Convenient Double Standards
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who never lived at all.
G. K. Chesterton
One misconception we must address before we go further is convenient double standards. Many people lay the blame for anything that goes wrong in the world on Christians and their morality. However, non-Christians are often exempt from such. You will not find many atheists who admit that the mass murdering communist leaders of the last 150 years were atheists. Few modern scientists will acknowledge that Marx’s ideas are similar to their own. Both believe that matter is all that exists and that the spiritual does not exist. This is known as philosophic materialism, not to be confused with the common use of materialism which often means being greedy. Philosophic materialism is not so much a single philosophy as a family of interrelated theories. Marx and many scientists have shared its foundational assumption: “that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology explains the human mind, with nothing left over. Therefore, physics alone explains the human mind. Physics is the ultimate explainer.”[1] With philosophic materialism, the concepts of God, sin, salvation, and heaven are all considered meaningless because the spiritual is not real. Certainly, any who believe in evolution will not acknowledge the importance of this idea in shaping the Soviet Union’s leadership or the communists leaders of North Korea.[2] Few will admit their moral relativism has its roots in the same thinking that Marx and his disciples drew upon. Many simply ignore any link between themselves and the deaths and economic decay that came from this mixture of atheism, relativism, philosophic materialism, and socialist economics while happily attacking Christianity at every step. As one former socialist has said:
[We pretended] that the U.S.S.R. was not the fault of socialists, or even of Bolsheviks (which we wished to be). Of course it was their fault, the fault of people exactly like us, but we closed our minds to this with a web of excuses. We pretended not to be who we were, and that the U.S.S.R. was not what it was.[3]
Past Christians have sins for which they will have to answer to God and which we can acknowledge were wrong, but Chesterton had it right, when he said “I take historic Christianity with all its sins upon its head; I take it, as I would take ... any other mixed or unpleasing human product.”[4] Many of these sins, so often held up to condemn Christianity, are common to all humankind. In some cases, the impact of Christianity on events is characterized inaccurately or exaggerated.
Double standards are most evident among modern socialists who wish to deny any link between their economic thinking and communism.[5] The point from one author, regarding these evasions, sums up this tendency well when he says:
The most extreme forms of socialism have usually been implemented by political movements describing themselves as “communist.”… Stalin was no less a monster than Hitler[6], Lenin no less a monster than Stalin, and Trotsky not much less a monster than Lenin or Che Guevara. “But that’s communism!” the modern-day socialist will object. “We’re talking about socialism! Decent, humane, democratic socialism! We’re talking about Swedish socialism, not Soviet communism.” What, precisely, is the difference between socialism and communism? Socialists invariably maintain, in essence, that all the bad stuff done in the name of socialism is communism, and all the good stuff is socialism. Free healthcare? That’s socialism. Political repression? That’s communism. Public pensions? Socialism. Gulag? Communism. But this is obviously facile and dishonest. It is also a gross oversimplification. Whether one describes a particular arrangement as socialist or communist, one is talking about different expressions of a single phenomenon: Marxism. The great communist leaders regularly describe themselves, their work, and their philosophy as socialist… we must deal with the world as it is.
Here we see the common tactic of denying the worst aspects of a movement by denying the relationship between its ideas and its crimes. Such a double standard is never offered to Christianity. Almost without exception, Christianity is always placed alongside religious wars, the crusades, witch trials, and slavery, and the connection between Christianity and those evils is never questioned. Yet, ideas such as atheism, determinism, moral relativism, and economic equality—so cherished by many today—are not examined for the results that they led to.
Political labels and designations are shed quietly to avoid guilt. Like political and moral chameleons, individuals and groups change their colors. Their communist red fades away obscuring the relationship between their atheism and relativism and the evils they brought about. Distancing themselves from their intellectual kin allows them to continue their criticisms without ever having to admit what their ideas brought about in the past. We will see that the discrediting of communist economics did not cause a reevaluation of the mental undercurrents that created Marxist thought. Instead, many who shared the ideas of Marx but had been let down by its failures in practice, decided to viciously attack non-Communist systems by pointing out their imperfections. The economic failure of Marx’s thought left these thinkers reeling, but the same foundational ideas were recycled as cultural and moral relativism. They returned to Marx’s original tactic of criticizing the imperfections of what already exists but never offering an alternative to replace it.
No human system is perfect. If those who still hold to the Marxist ideas could point to a system that was perfect, which met all the needs of every individual, then such a system might be worth imitating. But this is precisely the shortcoming of so many failed utopias. Many critics of our culture have tried to hold up places around the world as heaven on earth, a model for all the less enlightened, unintelligent people surrounding them. It was the desire to criticize their own neighbors and countrymen that led many intelligent and important people of the 1920s through the 1950s[7], to admire and praise some of the greatest murderers in history. As one economist has said:
socialists continue to fail to face the obstacles in the way of fitting separate individual decisions into a common pattern [with the aim of creating a society based on social justice]… It is a betrayal of concern for others, then, to theorise about the ‘just society’ without carefully considering the economic consequences of implementing such views. Yet, after seventy years of experience with socialism, it is safe to say that most intellectuals … remain content to brush aside what lessons might lie in economics, unwilling to wonder whether there might not be a reason why socialism, as often as it is attempted, never seems to work out as its intellectual leaders intended. The intellectuals’ vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless string of ‘utopias’—the Soviet Union, then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua—should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts. But such facts … remain unexamined by those who pride themselves on their rationalistic rejection of the notion that there could be any facts that transcend historical context or present an insurmountable barrier to human desires.[8]
These thinkers presumed that if enough will is thrown behind a government they controlled, then all evil will be destroyed and good will triumph. Many of these revolutionaries laid out their assumptions about the world and humanity as they wrote on religion, government, and economics. We need to see both their words and actions side by side.
Many times words sound appealing but their implications are not clear until they are put into action. As one author has said, “Communism was often regarded as ’in favor of social justice.’” It “knew how to pose as the heir to the Enlightenment, and many were duped by this rationalistic and humanistic pretense.”[9] When ideas come out of places where they remain untested by reality—such as media, universities, or even our own minds—and are put into practice in daily life, it is easier to identify their flaws.[10] Many of these ideas will sound familiar to us today. Modern thinking tends to promote ideas while ignoring how those same ideas played out in the past. We have the capacity to see what came about when these ideas were put into practice, but we must be willing to put in the effort. Such studies will provide us guidance about what the future holds. Hopefully, after examining the ideas and their consequences that underlie these older systems, we will have the skills to not be prey to a modern set of false assumptions.
[1] Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth (Colorado Springs: David Cook, 2015) Pg 70, Kindle edition. [2] E. Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (Heraklion Press) pg 57. Kindle Edition. [3] Peter Hitchens, brother of Christopher Hitchens who authored God is not Great [4] G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (A Public Domain Book: Amazon, 2011), pg 65, Kindle Edition. Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth (Colorado Springs: David Cook, 2015) Pg 135,Kindle edition. [5] Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 191, Kindle Edition. [6] Tismaneanu, Devil in History, pg 12. Nazism contained a number of tactical affinities with the much-decried Marxism. Hitler himself admitted that he found inspiration in Marxist patterns of political struggle: “I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. I don’t mean their tiresome social doctrine or the materialist conception of history, … and so on. But I have learned from their methods. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun. The whole National Socialism is based on it … National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order. “ [7] Such as Harold Lasky, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John Paul Sartre [8] Friedrich Hayek, Fatal Conceit (London: Routledge, 1988), pg 85-86, Paperback. [9] Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 45, Kindle Edition. [10] This was the same strategy that Plato used in The Republic. He was looking for the moral life by first examining justice in society.
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