3. Virtue in Distress
VIRTUE IN DISTRESS
[Poety not included because of rights restrictions.]
Having abandoned an intelligent first cause of origin, the atheist is faced with a major hurdle in establishing the essential nature of man. In every society, no matter what its cultural underpinnings, there is a code of “oughtness.” While the specifics may vary from culture to culture, in each case, those specifics are rooted in a prior set of beliefs as to what ought to be. These, in turn, are related to what they consider to be a person’s essential nature and purpose. It is, therefore, inappropriate to say that we cannot challenge one’s morality, for the beliefs on which that challenge stands are open to defense or refutation. One common agreement emerges: That wherever one finds an “oughtness,” it is always linked together with a believed purpose in life. Purpose and oughtness are inextricably bound, and any effort to sever them meets with individual discord and societal disruption. The result is anarchy.
Consider a watch. Any description of its goodness or badness is bound up with what a watch is supposed to do. The story is an old one, but the point it makes is worthy of repetition. On his way to work every day, a man walked past a clockmaker’s store. He would ritualistically stop outside and synchronize his watch with the clock that stood in the window of the clockmaker’s shop. Observing this routine, the clockmaker one day struck up a conversation with the man and asked him what kind of work he did. The man timidly confessed that he worked as the timekeeper at the nearby factory and that his malfunctioning watch necessitated daily readjustment. Since it was his job to ring the closing bell every day at 4:00 p.m., he synchronized his watch with the clock every morning to guarantee precision.
The clockmaker, even more embarrassed than the timekeeper, said, “I hate to tell you this, but my clock doesn’t work very well either, and I have been adjusting it to the bell that I hear every afternoon from the factory at 4:00 p.m.!”
How does he know the right time when the only recourse is to a poorly functioning watch that is in turn corrected by a faulty clock? What happens to a society that does not know which way to turn to gain an understanding of right and wrong? When confused moral philosophers moralize from uncertain starting points, error compounds itself. A self-caused universe does not communicate morality, a silence underscored by Stephen Crane:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”[1]
In a naturalistic world, there exists neither a sense of obligation in the universe, nor a demand from it.
The atheist, who by definition subscribes to a purely naturalistic view of our origin and essence, in effect is forced to hold to what is called the Whig theory of history, which asserts that the most advanced moment in time represents the time of highest development. Progress judged this way is not so much logical as it is chronological. With that as a given, the point of present achievement, as signaled by a number of philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists, is that moral absolutes are a thing of the past, and any recognized and endorsed moral theory is anachronistic and vacuous. Nietzsche said it this way:
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.[2]
He was right. One cannot rescue the beneficial aspects of Christian morality while doing away with Christ. One cannot salvage the Ten Commandments while destroying the authority of the books of Moses. Nietzsche considered the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount to be a damning approach to life, for they emphasize the responsibility of man toward the poor and weak of society. According to Nietzsche, a society driven by such an ethic, in effect, is controlled by the losers.
The present abandonment of a moral law is really quite a unique experiment in civilization. This is not to deny the moral struggles of the past. But those past societies, at least theoretically, espoused a norm for determining what was right and what was wrong, some foundation on which to erect the structures of moral rectitude. In our day, there are no foundations, and we are well on our way to becoming moral eunuchs. Of the twenty-one civilizations that English historian Arnold Toynbee mentioned in his history, ours is the first that does not enjoin a moral law or educate our young in moral instruction.
In another sense, also, this forsaking of a moral law is a unique experiment. Although it is not the first time that atheism has been a formalized system, the accompanying loss of absolutes has never been so blatantly and triumphantly espoused. The Indian sage Sankara was the systematizer and leading voice of his society in his eighth-century commentaries on the Vedas. Though a strict monist having no belief in a personal, relational God, he nevertheless was a strong believer in a moral code, and would have branded our unbelief in a moral law a sign of depravity.[3] Though the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha, taught his beliefs as an atheistic system, he had a strong moral code and would have branded our amoral stance ignorant.
But with the givens of our chance existence in this world, the present posture is at least more consistent. The logic of chance origins has driven our society into rewriting the rules, so that utility has replaced duty, self-expression has unseated authority, and being good has become feeling good. These new rules plunge the moral philosopher into a veritable vortex of relativizing. All absolutes die the death of a thousand qualifications. Life becomes a pinball game, whose rules, though they be few, are all instrumental and not meaningful in themselves, except as a means to the player’s enjoyment.
