Enormous miseries have been the fruit of modernity’s five great revolutions: the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik [Russian communist] Revolution, the National Socialist [Nazi] Revolution and the Sexual Revolution. These five revolutions are one revolution… each stems from the same root: the idolatrous search for a new absolute, the divinization of power or freedom or equality or pride or pleasure, respectively.
Peter Kreeft
The basis on which the whole structure of the new ethics has been reared is… the assumption that the significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society.
Irving Babbit
If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a heaven on earth would follow.
C. S. Lewis
Why Sin Must Inform Our Thinking
Mistakes have been made by [those who believe in God] but far greater mistakes have been made by those who denied the existence of God.
Ravi Zacharias
In the 1400s, Sir Thomas More wrote his book, Utopia. The book tells the story of an island, Utopia, between Europe and the New World in which the problems plaguing More’s Europe were happily absent. In its original Greek, utopia means “no such place,” and the book humorously mocks those who try to create a perfect world. The ship captain who discovered Utopia is named Raphael Hythlodaeus. Hythlodaeus means “skilled in talking nonsense.” Many modern people are also “skilled in talking nonsense” for while they have denied the reality of truth, they nonetheless put forth as truth their own ideas for fixing the world. They apply their skepticism selectively, never applying it to their own thinking. Instead, they tear down other’s ideas, but their skepticism, agnosticism, and relativism do not stop them from addressing “problems” which, they believe, require their special insights. As Chesterton says, “this bias against morality among the modern … is not really a bias against morality; it is a bias against other people’s morality.”[1]
They are not the first. We need to examine history to see what happens when such ideas are followed. Many in the past had the same habits of mind as our modern skeptics. These individuals dreamed up plans that promised painless economic growth, freedom from traditional morals, and equality. Those unfortunate enough to live under their rule got none. Nonetheless, their promises of creating a better future without any sacrifice or trade-offs were appealing, winning them followers and power. The appeal is easy to understand, for we all want something for nothing. Through such promises, groups like the communists achieved government power in countries around the world. Once they seized power, the horrors of these mistaken assumptions revealed themselves in economic decline, starvation, repression, and mass murder. All this came to be through people who denied sins effects on behavior and its limitations on human thought. The results were disastrous then, and some of the same foundational ideas persist in our own time. Chesterton, dealing with the skepticism in his era, noted the connection between skepticism, political radicalism, and the desire to control others. In a book he wrote defending the Christian faith and the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, he compared the accurate understanding of reality that Aquinas acquired from Christ’s teachings and with the extravagant theories of his modern opponents who did everything in the name of the greater good:
Aquinas was a firm but moderate Realist, and therefore held that there really are general qualities ... He recognized that individuality is real, but said that it coexists with a common character making some generalisation possible; in fact, as in most things, he said exactly what all common sense would say, if no intelligent heretics had ever disturbed it. Nevertheless, they still continue to disturb it.[2]
Chesterton noted this tendency among several writers of his day. “I remember when Mr. H. G. Wells … poured forth book after book to argue that everything is unique and untypical, as that a man is so much an individual that he is not even a man.” Chesterton then points out the humor in this tendency. Relativism, atheism, and skepticism tend to attract “those who are always complaining of social chaos, and who propose to replace it by the most sweeping social regulations. It is the very men who say that nothing can be classified, who say that everything must be codified. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw said that the only golden rule is that there is no golden rule. He prefers an iron rule; as in Russia.”[3]
History contains patterns from the past that can help us deal with current problems. A lesson to come out of its pages is that attempting to reshape human nature, apart from Christ, can have dangerous consequences. Great tragedies occurred because people believed in shaping their fellow human beings by political means. As one historian points out:
The delusion that problems are susceptible … to being solved by political decision has generally led many backward countries further and further into the grip of incompetent autocrats. Each time a solution imposed by force has… failed to improve matters, it is thought that the fault is merely that insufficient power has been put behind it. If one more refractory social group is liquidated, if party discipline is tightened and all shirkers and compromisers adequately dealt with, the next time all will be well. We should have learned by now from these unfortunate “social experiments” that there are problems that cannot be dealt with even by the maximum application of political power.[4]
To say that ideas are irrelevant is mistaken. Communism is nothing if not an idea, and this idea killed millions and kept millions more in poverty. Should the belief that ideas have consequences be doubted, one only need look at the differences this idea made in countries that were previously unified but were divided during the Cold War. The results between the populations who lived in East and West Germany or North and South Korea were, and in the case of Korea still are, significant. These were areas with people similar in race and culture. Further, their economic starting points were similar. And yet, the impact of one idea crippled what people were able to do. Also, consider China, where sixty million people died in a famine when the government followed the communist ideas of Mao, versus the economic growth that came about once the ideas of Mao were replaced with free market ideas.[5]
These horrors were brought about by men thinking certain thoughts and putting those thoughts into action through the state. They did not come about randomly. Several interrelated ideas merged over the last 250 years to bring about these man-made catastrophes. The starting point was a denial of God. Built upon this was the premise that humanity is the product of environment and nature alone. Both ideas led to an explicit denial of sin. This left human beings as the highest intelligence in the universe and to the corollary that our knowledge can be unlimited through science. The final step was the belief that human knowledge could be used to reshape nature in a way that we see fit and that people can be molded through government and education to create a better world. The denial of God and the denial of sin were the starting grounds for all other errors, for they were the two ideas which placed limits on human knowledge and power. Once they were gone, men began to act as they saw fit. They presumed that no absolute truth existed to limit them. They acted as if they knew how to make the world reasonable and fair. They failed to do either.
Any assessment of human knowledge and nature must begin with what has happened in the past. Many ideas which are thought to be new have been tried before and resulted in disaster. I do not wish to delve into politics and economics any more than is necessary for these are secondary matters, but it is essential because a quasi-religious social and political gospel, representing the great heresy of our time, has corrupted our ability to understand the most important thing, humanity’s relationship to God and one another. Let us remember what Irving Babbit said, “when studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.”[6] Many of our mistaken ideas about freedom have come about by uncritically accepting these ideas which share an intellectual ancestry with some of the most dangerous movements of the past 250 years. We must trace these underlying assumptions to see where our thinking leads us. If nothing else, sin is evident for all to see in the pages of history. This era is not free of sin, it just fails to recognize sin because it rejects the idea from the outset.
[1] G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (A Public Domain Book: Amazon, 2011), pg 103, Kindle Edition. [2] G.K. Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas (Business and Leadership Publishing, 2015) location 3748, Kindle Edition. [3] G.K. Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas (Business and Leadership Publishing, 2015) location 3748, Kindle Edition. [4] Robert Conquest, Dragons of Expectations (New York: WW Norton an Co, 2005), pg 52. For a good example of this principle see Anne Applebaum, The Red Famine (Random House Audio, 2017) Track 84, Downpour audiobook. [5] Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2015,) loc 4437, Kindle Edition. Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics 5th edition (New York: Basic books, 2015) pg 25, Kindle edition. [6] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Washington DC, Regnery publishing, 2001). Locations 5316-5317, Kindle Edition.
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