The Right Word (2)

         Here and there in The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis seems to long wistfully for that future moment when all names return to their rightful owners.

         To call things by their rightful names is the privilege (and the distinguishing mark) of wisdom.  Lamentably, ours is not an age of wisdom, and that is nowhere more obvious than in the fact that we call the slow-motion barbarization, which is the main focus of our schools, “education.”  It is anything but.

         To understand that fact is not something you’d likely learn in most schools, at whatever level, from the pre-kindergarten to the post-graduate, because our schools themselves are the foremost advocates of barbarism in our entire culture, except perhaps Hollywood.

         To the degree that sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible, our verbal confusions engender confusions of countless sorts and results, none of which is exemplary.  Nearly all labels, normally useful things, are frayed at the edges and, for that reason, serve as impediments to wisdom, not as its support.  This degeneration of language is not accidental, not at all.

         It is the intentional purpose of leftist word warriors who would rather master others by means of language than simply to master language itself.  That’s why they want to police your speech.  They know that when the power of words is small, the power of thought is small.  So they set about outlawing your language.  That way you will have fewer words by which to conceive, articulate, or defend your ideas and worldview, which they hope to make, literally, impossible.

         So here’s the upshot:  Clarify your words as soon as possible, and thereby enable yourself to clarify your thoughts.  For clarity of thought there is no suitable mental substitute.  Do it or else suffer the burdens of foolishness and verbal tyranny.  That is the choice reality gives you.  Ideas have consequences.  Bad ideas have bad ones.  It’s that straight forward.

         But our culture wouldn’t recognize a bad idea even if it jumped up and bit us in the eye.  After all, we elected Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – twice.  Both made the country noticeably worse and got rewarded for doing so with a second term.  You do know, don’t you, that idiots elect idiots?  Both in the delivery room and at the polling place, we reproduce after our own kind.

The Chronicle of an Undeception

The Chronicle of an Undeception    

            "The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values."

                                                                                                George Will

 

I.  The Tragic Vision of Life

            I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties.  In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock nation, I thought all I had to do was "get back to the land to set my soul free."  I thought that flowers had power, that love could be free, and that the system was to blame.  By 1968, I had the whole world figured out.  I knew the cause of every evil -- America -- and I knew the solution to every problem -- freedom and tolerance.

            If truth be told, of course, I knew nothing, at least nothing worth knowing.  I knew how to posture, but not how to stand.  I knew how to protest, but not how to protect.  I knew how to work up an impressive case of moral outrage, but I didn't know morality.  I knew about peace, but I didn't know enough to fight for it.  I knew about self-indulgence, self-preservation, self-esteem, and self-expression, but I didn't know about self-sacrifice and self-control. 

            Worse still, I didn't even know myself.  I didn't know what Socrates knew about me -- that I entered this world in a state of total and seamless ignorance, and that my ignorance could never be breached as long I remained blissfully unaware of it.  I didn't know what St. Augustine knew about me -- that the well of my soul was poisoned, and that whatever was down in the well would come up in the bucket.  St. Augustine also knew this about my soul:  No matter how hard it tried, no matter where it looked, it could never find its rest anywhere but in God.  I didn't know what Edmund Burke knew about me -- that no government could fix what ailed me, either by the things it did or by the things it did not.  The most any state could do was to help protect me from myself and from others.  Most importantly, however, I didn't know that I was Everyman.  When I learned that, I stopped being a liberal.     

            Like almost all dissidents of my generation, I was a protestor without a plan and a visionary without a vision.  I had not yet learned that you see only what you are able to see, and I was able to see only the egalitarian, relativistic, self-gratifying, superstitions of the secular, wayward, left.  Please do not think that this was simply a case of prelapsarian innocence.  It was not.  It was ignorance and it was evil, although I would have denied it at the time. 

            Only slowly did I come to understand that my fellow dissidents and I had taken for ourselves the easiest and least productive of all tasks, that of denigrator.  And only slowly did I come to understand that to destroy is easy, that to build is hard, and that to preserve is hardest of all. 

            But it was worse even than that, because my fellow dissidents and I were blind to the most obvious truths, especially to what Russell Kirk and others have called the tragic vision of life -- the profound realization that evil is not something “out there,” it is something “in here.”  The tragic vision of life arises from the fact that we are flawed -- deeply, desperately, tragically flawed -- and we cannot be trusted.  We are broken at the heart; our defect is life wide and soul deep.  Though we are capable of reason, because of our selfish passions and our moral weaknesses we are rarely reasonable.  We ourselves are what is chiefly wrong with the world.  We are this planet’s most malignant and enduring ailment.  We have our dignity, to be sure, but we have our horror as well.  I can tell you this:  I did not wake up until I met the enemy face to face.  I met him in the mirror.  We all do. 

            I had to learn to stare squarely into that face in the mirror, into the face of hard, fallen reality, and not to flinch.  I did not, in fact I could not, comprehend the tragic vision of life until I learned that the problem of the human heart is at the heart of the human problem.  Once I examined with care and honesty the habits of my own heart and those of my dissident friends, I learned that C. S. Lewis was right:  to be one of the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve is both glory enough to raise the head of the lowest beggar and shame enough to lower the head of the highest king.  I am a human being.  That is my wealth; that is my poverty. 