Having come loose from our moral moorings in this brave new world, we find ourselves adrift in uncharted seas and have decided to toss away the compass. Boston college professor Peter Kreeft, in his Three Philosophies of Life, stated it very succinctly:
Ancient ethics always dealt with three questions. Modern ethics deals with only one, or at the most, two. The three questions are like the three things a fleet of ships is told by its sailing orders. [The metaphor is from C. S. Lewis.] First, the ships must know how to avoid bumping into each other. This is social ethics, and modern as well as ancient ethicists deal with it. Second, they must know how to stay shipshape and avoid sinking. This is individual ethics, virtues and vices, character-building, and we hear very little about this from our modern ethical philosophies. Third, and most important of all, they must know why the fleet is at sea in the first place . . . I think I know why modern philosophers dare not raise this greatest of questions: because they have no answer to it.[4]
Peter Kreeft appropriately underscored the dissimilarities between the ancient ethicists and their modern—and I would add, postmodern—counterparts. The ancient ethicists probed the specifics, dealing with the what and the how of ethics in order to arrive at a prescription. Contemporary ethicists question more the why and the if of ethics in order to write a description.
An Alarming Parable
Leading philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre is even more pointed in stating the present malady. In his seminal book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, he began with a thought-provoking scenario in his chapter entitled “A Disquieting Suggestion.” He asked the reader to imagine a world in which the natural sciences, through the blunders of a few, have been instrumental in bringing about a universal catastrophe. The ecological change, resulting in calamitous situations, has provoked crowds into riotous behavior and massive destruction. The lynching of scientists, both verbally and actually, coupled with the destruction of all books dealing with science, has brought the world full circle and left it devoid of all scientific knowledge. On the heels of this, a pseudo-political party has come into power, promising to do away with all teaching on science.
As time goes on, some enlightened individuals seek to revive science somewhat, but they do not have sufficient data to put it all together. Although, once again the verbiage of science resurfaces, no clear-cut definitions for the same words, such as “atomic weight” and “specific gravity,” are established. Some half-burnt fragments mention them, but no point of reference is evident.
Like any parable, the details ought not to destroy the main point. MacIntyre pictured an imaginary situation in which a scientific worldview is in jeopardy, and the language itself no longer bears reference to the real facts.
If such a scenario ever became reality, two further complications would arise. First, the logician could not really be of any help, for he would be equally hampered by being locked into the data on hand. He would be able at best to deal only with that which was “known” or “believed.” Second, the existentialist, who lives by the force of his will, could call the solutions offered neither right nor wrong, for, in his passion, being quite autonomous, he would choose what he felt to be self-authenticating personally. In such circumstances, would a scientific theory be established on the basis of a popular vote?
Thus, with the foundation destroyed and priority being given to feeling, society would be left with a rugged individualism, each person under his or her own apple tree, determining why he or she feels apples fall to the ground. Having lost the truth base, the “felt,” or intuitive, remains an option for all. The sociologist would make his contribution on the basis of a survey, and then scientific norms could be postulated depending on whatever is plausible for most people. Although this would vary from community to community, it ought not to be considered serious because no empirical evidence matters in a salvation-by-survey society. Existence is all that counts. With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference.
MacIntyre’s illustration is very powerful and his application of it very specific:
The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra [i.e., a vague resemblance] of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, for morality.[5]
MacIntyre’s imaginary situation fulfills Nietzsche’s parable “The Madman.” Between the psychological effect of the incident with Galileo, the extrapolational leap from the Darwinian theory into atheism, and the philosophical attempt to choke the concept of God by denying it metaphysical breathing room, no logical basis is left for morality. It has been effectively eroded one step at a time. To believe in the defense of morality is considered no longer intellectually tenable.
The Ideas Propagated
One might legitimately ask whether the general public really derives its ethical beliefs from the intellectual pundits of the day, and the answer to that is both yes and no. The pundit of intellectual and debating ability provides ideological and philosophical strength to the institutions of the land, be they legal, educational, religious, or political. The platonic deduction that all politics is law, and all law is ethics, is no longer believed. Living under the tremendous illusion that personal freedoms and freedom of speech are devoid of moral assumptions and responsibilities, we have bankrupted ourselves, so that honor, truth, and morality have been sacrificed at the altar of autonomy and self-worship.
