitrary, expediency can twist and turn at will. Men tend to act ultimately with remarkable consistency to their presuppositions, their worldview. To forget this in regard to a system which consciously rests on the philosophic base of materialism will be to lose not only two eyes, but also one’s head.
Countries which have a different base, for example a Christian one (or at least one with the memory of a Christian foundation), may indeed act most inconsistently and horribly. But when a state with a materialistic base acts arbitrarily and gives no dignity to man, internally or externally, it is being consistent to its basic presuppositions and principles. To accept Marxist-Leninism is indeed a leap into the area of nonreason. It is its own kind of Nietzsche game plan, a setting of limits as to what one will observe, and a refusal to look outside of these boundaries lest the system be brought down like a house of cards. This does not make Marxist-Leninism less of a danger, and it is necessary to take into account the resurgence of the old-line Communist parties, and also the Russian-financed terrorist groups.
There are two streams of Marxist-Leninism: first, those who hold it in an idealistic form as a leap against all reason—listening to the words which have been lifted as a Christian heresy, the words of dignity and rights—and who close their eyes to the intrinsic oppression of the system as a system; second, the old-line Communists who hold an orthodox communistic ideology. “Danny the Red” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit), who led the student riots in France in May 1968 and who is still a Marxist, in an interview in 1975 made the distinction between these two groups. He spoke of the old-line Communists in terms of “orthodox communist ideology” and “bureaucratic structure of the type existing in the Soviet Union.”
If personal peace and affluence would seem available under communism, no one can be sure what many of the young people and older ones too will do. The two streams of Marxist-Leninism of which we have spoken could flow together at a crucial point and produce political results which would be irreversible.
In the United States many other practical problems developed as man’s desire to be autonomous from God’s revelation—in the Bible and through Christ—increasingly reached its natural conclusions. Sociologically, law is king (Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex) was no longer the base whereby one could be ruled by law rather than the arbitrary judgments of men and whereby there could be wide freedoms without chaos. Any ways in which the system is still working is largely due to the sheer inertia of the continuation of the past principles. But this borrowing cannot go on forever.
As we have seen, there is a danger that without a sufficient base modern modern science will become sociological science; so civil law has moved toward being sociological law. Distinguished jurist and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) took a long step in this direction. In The Common Law (1881), Holmes said that law is based on experience. Daniel H. Benson (1936–2011), assistant professor of law at the Texas Tech University School of Law, quotes Holmes: “Truth is the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others.” In a 1926 letter to John C. H. Wu, Holmes wrote, “So when it comes to the development of a corpus juris the ultimate question is what do the dominant forces of the community want and do they want it hard enough to disregard whatever inhibitions may stand in the way.” This is very different from Samuel Rutherford’s biblical base and from Paul Robert’s painting in which Justice points to “The Word of God.”
Frederick Moore Vinson (1890–1953), former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, spelled out this problem by saying, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.” All is relative; all is experience. In passing, we should note this curious mark of our age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.
Roscoe Pound (1870–1964) wrote in Jurisprudence (1959): “The Greek philosophers sought to find some assured basis of social control other than tradition and the habit of obedience on the one hand, or the will of the politically supreme for the moment on the other hand. They conceived they had found such a basis in the analogy of the constant and universal phenomena of physical nature.” In the days of Rousseau, Goethe, and Constable, when nature was being venerated, there was a concerted attempt to make nature the base for law. It is called Natural Law or the Law-of-Nature School of Jurisprudence. Roscoe Pound writes about the men identified with this approach: “Jurists of the eighteenth century Law-of-Nature School conceived that a complete and perfect system of law might be constructed upon principles of natural (i.e., ideal) law which were discoverable by reason.” This was a part of Enlightenment optimism.
But, as we have seen, nature provides no sufficient base for either morals or law, because nature is both cruel and noncruel. Gradually, the hope that nature would give a fixed value in law was abandoned, and instead (as Pound quotes French jurist and legal philosopher Joseph Charmont [1859–1922]) by the start of the twentieth century, law rooted in nature only had a variable content. A Jewish-Christian lawyer once wrote to me that as he considered the serious meaning of the Nuremburg war-crimes trials, “I knew then that no moral law was written on a blade of grass, in a drop of water, or even in the stars. I realized the necessity of the Divine Immutable Law as set forth in the Sacred Torah, consisting of definite commandments, statutes, ordinances and judgments.”