            Before that undeception, I was like all other cultural and political liberals.  I had fallen prey to what Jeane Kirkpatrick identified as the error of misplaced malleability.  I thought that human institutions could be reshaped at will to fit the plans already existing inside my head.  It cannot be done.  Human institutions arise from human action; human action arises from human nature; and human nature is notoriously intractable.  Apart from the grace of God, human nature cannot be fixed, no matter how badly it needs fixing.  I finally learned that my deepest need was not more freedom.  I needed the grace and guidance of God.  Until I understood that, I remained shamelessly superficial.

            I had to put my insipid and airy romanticism where it belonged, on the burgeoning junk pile of the fatally flawed and conclusively overthrown fantasies to which the human mind seems continually to give rise.  Not romanticism but religion, not Byron but the Bible, not poetry but Paul, not Voltaire but virtue, not trends but tradition, not idealism but ideas, not genius but grace, not freedom but faith could cure me.  I had to exchange Wordsworth for the Word and revolution for repentance.  Thus, while some of the things I valued were useful and good, they were not properly fundamental.  I had to put first things first.

            The tragic vision of life humbled me.  From it I learned that it was not my prerogative to invent wisdom and virtue.  That had already been done.  My responsibility was to listen to the One who invented them and to those whom He taught.  Wisdom and virtue, I had to learn, were not born with my generation, or with Rousseau's, or Matthew Arnold's, or even Eugene McCarthy's.  I had to learn in the last half of the twentieth century what was already old news even in the days of Jeremiah, the ancient prophet, who wrote,             

                        Stand at the crossroads, and look,

                        and ask for the ancient paths,

                        where the good way lies;

                        and walk in it, and find rest for your souls (Jer. 6: 16).

Wisdom is found by walking the "ancient paths."  Those "ancient paths" led through the wilderness, through the sea, even through the valley of the shadow of death, and not through Berkeley, not Columbia, not the Village, not Watts, not Haight-Ashbury, not Altamont, and not Woodstock. 

            The tragic vision of life also taught me that order is the most fundamental of all political and social needs.  Because it is, I learned that the police are not pigs.  They never were, and are not now, an occupying army intent upon destroying my freedom.  Quite the opposite; imperfect as they sometimes are, the police are the guardians of freedom and the paid protectors of life and property.  In the line of duty, some of them even died for me, and for you.  The tragic vision of life taught me that you cannot reject authority -- whether civil, familial, cultural or divine -- and yet live in an orderly world.  When you “off the pigs,” (of whatever sort) you give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom.  To live outside the rules, to live outside authority, to live without the wisdom of the ages and of God, is to court slavery and death.  Enforceable law and law enforcement are requirements of the first rank.  Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable law, freedom is impossible.  As Dean Clarence Manion observed in the very last line he wrote before his death in 1979, “a society that is not held together by its teaching and observance of the laws of Almighty God is unfit for human habitation and doomed to destroy itself.”  

            When is freedom not enough?  Every time truth and righteousness are at stake.  In a fallen world, that is almost always.  Freedom must be exercised according to the dictates of truth and virtue, never the other way round.  Freedom must be limited by the demands of justice, love and revelation.  The most important consideration regarding any action is not “Is it free?” but “Is it good?”  When I learned that, I stopped being a libertarian.  Freedom, furthermore, is an incomplete concept.  Whenever someone insists upon freedom, you must ask "Freedom to do what?"  You must ask that question because freedom, like tyranny, has its unintended and unforeseen consequences, some of which are colossally vile.  In passing, I name but one -- abortion. 

            From the tragic vision of life I learned that you have to do what is right whether it suits you or not.  In the sixties, we hardly did anything that did not suit us.  I also learned that the enemy is not the CIA, not the FBI, and not the GOP; it's the NEA, NOW, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, DNC, WCC and NPR, indeed the entire grab bag of alphabetized, leftist, subverters of culture, of tradition, and of revelation.  I learned that those who deprive themselves of the wisdom of western tradition are no more free than a baby left alone by its parents to do as it pleases.  I learned that politics is not about equality, but justice; that personal action is not about freedom, but righteousness; and that sex is not about pleasure, but love and privilege and posterity. 

            Those things and more I learned from the tragic vision of life.  I commend them to you.  They taught me that in many ways the sixties were twisted and misshapen.

            The sixties are over, and it's a good thing.  The sixties were a bad idea, if for no other reason than because the sixties had no ideas, only selfish desires hiding behind the shallow slogans and freelance nihilism emblazoned on psychedelic bumper stickers, slogans like “I dissent, therefore I am.”  The only things about which we were intellectually modest in the sixties were the claims of objective truth.  We seemed unable to wrap our minds around even the most obvious ideas.  We seemed unable to realize, for example, that you cannot raise your consciousness until you have one.  The sixties were perhaps the most unconscious decade in centuries.  It was a time of suffocating intellectual mediocrity, from which our nation has not yet recovered. 