If we are to understand our present moral confusion, we must retrace the footprints that have led to this situation. Without a doubt, the intellectual community must bear the brunt of the blame. Many intellectuals and so-called trendsetters of society have ridiculed the traditional underpinnings of right and wrong and have launched a three-pronged attack upon treasured beliefs: first, by their writings and pronouncements; second, by the changes they have effected upon foundational institutions, such as law and education; and third, by the blatant disregard for morality in their own lifestyles.[6] Thus, institutions that were established to provide the facts for society have now become largely self-serving and provisional. We are left with the fundamental presupposition that right and wrong are ideas without any point of absolute reference. The intellectual supermen have done their job.
As these opinion-makers jumped on the bandwagon of a world now in high gear without God, they held out their philosophical swords to slice up anything in their way. Their proclaimed creed became “knowledge at any price,” and this knowledge-for-the-sake-of-knowledge mentality has been categorized as “a lust for knowledge.” (“Always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” [2 Tim. 3:7] is an apt biblical description of such individuals.) These intellectuals have wanted every curtain and veil removed—right down to tinkering with unborn fetuses. All proverbial and parabolic instruction from the past that enjoined reverence and humility has been cast to the winds. The conclusions of the past have been dismissed as primitive belief, and described as a system of thought concocted by a few to control the masses through guilt.
What the intellectual has completely missed is that morality is not abstract or contrived. It is imperative that the historian, the scientist, and the philosopher be in pursuit of what is prescriptively and descriptively true. Further, these findings must be reported truthfully. Philosophy may begin with wonder, but its motivation is the love of wisdom—the knowledge and application of truth. When intellectuals violate morality in any academic discipline, implicitly or explicitly, it leads to lawlessness and the concoctions of science-fiction. And lawless people use their power over nature to control others.
A fierce dog may protect us from the possible ravages of others, but how do we protect ourselves from the intellectual arrogance that plunders everything treasured and leaves it to be mocked and expelled by academicians and celebrities? The heroes of our society win Nobel Prizes or Academy Awards, and then use that platform to castigate moral law. How does the person in the street counter a Nobel laureate or a Hollywood movie star?
Thus, people like Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre, and even Woody Allen, have had a profound impact on society, having both argued against the existence of God and mocked his injunctions. One would think that such intellectual giants would come up with a compelling argument for their own moral philosophy. Yet, it has not been forthcoming.
Indeed, in his famous debate in 1948 with the philosopher Frederick Copleston, Bertrand Russell revealed his philosophical Achilles’ heel on morality. At the midpoint of the debate, Copleston asked Russell on what basis he differentiated between right and wrong, and Russell answered that he did so on the same basis that he differentiated between yellow and blue. Copleston challenged the analogy because colors, he said, were differentiated on the basis of seeing. How does one differentiate between good and bad? And Russell replied that he did so on the basis of his feelings.[7]
Copleston was very gracious, for had he wanted to draw philosophical blood, he could have decimated Russell’s argument. In some cultures people love their neighbors, in others they eat them, both on the basis of feeling. Would Russell have had a preference?
Secular philosophers cannot logically give an answer to this question of how to determine right and wrong because there is no common starting point for ethical theorists, and it is not for the lack of trying. Valiant attempts have been made, with some appealing and commendable arguments. But they inevitably reason in a circle and become lost in the maze of counterarguments. Complicating it all are the insatiable passions of humanity, which make an atheistic unifying theory ultimately unreachable.
The English poet and essayist F. W. H. Myers told of the occasion when, on a rainy evening in May, he was strolling in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity College in Cambridge in the company of the great novelist Mary Ann Evans (who wrote under the male pseudonym of George Eliot). They were discussing morality and religion. Myers wrote:
[S]he, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law.[8]
It has great appeal to say, “Duty!” But again, if natural selection is a starting point, the questions of duty to whom, and to what purpose, are not answered. An infinite number of theories have emerged to explain “duty,” but they keep sliding down slippery slopes.
The theories are well labeled: subjectivism, emotivism, egoism, utilitarianism, and others. Whichever way they move, each system arrives at the edge, or the heart, of autonomy, which literally means a law unto one’s self. Jeremy Bentham illustrated in his “greatest happiness principle” the absurd lengths to which philosophers have gone. A pleasure “calculus” was derived to which any action should be subjected and measured as to duration, intensity, propinquity, extent, certainty, purity, fecundity, etc.
This shows the utterly ridiculous limits to which we have been driven, and it still does not answer the questions of why we should be moral and who should determine morality. In fact, the extremes to which the human mind has gone in the construction or destruction of moral frameworks well justifies the castigation by Malcolm Muggeridge, albeit cynical, that we have educated ourselves into imbecility. Our philosophers, therefore, however well-intentioned they may have been, have cut the nerve of morality in trying to breathe life into it apart from God.