Man has failed to build only from himself autonomously and to find a solid basis in nature for law, and we are left today with Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “experience” and Frederick Moore Vinson’s statement that nothing is more certain in modern society than that there are no absolutes. Law has only a variable content. Much modern law is not even based on precedt; that is, it does not necessarily hold fast to a continuity with the legal decisions of the past. Thus, within a wide range, the Constitution of the United States can be made to say what the courts of the present want it to say—based on a court’s decision as to what the court feels is sociologically helpful at the moment. At times this brings forth happy results, at least temporarily; but once the door is opened, anything can become law and the arbitrary judgments of men are king. Law is now freewheeling, and the courts not only interpret the laws which legislators have made, but make law. Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king.
As arbitrary absolutes characterize communistic rule, so there is a drift in this direction on our side of the Iron Curtain as well. This means that tremendous changes of direction can be made and the majority of the people tend to accept them without question—no matter how arbitrary the changes are or how big a break they make with past law or past consensus.
It is worth considering at length, as an example, the United States Supreme Court ruling concerning the human fetus, the unborn baby. On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled that every woman in the United States has the right to an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy, with no discussion. In the second three months abortion is allowed if the state agrees it is healthy for the mother to have the abortion. During the second three months, as in the first three months, the fetus does not enter into consideration. Even during the last three months the fetus does not have effective protection under the law, because the word health (of the mother) has been given a very wide meaning.
To quote Joseph P. Witherspoon (1916–), professor of jurisprudence at the University of Texas School of Law, in the Texas Tech Law Review, volume 6, 1974–1975: “In this 1973 decision the Court . . . held that the unborn child is not a person within the meaning and protection of the term ‘person’ utilized in the fourteenth amendment so as to strip all unborn children of all constitutional protection for their lives, liberty, and property.” In Britain the law allows pregnancies to be terminated up to the twenty-eighth week. There are several things to notice here.
Plate 61 Francis Schaeffer and his film crew at the U.S. Supreme Court building, Washington, DC. “. . . to strip all unborn children of all constitutional protection.” Photo by Mustafa Arshad.
This is totally arbitrary. First, it is medically arbitrary. Our Future Inheritance: Choice or Chance? (1974) is a book put out in England to inform the public about the questions of genetics which are immediately before us at this point of history. It is based on a series of working papers produced with the cooperation of scientists in a number of fields, including some scientists from the United States. It is in favor of abortion. However, the book says that the question about when human life begins is open: “It [abortion] can be carried out before the foetus becomes ‘viable’—although when that is, is in itself an arguable point.” It further states that “a biologist might say that human life started at the moment of fertilization when the sperm and the ovum merge.”
The arbitrary nature of the decision medically is underlined by the fact that one section of the book accepts the destruction of the fetus by abortion, yet another section focuses on the question of whether it is ethical to fertilize the ovum with a sperm in vitro (in the laboratory) when at that stage of technology it was certain to live for only a very limited number of days. The problem is that after fertilization it has “the full genetic potential for becoming a human being and will become one if implantation [in the womb] and gestation are successful. At what stage of development should the status of a patient be attributed to the embryo or foetus?” Here the question is raised whether the six-day-old fetus should be considered “a patient.” In another place the book argues for fertilization in the laboratory on the basis that, since we help a baby who is prematurely born, should we not be willing to help “the complete development of a baby outside the body”? This is preceded by the sentence: “Assistance for the premature baby would, by most, be considered one of the basic duties of society.” And in the argument for a total development outside the body the concept of the premature baby is carried back to the time of fertilization. What does this make the abortion of a five-and-one-half-month-old baby? It certainly has “the full genetic potential for becoming a human being.”
I am making only one point here: both the ruling by the United States Supreme Court and the British law were purely arbitrary medically. They established an arbitrary absolute which affects millions of embryos, when medically the matter is so open that the asking of ethical questions about a fertilized ovum of only seven days is considered valid, and when medically the question concerning the seven-day-old fertilized ovum rests on the fact that it has “the full genetic potential for becoming a human being.” So when the official Supreme Court Reporter (vol. 410) says that the unborn are not recognized in the law as persons, here is a medical arbitrary absolute with a vengeance—and at the point of human life.
Second, it is not only arbitrary medically but legally. The ruling set up an arbitrary absolute by disregarding the intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Quoting Professor Witherspoon again:
Thus, the failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade [the abortion case] to have examined into the actual purpose and intent of the legislature in framing the fourteenth amendment and the thirteenth amendment to which it was so closely related and supplementary thereof when it was considering the meaning to be assigned to the concept of “person” was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it. Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case, or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and children, including the unborn from the time of their conception.