II.  Sixties Redivivus  

            I can imagine a student reading these remarks and wondering, "This all might be well and good, but what does it have to do with me?  I wasn't even alive in the sixties."

            My answer is simply this:  While the sixties are over, they are not dead, not by a long shot.  They live, indeed they thrive, not only in the White House juvenocracy (which is tragic enough), but in the faculty lounges and endowed chairs of nearly every college and university in the United States.  Tenured faculty members everywhere have traded their tie-dyed T-shirts and their bell bottom jeans for a cap and gown, if not a cap and bells.  Those faculty members are the entrenched purveyors of an unexamined and indefensible hand-me-down Marxism, and of what Allan Bloom called nihilism with a happy ending.  They have become paid agents of the very colleges and universities they once tried to burn to the ground, and not because they gave up on the dreams of the sixties.  What they failed to do as protesters they have succeeded in doing as professors.  Quite possibly they have done it to you, because the entire teaching profession, from the pre-kindergarten level to the post-graduate, has become a political captive of the cultural left.  Like roving street gangs prowling the halls of academe, power hungry bands of leftist professors everywhere have instigated countless institutional turf wars, most of which they won.  They succeeded in burying the accumulated wisdom of the ages in the name of learning; in overthrowing academic freedom in the name of tolerance; in stifling debate in the name of openness; in exalting egalitarianism above all other ideas in the name of equality; and in segregating and tribalizing the university, the nation, and the culture by gender, by age, by religion, by race, and by sexual preference, all in the name of unity.  The schools and colleges that hire and then tenure them commit academic treason.  I simply remind you that any intellectual community that is unwilling or unable to identify its enemies cannot defend itself.  David Horowitz was exactly right:  Those who cherish free institutions, and the culture of wisdom and virtue that sustains them, must stand up boldly against the barbarians already inside the gates.

            Because the sixties live, this decade has become irrational, ignorant, and morally illiterate.  If the sixties were majestically self-indulgent, this decade is perhaps the most self-congratulatory decade our nation has ever seen, and not because we have succeeded where all other generations have failed, but in spite of the fact that we have failed where all other American generations have succeeded -- in learning to learn, in learning to work, in learning to listen, and in learning to worship.  This is a decade determined to ignore, if not belittle and malign, beauty, truth and goodness, three things most moderns foolishly believe are in the eye of the beholder.  Our decade is the sworn enemy of revelation and of righteousness.  If the threefold mantra of the sixties was "tune in, turn on and drop out," that of today is comprised of that earlier mantra’s four silly children, four sentences that no thinking man ever permits himself or herself to utter in the face of a moral challenge, sentences like: "Everything is relative," “There is no right or wrong," "There are no absolutes," and “Who's to say?" 

            If you cannot now figure out why belief in those four sentences is the death of learning and of virtue, then perhaps for that very reason you can understand why I spend nearly all my time and energy as a professor and as a writer defending the ancient liturgy of the enlightened mind -- that right and wrong are matters of fact, not matters of feeling; that without God there is no good; that justice is not equality; that new is not necessarily better; and that relativism, secularism, and pragmatism are not the friends of truth and goodness.  The denizens of modernity probably do not realize and probably do not care that they are the befuddled and bedeviled lackeys of designer truth, of made-to-order reality, and of ad hoc morals making.  If you follow them, you walk into the night without a light and into the woods without a compass.  I want to tell you as plainly as I can that their vision of academic tolerance lacks intellectual virtue.   It dilutes the high cultural inheritance of the past with the petty and insupportable leftisms of the present.

            A moment ago, I imagined a student that might be wondering about the relevance of my semi-autobiographical musings.  I also can imagine someone thinking that all I’ve done since the sixties is simply to change sides in the culture war that rages around us.  To think so, however, is to assume that flower power and Christianity are morally equivalent and that hippies rank equally with saints, two false assumptions that, if you make them, show just how much a child of the sixties you really are.  

            I have often wondered why today feels like a sixties renaissance.  I discovered the answer to that question in a college cafeteria and in conversations with some of my students’ parents. 

            First, the parents:  I have often noticed my students saying and thinking the same sorts of things their parents say and think when I speak with them.  Such things happen because the acorn seldom falls far from the oak tree.  That fact is more than a little significant because the parents of today’s college students were probably the young men and women of the sixties.  Many of the responses my students learned to give to life are responses they learned from their parents.  More often than not, those responses are the stock responses of the sixties.  In one way, of course, that is good; I want my students to learn all the truth they can from their parents.  But insofar as my students’ responses mimic the responses of the sixties, they too must learn the lessons I had to learn.  They must come to understand, with all the clarity and courage they can muster, the truth of the tragic vision of life:  We are, every one of us, morally defective, ethically twisted, and spiritually broken.  If my students fail to come to that realization and to act upon it, both they and their world shall suffer. 