A Predictable Consequence
Having accomplished the academic slaughtering, these intellectuals separated their mental skills from their moral practices in their own lifestyles, and many who espoused an autonomous morality lived it to its tragic end. The morality of Bertrand Russell, or Jean Paul Sartre, or Ernest Hemingway betrayed lives lacking cohesion. These authors lived in relationships devoid of love’s commitment or moral fidelity. Yet the colossal impact they have had is truly staggering, and their examples ought to give us the courage to recognize the deep and dangerous flaws in the teachings and lifestyles of these molders of the modern and postmodern mind.
Jean Paul Sartre, guru of the sixties, whose name was a household word among students, fanned the existentialist flame of that era. His most enduring mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, said that the slogan from the Sartrean mind-set that enthused her the most was, “It is forbidden to forbid.” Through his writings he became the academic godfather to many terrorist movements on the cutting edge of oppression in that decade. Paul Johnson, the historian, said this of Sartre:
What he did not foresee, and what a wiser man would have foreseen, was that most of the violence to which he gave philosophical encouragement would be inflicted by blacks not on whites, but on other blacks. By helping Fanon to inflame Africa, he contributed to the civil wars and mass murders that have engulfed most of that continent from the mid-sixties onwards to this day. His influence in Southeast Asia, where the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, was even more baneful. The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as the Angka Leu (The Higher Organization). Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant, and one an economist. All had studied in France in the 1950s where they had not only belonged to the Communist Party, but had absorbed Sartre’s doctrines of philosophical activism and “necessary violence.” These mass murderers were his ideological children.[9]
The intriguing contradiction in Sartre is that he severely criticized the involvement of the United States in Vietnam as immoral, while he himself walked the logical road from existentialism—which espouses ethical neutrality—to Marxism, from a rugged individualism to a “classless society.” A logical road, I say, because I firmly believe that all autonomous cultures over a period of time will need some kind of a mystification and “moral cause.” Having rejected God, and finding no cause worthy of total commitment, they move to the utopian ideal of the Marxist worldview, gathering the herd under their “superman wings.”
However, Sartre’s impact on people of the 1960s is small compared to Nietzsche’s influence on Adolf Hitler. Hitler took Nietzsche’s writings as his philosophical blueprint and provoked the bloodiest, most unnecessary, most disruptive war in history, changing irremediably the pattern of the world. Nietzsche’s influence on Hitler is undeniable. In fact, historian William Shirer has written that “Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.”[10]
Probably one of the darkest spots in our world today is what remains of the concentration camp in Auschwitz, in the south of Poland. It was there that Rudolph Hoess, the commandant, oversaw the obliteration of 12,000 people a day. One visit to a place like that is enough to leave one speechless with grief. It reveals the depth of criminality to which the human mind can degenerate. One room contains 14,000 pounds of women’s hair, taken from the women after their bodies were removed from the gas chambers, and used for making sacks for transporting commodities. Eugene Kogan’s book Theory and Practice of Hell described the horror of the Nazi experiment. These were the “new games” invented, to use Nietzschean terminology, on the playing field of the Nazi world. Hitler took Nietzsche’s logic and drove the atheistic worldview to its legitimate conclusion. In Auschwitz the words of Hitler are clearly stated:
I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality. . . . We will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence—imperious, relentless and cruel.
He took the metaphysic of Darwinian theory, and in his Mein Kampf said:
If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race (like the Germanic race) should inter-mingle with an inferior (like the Jewish race). Why? Because, in such a case her efforts, throughout hundreds and thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.[11]
What is truly instructive about Hitler’s use of natural selection is that Darwin himself foresaw such implications and repercussions from his theory. In commenting about the Civil War in America, Darwin said, “In the long run a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.”[12] Elsewhere, he added, “Looking at the world at no distant date, what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”[13]
If atheism gains its life-sustaining support from atheistic evolution, then it cannot shut the floodgates to the tidal waves of its philosophical implications. It is important to keep this in perspective. Augustine warned that it is not wise to judge a philosophy by its abuse. But the theory of the domination of the strong over the weak is not the abuse of natural selection; rather, it is at the heart of it. Hitler unintentionally exposed atheism and dragged it where it was reluctantly, but logically, forced into its consequences. The denuding of people, in every sense of the word, that took place in the concentration camps, brought about the logical outworking of the demise of God and the extermination of moral law.
