The Harvard Delusion

           Beware the political and philosophical buffoons who masquerade as statesmen, and who fool the ignorant masses into believing them with trite phrases no more profound than “hope” and “change.”  Beware of those whom Roy Campbell, in his poetic satire “The Botanocracy” described as

         “Statesmen-philosophers with earnest souls,

            Whose lofty theories embrace the Poles

            Yet only prove their minds are full of Holes.”

         Real statesmen are not philosophers or metaphysicians.  Rather, they are persons of wisdom, educated at the feet of our ancestors.   As Charles Kingsley explained in his essay “Ancient Civilizations,” the wise do not feed on the shame of our forebears, but on their honor and glory, on great times, noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk, which mental feast Kingsley also points out, is the political implementation of St. Paul’s wise injunction for us to think about whatever things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report (Phil. 4:8).

         Those are not the channels in which most modern political minds now move.  If Alinsky, Marx, Keynes, or the latest New York Times poll are your mentors, you are a fool.  So are those who vote for you.  When you, your voters, and your schemes are finally shipwrecked on the rocks of reality, undeception follows, at least for a moment, until human nature and the noetic effects of sin again re-assert themselves and we unlearn the lessons of history and replace them with fantasies spun out nothing more substantial than the arrogance of the so-called experts and the attendant practical hubris and self-deception that they alone can do what all others failed to do:  namely, to escape the rule of reality.  For them, somehow (we know not how) bad ideas will not yield bad consequences.

         I call it the Harvard delusion. 

        

Where Have all the Epics Gone, Long Time Passing?

       I often ask my students why the 20th century, and now the 21^st, produced no great epic poems.  I have yet to receive an answer, any answer.  After 30 years of such questioning, I suspect I never will.

       So here, in pedagogical desperation, I do what I seldom do:  I give them the answer they never gave me.  It is not my own; it comes from Russell Kirk, as does so much that explains what’s wrong with the world.

       Great literature, Kirk insists in his “English Letters in an Age of Boredom,” habitually hovers around four enduring themes:  religion, heroism, love, and human variety.

       But, he says, (1) a society, like ours, which has lost its religious convictions and its piety, denies itself the first theme.  (2) A society that denigrates true greatness denies itself the second.  Think about them what you wish, girl-smitten vampires are not heroes.  (3) A society that takes love for nothing more than carnal gratification denies itself the third.  (4) A society that conceives of humans as little more than accidental, soulless, interchangeable, cogs in a mechanistic nexus denies itself the fourth.  “The springs of the imagination thus are dried up,” Kirk pronounces truly, tragically, and finally.  In that springless desert, not even satire can flourish or long exist, for with the loss of the great themes and imagination comes the loss even of mockery.

       There, in one paragraph, is why great literature died in our hands.  We stopped believing the right things.  We stopped asking the right questions.  In our hands, the perennial issues and the perennial questions to which they gave rise all died.  We have the opposite of a Midas touch.  What we handle turns not to gold, or even to garbage, but to ghosts.

       You can expect nothing else from the culture of death.

       No cure for it can be found, save the Word of Life, which we meticulously have banned from the public square, the academy, the laboratory, and the arena.

       Wyndham Lewis, it turns out, despite his pessimism and complaints, was too optimistic.  He thought human reason might save us.  He never asked what, or Who, might save reason.

       Lewis forgot that while we human creatures are capable of reason, because of our selfish desires and unruly appetites, we are rarely ever reasonable.  Thinking is hard work; thinking rationally harder still.  We are not at all well suited, by birth or by habit, either to hard work or to thinking, much less to both.

       Kirk could have gone on, could have continued his litany of epic killers.  Had he done so, he might have included impatience, the sort bred from years spent planted squarely before a television set, years during which we acquired the habits and rhythms of sitcoms and soap operas – thereby inexorably acquiring a taste only for problems that can be raised and solved in 30 minutes minus commercials, problems like a torn prom dress or backing your dad’s car into a tree.  For us, if it can’t be handled in 22 minutes, it’s too long and too difficult.  Reduced to those shrunken dimensions, Milton’s epic panoply (or Dante’s) becomes a mere screenplay, a script, replete with artificial laugh lines, clichés, and crudities, wherein inane anatomical utterances replace eloquence and wherein scatological shock replaces beauty, truth, and goodness, things far more difficult to conceive, write, produce, and to communicate than garish, slapstick stunts and juvenile vulgarity.  For shrunken sensibilities like ours, the word “epic” means two hours of TV watching for three nights in row.  On any or all of those three nights, thinking is optional, hardly required.

       That shrunken sensibility stands behind what I hear too often from my students.  For example, while discussing Beowulf in an English literature survey course, and the fact that while sometimes you slay the monster, in the end the monster slays you, I asked Jen, a most delightful sorority girl, what monsters she faced.  She said:  “Every day, when I get up, I don’t know what clothes to wear.”

       Somewhere in the 20^th century, the scope of battle shrunk; the monsters withered; and so, apparently, did we.