            Second, the cafeteria:  I often notice my students echoing some of the things they hear their teachers say.  When talking with students in the cafeteria, for example, I sometimes have the eerie feeling that I’m not in the cafeteria at all; I’m in a faculty meeting.  I say so because I frequently hear the clear and unmistakable intonations of my colleagues’ voices, but coming from other people.  Sometimes I even hear my own voice.  Again, that’s good; I want college students to learn all the truth they can from their professors.  But here’s the rub:  Like me, many of their teachers were children of the sixties; and like me, many of those professors have made only an incomplete break with the mistakes of that era.  From their other professors and from me, my students have gotten many of their ideas.  Like my students themselves, their ideas have parents.  Worldviews and attitudes, just like the people who have them, show marked family resemblances.  For that very reason, I often want to ask my students this question:  From where do you imagine your rampant relativism and your not-very-carefully-hidden contempt for authority arise?  In most cases, when I consider asking such a question, I already know the answer -- from the sixties and from the people (like me) who reached their emotional and intellectual maturity at that time.

III.  Undeception Redivivus? 

            Here’s my point:  If you believe in the sixties, or if you believe in today, you believe a lie.  As I did, you need an undeception.  In order to get it, you need to go back well beyond the sixties, back to a wisdom that is older than time.  You need to go back to God and to the wisdom that spoke this universe into existence.  You need to go back to the God who made you and redeemed you.  Real answers are found nowhere else.

            It should not surprise you when I tell you that, if you do what I suggest, you shall meet energetic and determined opposition, sometimes even from those who call themselves the friends of God and of tradition.  As Socrates observed long centuries ago, most men do not take kindly to the preacher of moral reform, to the pursuer of the good.  There is no telling, he said in the Gorgias, what might happen to such a man.  But do not let that stop you.  Do it anyway.  Do it because you need it; do it because it is right; and do it because it ought to be done.  Your task will be difficult.  It's always easy to be a modernist; it's always easy to go with the spirit of the age.  But in the face of the world's downward slide you must be vigilant, strong, perceptive, and courageous.  The world needs people like that, people unafraid to turn around and walk back into the light.  Our world needs people like that more now than perhaps it ever has because everywhere you look the adversary culture of the sixties has become the dominant culture of today. 

            Our cultural patrimony is being embezzled from under our very noses.  If you think of yourself as a Christian, or as a conservative, or as both, the view from here is haunting:  We don’t own the public square; we don’t own the media; we don’t own the arts; we don’t own the sciences; we don’t own the arena; we don’t own the marketplace; we don’t own the academy; we don’t own anything.  We don't even own the Church.  It’s all owned by the sixties.

            Therefore, if, as I did, you find yourself an unwilling or unwitting child of the sixties, I invite you, I exhort you, to turn with an open mind and an open heart to the prophets and apostles in Scripture and to the great poets and sages outside Scripture.  They are your only liberation from modernist thralldom and from slavery to your own fallen desires.  (Did you know that you can be a slave to your own will?)  Put yourself on a quest for eternal truth, and never give up until you find Him.  

            While you are on this quest, you must always remember that most of the powers that be are of no help to you.  Those who loved the sixties own today.  The left still hates America, and it still hates what made America possible:  faith in God, the sacredness and inviolability of the family and of life, individual responsibility, local and limited government, and traditional morality.  The leftists of today are the enemies of heartland values.  They want you to keep quiet.  They want you to sit meekly in the corner of the room, hands folded and mouth shut.  They want you to be nice.  They want the friends of beauty, truth, and goodness to speak only when spoken to and, when they do speak, to speak only those things that offend no one.  That they have offended you seems not to matter.  They want you to stick to the script.  They want you to keep your views to yourself and to act as if your views were not true, indeed as if there were no truth.  That's what political correctness -- Or should I say political cleansing? -- is all about. 

            Consider it for just a moment:  What kind of man or woman would you be if you let yourself be controlled by the empty criticisms of the rootless left, and what kind of world would you be creating for those who came after you if you neglected to restore realism to human thought and turned your back on the only thing that can make you content even in dungeons, even in slums, even in the face of death?

            My desire for you is that you throw off the vestiges of leftist cultural subversion, that you make yourself a devotee and guardian of the wisdom of the ages, that you become the sworn enemy of nonsense in all its forms, and, most importantly, that you become the faithful and ardent friend of God.  Then, and only then, can you be free. 

            What has been given you as a heritage you must now accept as your quest.  If you wish to be wise, you must learn to learn from your ancestors.  You must learn to make peace with the wisdom of the ages and with those who gave it, regardless of their sex, their race, or their ethnic background. You must do so because wisdom and truth are not gender based, race based, or nation based. They are thought based, and thinking is very hard work.  Knowledge is not parochial.  It is not the private property of any race, any gender, any era, or any ethnic group.  It belongs to those determined to get it, to those who seek it resolutely and who will not be denied, no matter how difficult the circumstances arrayed against them.

            In that light, I invite you today to make one of the most important choices of your entire life:  Which will you have, truth or rest? 

            You cannot have both.  

           

Cornball Brother

            He had me fooled.