While Hitler was relentlessly pursuing the “inferior” of the world, leading the most educated nation of the day, Josef Stalin (described by Malcolm Muggeridge as “that murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin”) began his exterminations of the “inferior” on the uneducated masses. Stalin, who once studied for the priesthood, found moral power to be innocuous compared to brute power. Thus, appointed by Lenin to subjugate beliefs inimical to the revolution, he was selected, among other reasons, because of his hatred for God and for things religious. Now, as Russian historians tally the numbers murdered, estimates have already reached fifteen million people. One historian has said that while Hitler seduced Germany, Stalin raped Russia—both propelled by an atheistic worldview.
Relativized morality, when it has had its day, will have trivialized human beings, and made us expendable statistics in fulfilling the ideological plan of some superman. And if, perchance, one thinks we are too far afield from atheism in our argument, let me remind the reader that it was Nietzsche who said that because God had died in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century would become the bloodiest century in history. Disregard for the sanctity of life, and its resultant corollary of estimating the value of a life by its quality, provided some of the Third Reich’s metaphysical moorings. The “inferior” were to be obliterated; the “superior” were to determine destiny, and the will and power of the superman would dominate.
Ironically, at the Nuremberg trials, when the judges on trial were being defended, one of the strongest arguments was that they were operating according to the law of their own land. To that, a legitimate counterquestion was raised, “But is there not a law above our laws?” The Nietzschean answer would have to be “No.” Human reason alone, unfounded on a divine first cause, makes survival the only ethic, and it never answers when, why, or who.
It is important that I be clearly understood. Not all atheists are immoral, but morality as goodness cannot be justified with atheistic presuppositions. An atheist may be morally minded, but he just happens to be living better than his belief about what the nature of man warrants. He may have personal moral values, but he cannot have any sense of compelling and universal moral obligation. Moral duty cannot logically operate without a moral law; and there is no moral law in an amoral world.
Further, just in case it is argued that atheism is not the only philosophy that has resulted in war, and that the Crusaders engendered much violence in the name of Christ, the answer is quite straightforward. Those who, in the name of Christ, have sought to kill in order to propagate their belief, were acting in serious contradiction to both the message and the method of the gospel. By contrast, the demagogues of the Nietzschean and Sartrean stripe were operating in total harmony with, and in some cases the direct injunction of, the ideology behind their actions.
Moreover, we would be deceived if we falsely concluded that the philosophy of atheism has not yet affected us with violence. To relegate it to a distant impact would be to assume that the consequences of such ideas, as espoused by these intellectuals, have affected only remote geographical areas or exceptional cases such as the Third Reich. Intellectuals who have eradicated God from their philosophies have not remained content in affecting that remote a sphere. Much closer to home their ideas carry enormous weight in decision-making at the highest levels of our nations, building into the body of society the nerve and sinew of their values in law and education. The filtered-down effect of their beliefs is far-reaching.
The very laws of the land today are shaped by many who have a worldview that denies the moral law of God. We have now found ourselves embroiled in debates that have sweeping consequences, which we try to play on middle ground, living under the illusion of neutrality. As the English philosopher G. K. Chesterton said:
For under the smooth legal surface of our society, there are already moving, very lawless things. We are always near the breaking point, when we care for only what is legal, and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.[14]
Those words were written more than a generation ago, and now, in that short span of time, the comment by political science professor Robert Fitch has become painfully real:
Ours is an age where ethics has become obsolete. It is superceded by science, deleted by philosophy and dismissed as emotive by psychology. It is drowned in compassion, evaporates into aesthetics and retreats before relativism. The usual moral distinctions between good and bad are simply drowned in a maudlin emotion in which we feel more sympathy for the murderer than for the murdered, for the adulterer than for the betrayed, and in which we have actually begun to believe that the real guilty party, the one who somehow caused it all, is the victim, and not the perpetrator of the crime.[15]
Once again, it is key to point out how time has nudged ideas into consequences. The well-known work of Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, was preceded forty years earlier by a book by Richard Weaver (also from the University of Chicago) titled Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver’s book provided the prophetic backdrop to Bloom’s portrait of the closed-minded postmodern skeptic. The impact of ideas has come home in more ways than we realize.
The ideas of atheistic thinkers have shaped this century in a way that few would be willing to deny. Newsweek columnist George Will has appropriately said that there is nothing so vulgar left in the human experience for which we cannot fly in some professor from somewhere to justify it. The lesson is obvious: To be an intellectual is a great privilege, but to be an intellectual without God is dangerous. The rock group King Crimson expressed it well years ago when they sang of knowledge being “a deadly friend when no one sets the rules.”