Supreme Court Justice White in his dissent to the Court’s action stated, “As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.” Upon this arbitrary ruling medically and legally, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on this subject of abortion of almost every one of the states in the Union.
Further, this arbitrary decision is at complete variance with the past Christian consensus. In the pagan Roman Empire, abortion was freely practiced, but Christians took a stand against it. In 314 the Council of Ancyra barred from the taking of the Lord’s Supper for ten years all who procured abortions or made drugs to further abortions. Previously the Synod of Elvira (305–306) had specified excommunication till the deathbed for these offenses. The arbitrary absolutes of the Supreme Court are accepted against the previous consensus of centuries, as well as against past law. And (taking abortion as an example) if this arbitrary absolute by law is accepted by most modern people, bred with the concept of no absolutes but rather relativity, why wouldn’t arbitrary absolutes in regard to such matters as authoritarian limitations on freedom be equally accepted as long as they were thought to be sociologically helpful? We are left with sociological law without any certainty of limitation.
By the ruling of the Supreme Court, the unborn baby is not counted as a person. In our day, quite rightly, there has been a hue and cry against some of our ancestors’ cruel viewing of the black slave as a nonperson. This was horrible indeed—an act of hypocrisy as well as cruelty. But now, by an arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow, millions of unborn babies of every color of skin are equally by law declared nonpersons. Surely this too must be seen as an act of hypocrisy.
The door is open. In regard to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated “aliveness” from “personhood,” and if this is so, why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged? So the steps move along, and euthanasia may well become increasingly acceptable. And if so, why not keep alive the bodies of the so-called neo-morts (persons in whom the brain wave is flat) to harvest from them body parts and blood, when the polls show that this has become acceptable to the majority? Dr. Willard Gaylin (1925–) discussed this possibility in Harper’s (September 1974) under the title, “Harvesting the Dead.” Law has become a matter of averages, just as the culture’s sexual mores have become only a matter of averages.
As the Christian consensus dies, there are not many sociological alternatives. One possibility is hedonism, in which every man does his own thing. Trying to build a society on hedonism leads to chaos. One man can live on a desert island and do as he wishes within the limits of the form of the universe, but as soon as two men live on the island, if they are to live in peace, they cannot both do simply as they please. Consider two hedonists meeting on a narrow bridge crossing a rushing stream: each cannot do his own thing.
A second possibility is the absoluteness of the 51 percent vote. In the days of a more Christian culture, a lone individual with the Bible could judge and warn society, regardless of the majority vote, because there was an absolute by which to judge. There was an absolute for both morals and law. But to the extent that the Christian consensus is gone, this absolute is gone as a social force. Let us remember that on the basis of the absoluteness of the 51 percent vote, Hitler was perfectly entitled to do as he wished if he had the popular support. On this basis, law and morals become a matter of averages. And on this basis, if the majority vote supported it, it would become “right” to kill the old, the incurably ill, the insane—and other groups could be declared nonpersons. No voice could be raised against it.
Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894–1956), a biologist-sociologist at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, produced his influential Sexual Behavior of the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953). These were based on 18,500 interviews. Kinsey made that which is “right” in sex a matter of statistics. Many people read his books because at that date they were far more titillating than other books accepted as respectable. However, their real impact was the underlying conception that sexual right and wrong depend only on what most people are doing sexually at a given moment of history. This has become the generally accepted sexual standard in the years since. Modern man has done the same thing in law.
As we saw in the first chapter, the Greeks found that society—the polis—was not a strong enough final authority to build upon, and it is still not strong enough today. If there are no absolutes, and if we do not like either the chaos of hedonism or the absoluteness of the 51 percent vote, only one other alternative is left: one man or an elite, giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes.
Here is a simple but profound rule: if there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute. Society is left with one man or an elite filling the vacuum left by the loss of the Christian consensus which originally gave us form and freedom in northern Europe and in the West. In communism, the elite has won its way, and rule is based upon arbitrary absolutes handed down by that elite. Absolutes can be this today and that tomorrow. If Mao equaled the law, then the concept of a continual cultural revolution, “The Great Leap Forward,” may be in order one year and very much out of order the next. Arbitrary absolutes can be handed down and there is no absolute by which to judge them.