         I was pretty sure Robert Griffin III was an African American.  Come to find out, he’s not.  Oh, he might look the part, and he might have African-American parents and grandparents.  But none of that counts.  That just makes him ostensibly, not authentically, black.

         What counts, according to ESPN analyst Rob Parker, the self-appointed genuine article of American blackness, is whether or not Griffin is “down with the cause.”  If he’s not, Parker says, then “he’s not one of us.”  To Parker, Griffin can’t be “down with the cause” because he went to Baylor, a Baptist university; he has a white fiancée; and he might have voted Republican.  To Parker, that makes Griffin “a cornball brother.”  You know, “kind of black,” in Parkerspeak.

         If Parker is right, then real blackness comes from immersing oneself in leftist group think, from marrying only racially suitable women, and from going to racially suitable colleges, which sounds very familiar.  It used to be that racists were known by the way they insisted on black men marrying only suitable black women.  It used to be that black men, if they went to college at all, had to go to approved colleges.  Folks who talked like that worked for the KKK.  Now they work for ESPN.  How the voice of the KKK became the measure of authentic blackness I do not know.

         Racists like Parker don’t get it.  They don’t recognize or value the heroic example of folks like Griffin, who acquire an impressive skill set, who get a good education, who accomplish great things, who serve God faithfully, and who fall in love with, and win the heart of, the woman of their dreams.  That’s an example, that’s a cause, any young American, of whatever ethnic or racial background, will find inspiring and instructive.

         Apparently none of that registers with Parker, who thinks that real blackness is a political orientation.

         If it is, then our first black president wasn’t Barack Obama.  It was Bill Clinton.    

The Right to Work

         The right to organize a union is a federally protected activity.  It cannot be taken away.  Right to work laws do not take it away.  Right to work laws are the marketplace application of another federally protected activity, one explicitly articulated in the Constitution, namely the right to free association.

         In this context, the right to free association means that you are free to join, or not to join, any legally constituted and legally operating organization you wish.  If you want to join a union, you may.  If you want to decline union membership, you may.

         Unions are not happy with right to work laws because when workers are free to decline membership, they do.  They do it in enormous numbers and in enormous percentages.  That’s another way of saying that unions don’t like workplace freedom.  If to thrive means to have more money for use in securing political clout and legislative advantage, then unions thrive best in an atmosphere of coercion.  They get lots more money to buy politicians who will pass pro-union legislation if all workers are forced to join the union and pay their union dues.  Make no mistake about it:  It’s about money.  It’s about clout.  It’s about power.

         Union advocates always say that right to work laws aren’t really about freedom, they’re about undermining unions.  But by so arguing, those union advocates unwittingly confess that unions are not about freedom and that freedom itself undermines unions.  They unwittingly confess that unions are about coercion.  When workers get what they want, freedom expands.  When unions get what they want, freedom shrinks.  When workers get what they want, unions shrink.  So, according to the unions’ own argument, the real question is this:  Which do you want, freedom or unions?  Pick one.

         Let me make it clear:  Right to work laws don’t undermine unions.  Free workers undermine unions.  Unions fear free workers.  To the unions, the fewer free workers the better.    

         Unions want to turn the union hall into the hiring office.  They want to wrest from the company the company’s right to hire the best workers and to fire the worst.  They want to wrest from the worker the freedom to rise or fall as an individual, to succeed on the strength of one’s own merit and skill, to make or to decline one’s own deal or one’s own contract rather than to be a faceless, nameless, dues paying non-entity inside a tax-exempt, leftist, political front, whose money goes to support political parties, political candidates, and public policies the worker might actually despise.

         The union’s worst nightmare is the competent, self-reliant, I-can-do-it-myself worker able to make his or her own way through the world on the basis of acquired skills and demonstrated acumen, someone who doesn’t need to hide in the collective or to band together with the herd just to get or keep a job, someone who knows that if a company is stupid enough not to hire the best workers at an honest wage that that company gives its opponents a huge advantage in the marketplace because the best workers will then go elsewhere.  Smart companies know that the competitive edge belongs to companies with the best workers, not those with the most coercive unions.

         When right to work states border closed-shop states, existing businesses migrate from the latter to the former.  When start up businesses select a location, they make the same choice.  For example, just a few months ago Indiana, which borders Michigan on the south, became a right to work state.  Since then, almost 1/8 of the nation’s job growth went to Indiana, even though it has only 1/50 of the nation’s population.  During that same period, Michigan, then a closed shop state, lost jobs, just as it has done for years.  Right to work means more jobs.  More jobs mean more workers.  More workers mean more taxpayers.  More taxpayers mean more revenue for the state.  In other words, freedom pays.

         Unions don’t get it.  They think that they can bully their way to prosperity.  They bully their way to unemployment.  They drive away jobs.   By their bullying and their greed, they create a hostile environment for investment and job creation.  Despite their lumpish and loutish bluster, unions cannot suspend the laws of economics at will.  No one can. 

         Unions think (or at least argue) that the real issue is checking corporate greed.  They never think that there needs to be a check on union greed as well.