An Unworthy Influence
The negative impact upon society has come not only through the arguments of the intellectuals. It has also come more forcibly through their lifestyles and those of the trendsetters, which provides further justification for personalized values. The term values is Nietzschean, for morality has no market usage any more. Alan Bloom correctly traced back the word values through Max Weber to Nietzsche. The lives of intellectuals often defy explanation; Alexander the Great conquered the world but couldn’t overcome his alcoholism.
Paul Johnson, in his noteworthy book Intellectuals, raised this issue of lifestyles repeatedly. His chapter titles alone throw into the light the deep-seated, untamed passions of many of those who have shaped society. One of the most heartrending descriptions in the book is in the paragraph that ended his treatment of Jean Paul Sartre, where he drew some very poignant material from Simone de Beauvoir and her book Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. She had become quite disillusioned by his life toward the end and portrayed her years with him in rather brutal terms, describing his unbridled promiscuity, his incontinence, and his drunkenness. His life, like Bertrand Russell’s, failed to achieve any coherence. Johnson tellingly ended that chapter (entitled “Jean-Paul Sarte: ‘A Little Ball of Fur and Ink’”):
Over 50,000 people, most of them young, followed his body into Montparnasse Cemetery. To get a better view, some of them climbed into trees. One of them came crashing down onto the coffin itself. To what cause had they come to do honor? What faith, what luminous truth about humanity, were they asserting by their mass presence? We may well ask.[16]
In this brief comment, Johnson summed up one life. The deep reserve we should have about intellectuals of this stripe is climactically stated in the following excerpt from Johnson’s last chapter, “The Flight of Reason.” Not all will be willing to heed his warning, but a failure to do so will force history to repeat its mistakes.
One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is—beware of intellectuals . . . For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behavior. Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value . . . [enabling] them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action. Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.[17]
In our postmodern context there is no outside value to values. Values depend purely on what one chooses to fuse into them. The intellectual muscle and aberrant lifestyles of many in their sophisticated ranks gave the average man and woman both academic and pragmatic justification to do likewise. These new values, emptied into a milieu that itself had wedded industrialization and urbanization to consumerism and hedonism, have made the whole situation as devoid of morality as any epicurean could have dreamed. Intellectual resources provided the academic capital for many to break away from the Edenic restrictions and expend themselves. When thrown into the bright lights of the city, there was a demand for everything, except morality.
The extent to which this has signaled some calamitous conditions in life and death situations would have been unthought of a generation ago. The universal solvent “the death of God” has effectively dissolved the life-sustaining crucible of morality. But like all universal solvents, the problem of how and where to contain it becomes paramount. Atheistic philosophers cannot provide an answer. Addressing the devastation wrought by the erasing of right and wrong, Shakespeare wrote centuries ago:
. . . right and wrong
Between whose endless jar justice resides
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.[18]
Writing in 1970, Bertrand Russell makes a very revealing statement in the prologue to his autobiography. He said that there were three passions that controlled his life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. None of these three passions, I might add, could he have truly pursued without a moral imperative.
Philosophers sever the nerve of life if they do not acknowledge a moral law. Having destroyed that possibility by “killing God,” they have passionately tried to live out the consequences of their own ideas. And they have ended up like the man in the evolutionary tree drawn in Newsweek magazine in 1974—just hanging in space with no support. Morally, they are still trying to build a man out of the tooth of an extinct pig.
Only a moral system that is logical, meaningful, and practical has answers for any society. In hard terms, the morality that atheism teaches, implies, or espouses is unlivable. The dead-end street to which atheism has brought us is appropriately summarized, though mildly stated, in a comment by a modern educator. In reply to the question on what positive answers Nietzsche could give to life as it could be lived without God, J. P. Stern, professor of German, University of London, said:
The answers to that question are, I’m afraid, very unsatisfactory as far as Nietzsche is concerned. His whole attitude towards social questions never does get too far. . . . Nietzsche’s recommendations make living together in some kind of harmony extremely difficult. . . . In a sense we can say that some of the more outrageous political doctrines of our time, some of the fascist politics of the early part of this century are based to some extent—among intellectuals, at any rate—on this view that you must create your own values and live by them, regardless of the consequences. It hasn’t got us very far, as you can see.[19]
Questions for Study and Discussion