So far, two elites put themselves forward, offering to fill the vacuum in our culture. The first was Marcuse’s New Left, which has waned in influence. It no longer provides the live possibility for action, which it did for a time. Then John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) offered his form of the elite. Like the students at Berkeley, this economist has said that we live in a poor culture. Galbraith suggested an elite composed of intellectuals (especially the academic and scientific world) plus the government. In June 1975, two thousand “futurists” met for the Second General Assembly of the World Future Society in Washington, DC. Socioeconomist Robert Theobald (1929–1999) endorsed the concept of “sapientary authority,” a social structure in which wise men selected by merit would be deeply involved in the governmental decision-making process. “It’s naive,” declared Theobald, “to deny the necessity for some kind of competent elite.”
Daniel Bell (1919–2011), professor of sociology at Harvard University, sees an elite composed of select intellectuals. He writes in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), in the chapter entitled “Who Will Rule,” that “the university—or some other knowledge institute—will become the central institution of the next hundred years because of its role as the new source of innovation and knowledge.” He says that crucial decisions will come from government, but more and more the decisions of both business and government will be predicated on government-sponsored research, and “because of the intricately linked nature of their consequences, [the decisions] will have an increasingly technical character.” Society thus turns into a technocracy where “the determining influence belongs to technicians of the administration and of the economy.” Bell sees that in the final analysis the whole state—its business, its education, its government, even the daily pattern of the ordinary man’s life—becomes a matter of control by the technocratic elite. They are the only ones who know how to run the complicated machinery of society and they will then, in collusion with the government elite, have all the power necessary to manage it.
Bell’s most astute warning concerns the ethical implications of this situation: “A post-industrial society cannot provide a transcendent ethic. . . . The lack of a rooted moral belief system is the cultural contradiction of the society, the deepest challenge to its survival.” He adds that in the future men can be remade, their behavior conditioned, or their consciousness altered. The constraints of the past vanish. To the extent that Bell’s picture of this future is fulfilled, Galbraith’s form of the elite will be the actuality.
Humanism has led to its natural conclusion. It has ground down to the point Leonardo da Vinci visualized so long ago when he realized that, starting only from man, mathematics leads us only to particulars—and particulars lead only to mechanics. Humanism had no way to find the universal in the areas of meaning and values. As my son, Franky, put it, “Humanism has changed the Twenty-Third Psalm:
They began—I am my shepherd
Then—Sheep are my shepherd
Then—Everything is my shepherd
Finally—Nothing is my shepherd.”
There is a death wish inherent in humanism—the impulsive drive to beat to death the base which made our freedoms and our culture possible.
In ancient Israel, when the nation had turned from God and from His truth and commands as given in Scripture, the prophet Jeremiah cried out that there was death in the city. He was speaking not only of physical death in Jerusalem but also a wider death. Because Jewish society of that day had turned away from what God had given them in the Scripture, there was death in the polis—that is, death in the total culture and the total society.
In our era, sociologically man destroyed the base which gave him the possibility of freedoms without chaos. Humanists have been determined to beat to death the knowledge of God and the knowledge that God has not been silent, but has spoken in the Bible and through Christ—and they have been determined to do this even though the death of values has come with the death of that knowledge.
We see two effects of our loss of meaning and values. The first is degeneracy. Think of New York City’s Times Square—Forty-Second and Broadway. If one goes to what used to be the lovely Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, one finds that it too has become equally squalid. The same is true of lovely old streets in Copenhagen. Pompeii has returned! The marks of ancient Rome scar us: degeneracy, decadence, depravity, a love of violence for violence’s sake. The situation is plain. If we look, we see it. If we see it, we are concerned.
But we must notice that there is a second result of modern man’s loss of meaning and values which is more ominous and which many people do not see. This second result is that the elite will exist. Society cannot stand chaos. Some group or some person will fill the vacuum. An elite will offer us arbitrary absolutes, and who will stand in its way?
Will the silent majority (which at one time we heard so much about) help? The so-called silent majority was, and is, divided into a minority and a majority. The minority are either Christians who have a real basis for values or those who at least have a memory of the days when the values were real. The majority are left with only their two poor values of personal peace and affluence.
With such values, will men stand for their liberties? Will they not give up their liberties step by step, inch by inch, as long as their own personal peace and prosperity is sustained and not challenged, and as long as the goods are delivered? The lifestyles of the young and the old generations are different. There are tensions between long hair and short, drugs and non-drugs, whatever are the outward distinctions of the moment. But they support each other sociologically, for both embrace the values of personal peace and affluence. Much of the church is no help here either, because for so long a large section of the church has only been teaching a relativistic humanism using religious terminology.
I believe the majority of the silent majority, young and old, will sustain the loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own lifestyles are not threatened. And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things. Politics has largely become not a matter of ideals—increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth—but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of personal peace and affluence. They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.