         Freedom is that check.       

What's Wrong with Pornography

         What’s wrong with pornography?  Let me count the ways:

         (1) Pornography is sin.  It injures your soul and it injures your relationship with God.  Nothing worse can happen to you.  But that doesn’t mean you will feel it.  You might not feel it because your conscience can become so seared and insensitive that even greater and greater evils leave no impression upon it.  If your conscience is not pained by pornography, do not conclude that you have a clear conscience.  You flatter yourself.  Your conscience is not clear but scarred and benumbed.

         (2) Pornography is addictive.  Like drugs to the body, pornography leads to enslavement of the psyche.  You require a fix, and your fix needs to be more and more potent in order to deliver the desired effect.  In order to get it, you must slide deeper and deeper into the abyss.   The deeper you go, the more disfigured you inwardly become.  Pornography addiction is to your soul what methamphetamine addiction is to your body:  It is the hideous “after” to a more beautiful “before.”   Or, to change the comparison, perhaps you have seen the grotesque disfigurement some persons endure when, by accident or by criminal intention, acid is thrown in their faces.  For your soul, pornography is the acid.  Part of the ugliness of the pornography-soaked soul is its unnatural enslavement.  Contrary to its making, the addicted soul is not free; it is in chains.  You must never think you are free just because you do what you want whenever you want it.  After all, you can be a slave to your own desires, in which case they have you instead of you having them.

         (3) Pornography objectifies others.  Rather than remain themselves, rather than remain creatures for whom real love might lead us to sacrifice ourselves if the need arises, they become sub-persons whom we sacrifice to our own selfish and perverted ends.  We reduce the very creatures whom God has made His picture and His partner, and who therefore are the proper objects of His love and ours, to a mere means to our personal pleasure.  In our minds, they shrink from the lofty and privileged status of God’s image to a sub-human apparatus for our desires and corruptions, to which they are sacrificed.  They shrink from end to means, from human creature to equipment.

         (4) Pornography injures you and your spouse.  It sets up false expectations both of body and of action as if, in order to be acceptable, one had to look and act in a particular way or else to fail.  Rather than learning to love and value your spouse and yourself as you really are, false and unreasonable expectations intrude and, with them, come dissatisfaction, disappointment, self-recrimination and loathing, indeed sexual dislocation of every sort.  What was meant to be the great privilege of sexual intimacy between spouses is now the mere occasion of false expectations, frustration, and anger.  Rather than learning to love what and whom you have, you come to despise them and to desire what you have not.  You miss the great blessing Chesterton articulated:  Having sex with only one woman is an exceedingly small price to pay for being able to have sex at all.

         I easily could go on to name other tragic consequences of pornography.  The list is long with calamity:  disease, impoverishment, emotional destruction, broken families, and broken lives.

         Don’t be a fool.  Don’t go there. 

Higher Education: What it is; What it is not; What it's For

         Education is not job training; it is not even schooling.  Education is knowing what things are for, not simply how they work.  The truly educated person understands the proper uses to which such things as bodies, brains, governments, art, and sport are put, not merely how to eat, how to manipulate difficult mathematical formulae, how to win an election, how to paint a still life, or how to hit a curveball.

         The difference between these two conditions of mind is the difference between wisdom and information, between knowledge and data, between knowing and knowing about.  Those who acquire the former are genuinely educated; those who gain only the latter are mere technological functionaries, replaceable by the next generation of machines.

         But no machine can replace Socrates, or anyone like him.  Socrates and his ilk can do what no machine ever shall -- love, worship, exult, grieve, repent -- in short, understand.  Authentic understanding and the suitable responses it engenders within us are not the product of mere job training or of technical expertise.  Here’s what I mean:

         When asked who was the wisest of men, the Delphic oracle replied that it was Socrates himself.  Socrates was shocked to hear it.  "Who, me?" he wondered.  "I don't know anything."  But as he contemplated the oracle's answer, Socrates realized the oracle was right.  Socrates indeed was wiser than other men.  At least he knew he was ignorant; the others were ignorant and didn't know it.  As long as they were ignorant of their ignorance, they could never change it.

         Such true but humbling lessons about ourselves we do not learn from those who could or would train us only to program (or even to design) a VCR.  That is because a teacher can take no student any further than the teacher has gone, and the technicians and self-esteem peddlers of our day cannot and do not teach students the truth about themselves or about the human situation.  Rather, they teach those students that to feel good is at least as important as to do good, and that to get a job and make money is the central purpose of an education and the chief means to happiness.

         Because such views are truncated and foolish, and because foolishness is purchased at the highest possible price, Socrates insisted that a teacher's proper task is not to raise the student's self-esteem.  The teacher's first task is to reveal to the student the student's own ignorance, in the hope that such self-knowledge might spur that student to action, that is, to mental and spiritual life.

         Socrates was no lackey of the self-esteem mongers of his day.  He understood that real self-knowledge was often a painful and deflating thing, not something that made you feel especially good about yourself.  When people discover the truth about themselves, they frequently discover something they fervently hope others will never find out.  Socrates knew that real self-knowledge feels a great deal like mental root canal.  But that painful fact did not persuade him that his students must be protected from such discovery.  He knew that the truth often hurts because the truth about human beings is often unflattering.  Unflattering or not, Socrates knew that it was an absolutely necessary component of education.  Without it no one can truly be called learned.

         Socrates understood that we enter this world in complete, total, and seamless ignorance, and that precious few of us ever penetrate that darkness with even the faintest flicker of wisdom or insight.  He understood that, given our naturally benighted condition, undue self-esteem is the fountain of intellectual apathy and the death of learning.  Feel-goodism is to the mental life of the uneducated what abortion is to the unborn.    

         In Christian terms, we are a fallen and sinful race.  We ourselves are the reason the world has gone haywire.  We are both the crown of creation and the scum of the earth.  As the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, we human beings are the best things God ever made.  But as the sinners we have become, we are the woeful products of the evil thoughts and actions to which we have addicted ourselves.  Those twin facts, our high birth and our low descent, said C.S. Lewis, are reason enough to raise the head of the lowest beggar and to lower the head of the highest king. 

         But such things no mere technician could ever teach, and about ourselves the charlatans of self-esteem deceive us.  Repentance and hard work are what we require, not premature or undeserved congratulations, not heavy doses of vapid feel-goodism.  Martin Luther's torments of conscience, his soul-wrenching bouts with anfechtung, not Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking, are more likely to cure what ails us.  That’s another of saying that the job well done precedes the feelings of satisfaction; it does not follow them.  As in so many other things, the modern technicians of schooling have set the cart before the horse.  They bow in abject servitude to the tyrannous and impotent dictates of the so-called affective domain when they ought to banish it forever from the classroom.

         If you desire simply to train yourself, then learn to read, to write, and to compute; learn history and science as well.  But do not confuse the acquisition of these skills and of this information for education; they are not.  These things are the necessary means of acquiring an education; they are not education itself.

         But if you desire to become educated rather than remain merely trained, then you must remember that the educated person can give careful and insightful answers to the fundamental, or diagnostic, questions of life, questions like:

         "What is a good life, and what good is life?"

         "What is a good death, and what good is death?"

         "What is a good love, and what good is love?"

         "What is a human being?"

         But not only do most college students not know how to answer these questions, they have never even learned to raise them.  Because they and most of their teachers live without the benefits that come only from a classical liberal arts education pursued under the lordship of Christ, those students have never learned what Aristotle knew:  "He who would succeed must ask the right preliminary questions."

         Such preliminary questions do not include the questions professors most often hear from students, questions that seem naturally to arise from the indoctrination those students receive from the technicians and job trainers of our day -- questions like

"Will this be on the test?" 

"Will this help me get a job?"

"Will this make me feel good?"

Two Roads Diverged in a Mental Wood, and That Has Made All The Difference

            The fundamental difference between the Christian worldview and all secular worldviews is reducible to this:  God is there and He is not silent.  Because He exists, and because He has spoken meaningfully and understandably to the mind and senses He both designed and then validated by his revelation to them, we now have a well-grounded system in which facts and knowledge are metaphysically warranted, and in which learning can begin.  We can arrive not only at utilitarian technique and personal or cultural preferences, but at the knowledge and wisdom that relates all things to their rightful and transcendent point of reference.  By knowing which direction is north, you know all other directions.

            In this case, north is personal, indeed Tri-Personal, and not the ultimately impersonal, uncaring, and doomed universe of mindless matter to which students taught in a secularist context must adjust.  The difference between these two worldviews could hardly be greater.  One world is the cosmic home made for us by our gracious and self-revealing Father, a world in which history has meaning, purpose, and direction, a world in which Providence oversees all, and leads the universe and its inhabitants to their proper destiny.  The other is a hostile world unaware of, and therefore indifferent to, both its and our very existence -- an existence forfeit to ultimate destruction, a destruction to which nihilism is the only realistic and appropriate response.  One worldview teaches students that they are everlasting souls of inestimable worth; the other that they are soulless lumps of momentarily animate matter, part and parcel of a dying and meaningless world, and that whatever they might do or think, they are destined to share its inevitable doom.  Those are the options.  If the Christian worldview is true, then secular learning is not education but an exercise in nihilistic disorientation.  If, as Christians say, Christ is the Lord of all things, then nothing is properly secular.  Anything pursued in a secular fashion is, therefore, at least partly, if not wholly, mispursued.  Whether we speak of the academy, the marketplace, the public square, the laboratory, or the arena, all human endeavors, to be rightly understood and rightly pursued, must be related back to Him, back the God who, in Christ, walked our roads, breathed our air, and spoke our language, the God in whose light we now see all things.  If the Christian worldview is true, then secular education is a terrible disservice to those in whom we inculcate its impotent methods of intellection and assessment, methods that, from the beginning, banish the Transcendent as either unimportant or unnecessary.  Conversely, if Christ is not the rightful Lord of literally all things, then Christian education is a deep and wide delusion on the grandest scale because, if matter is all there is, then matter is all that matters.  In the canyon between these two possibilities, neutrality is not possible, despite modernist and postmodernist pretenses to the contrary.  One simply cannot escape the fundamental importance of the question Christ asked his disciples:  “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8: 29).  The secularist worldview answers, in effect, “Not much,” or “No one worth considering.”  To the Protestant, the answer is “You are the One by Whom, and for Whom all things were made.  You are the glue that holds the universe together” (Col. 1: 16, 17).  Upon their differing answers to that question hinges everything.

Compared to the Protestant view of reality, the secularist vision begins from a very different point, and it yields massively different conclusions.  That assertion, of course, is not new with me.  In the words of renowned atheist Bertrand Russell:

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built . . . Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow doom falls pitiless and dark.  Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little days . . . proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”[1]

            Russell is right:  The secularist worldview is the death not only of optimism, but also of any final distinction between good and evil.  To such a world as they presuppose, only despair can be an appropriate response.  Only death awaits us, the cosmic rendering of what Milton called “ever-during dark” (Paradise Lost 3: 45).  We will, according to Russell, finally be trampled under the heel of the same mindless power from which the world itself arose.  You end where you began.

Whether their secularist teachers intend it or not, the more astute students deduce from all this that life is a cosmic joke without a punch line and that they are part and parcel of a universe on its way to ruin.   They recognize the profound difference between living and learning under the love of a God who would, and did, die for us, on the one hand, and full-orbed, cosmic nihilism, on the other.  They discover that the differences between the Protestant and secularist worldviews are neither incidental nor neutral; they are antithetical.  They notice that ideas have consequences.  They learn that they must adjust to ultimate reality because ultimate reality will not adjust to them.  They learn that Allan Bloom was right about their thoughtless teachers:  Those teachers are the silly purveyors of what he identified as nihilism with a happy ending.  They paint the world with the blackest set of presuppositions and consequences, yet they think that a smiley face sticker on a spelling test can still be appropriate.  By contrast, the Protestant worldview yields an educational philosophy based upon the revelation of God in which – and only in which, things as diverse as humanity and chemistry find their proper place, neither too high nor too low.

            By emphasizing the profound differences between these worldviews, I am not ignoring or belittling what theologians call “common grace,” the enabling grace given to all God’s creatures, the grace by which we all benefit in countless ways, and which links us together in various levels of blessedness.  While real and available to all, common grace neither overlooks nor plays down the ultimate differences between competing worldviews.  Rather, common grace helps us to understand that things that are similar in some ways are not, therefore, ultimately alike.  Simply because the Christian and non-Christian worldviews intersect at various points, or simply because they seem similar in some ways, does not mean that that which divides them is insignificant.  The doctrine of common grace says that similarities between the Christian worldview and others are real but not fundamental.  We must remember that those superficial likenesses appear before the backdrop of the ultimate differences delineated above.  Those who either do not understand or do not believe in common grace are likely to elevate superficial likenesses to ultimate likenesses, with the result that absolute differences are shrunken, even willfully dismissed.

In light of those inescapable ultimate differences, things like the content of the periodic table or the notion that four plus four equals eight, do not have, and cannot have, the same significance for secular thought as for Christian thought, even though their use might be roughly parallel.  Just as epistemological warrant arises only from the God who makes known and who transcendently validates the use of our mind and senses, so also does authentic understanding (or wisdom), which comes from knowing the source, the purpose, the nature, and the end of all things.  That higher, more synthetic, knowledge is not the same as merely efficient manipulation toward a desired end, or as mastery of technique.  Because thinking persons seek to understand the real nature of all things and the relationship that ought to exist between those things, they cannot divorce the reality of, say, atomic weight from the source and proper use of atoms and from our knowledge of it.  The fact that mathematical functions are available to all does not mean that the significance and uses to which those functions are properly put are also equally available, regardless of the context in which we wish to use them or from which they derive.  

You must make a choice:

Either justice and grace are at the root of the world, or else indifference on the grandest possible scale.  We are faced with two very different worldviews as the basis for education and, inescapably, we offer them to our students.  One worldview has the best of all possible outcomes, the other the worst.  An omnipotent and omniscient God is the only sufficient basis for optimism, even in the worst of times; but mindless, indifferent matter at the core of all reality is the death of optimism even in the best of times.  If part of education is to help students know their world and learn how to adjust their responses to it accordingly, then ultimate despair is the only reasonable response to the secular worldview taught in public schools, where the Gospel of John is banished but Heather Has Two Mommies is lauded.  To think things in line with the secularist worldview and yet to inculcate the baseless optimism so characteristic of contemporary education is simply to make Pollyanna the patron saint of secular indoctrination and to sacrifice the minds of our children on her altar, the Moloch of postmodern learning.  Secular educators must either adjust their teaching to their worldview, or else get a different worldview.  Failure to do so is a crime of the intellect and an injury to the next generation.

The road forks; you must go right or left.

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[1]Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1925), pp 47-48, 56-57