Edith Schaeffer, RIP

(from Udo Middelmann)

Edith Rachel Merritt Seville Schaeffer died on March 30, 2013 in her home in Gryon, Switzerland, where she had moved 13 years ago to be surrounded by memories, her music, her son’s paintings and the detailed care organized daily by her daughter Deborah Middelmann. She was born on November 3, 1914 as the third daughter of Dr. George Hugh and Jessie Maude Seville in Wenchau, China, where her parents ran a school for girls and taught the Bible in Mandarin.

Edith Schaeffer marked her life with the expression of rich ideas, often rebellious against the staid and superficial life she saw among Christians. The oldest sister became a communist in New York of the 30ies, the second eloped.  Edith Seville married Francis August Schaeffer in 1935 and in no way was she the typical pastor’s or missionary wife. She turned her active mind to work with her husband, teaching first seminary wives to think and to question, to create and make of life something of integrity, as her husband so wanted her to do.  

To put her husband through 3 years of seminary she tailored men’s suits, made ball room gowns and wedding dresses for private clients. From whole cow skins she made belts sold in New York stores. With very little money she prepared tasteful and varied meals. She painted a fresco on the ceiling of the vestibule in the little church her husband pastored in Grove City, while he attached a steeple to it with the elders’ help. They lectured together and encouraged many to use their minds to understand what they believed and how to respond to the intellectual and cultural ideas around them. Together they travelled and taught in churches and university halls from Finland to Portugal, helping people understand Christianity as the truth of the universe, not a personal faith, and pointing out the cultural and philosophical pitfalls in everyone’s way.

She lived her life as a work of art, an exhibition of true significance and a portrait of a generous, stunning and creative personality. She always sought ways to draw on life’s opportunities to show that human beings are made for the enrichment of everyone’s life, for the encouragement of people. This was a central part of the work she and her husband engaged in from the very start of their life together. She was in all things generous. When books provided royalties she used all of it to give her four children and their families annual reunions for the cousins to know each other.

When she left the work of L’Abri after her husband’s death she started the Francis A Schaeffer Foundation with Udo and Deborah Middelmann to safeguard his papers and the ideas that underline their life, to make them available for a wider audience. She found people interesting anywhere, engaged in conversation and so met the most amazing individuals. She talked, for instance, with the author Andre Aciman, standing in line for tickets to Carnegie Hall in NY and found out that he had had our village doctor, Dr. Gandur, as his pediatrician in Alexandria, Egypt. He was so grateful to be in touch through her with his old doctor.

She enjoyed people in the streets, in airplanes and over the phone, wherever she found them or when they could reach her. She stayed up nights to help someone out of their distress or need. With much imagination she served her meals with stunning decorations made from twigs and moss, field flowers and stones. Duncan from Kenya once remarked: “This is the first place where I see the beauty of the truth of the Bible consistently carried over into all areas of life.”

After the death of her husband in 1984 Edith Schaeffer added a whole new chapter to her life. She continued to write books, lectured widely and returned twice to her place of birth in China. She investigated the making the Baby Grand Piano she had received as a gift at the Steinway factory in New York and presented “Forever Music” in a concert at Alice Tully Hall in New York with the Guarneri Quartet. Through Franz Mohr, the chief piano voicer at Steinway she came to know musicians like Rostropovich, the pianists Horowitz and Rudoph Serkin, the Cellists YoYo Ma and Ya Ya Ling, and also the guitarist Christopher Parkening. She organized concerts and elaborate receptions for musicians and friends in her home in Rochester, MN. When she met B. B. King at the International Jazz Festival in Montreux he gave her his pass to the evening’s concert. Once on vacations on the island of Elba, Sonny Rollins noticed her beauty and rhythm in the audience as she danced during his concert, came off the stage and danced with her.

Today she “slipped into the nearer presence of Jesus”, her Lord, from whom she awaits the promised resurrection to continue her life on earth and to dance once again with a body restored to wholeness.

If you wish to honor Edith Schaeffer’s life you can support her intense commitment to the work of the Francis Schaeffer Foundation, Jermintin 3, CH -1882 Gryon, Switzerland

Douglas Gregory of Cornwall Alliance refutes Obama's claims about climate change

by Douglas Gregory

In his second inaugural address President Obama condemned climate skeptics, saying the devastating effects of increased floods, droughts, forest fires, and powerful storms were beyond denial, and climate change was to blame.

However, forest fires are down 15 percent since the 1950’s, cumulative cyclone energy is down, and droughts and floods are unchanged.

We would prefer a little more of an actual threat before we upend our whole economy.

But perhaps it doesn’t matter. President Obama’s thinking may just reflect that of leaders who have called us to fight global warming regardless whether it’s a real problem.
Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), addressing the Earth Summit in 1992, said, “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.’”

At the same conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick said, “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”

IPCC co-chairman Ottmar Edenhofer said just before the 2010 Climate Summit in Cancun, “… one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth. …”
The list goes on.

What’s so dangerous about this is the admission that climate change is not science informing policy, but policy dictating to science.

The Cornwall Alliance’s scientists, economists, theologians, and other experts promote a scientifically sound, Biblical Earth stewardship. Your prayers and tax-deductible donations help us continue educating the public and decision makers on this and many other issues. Thank you for your support!

Douglas Gregory is Research and Policy Analyst for the Cornwall Alliance.

Communism and Western Intellectuals

When debating communism, I often encounter those who do not know exactly what it is.  My answer is the one known by millions and millions:  arrest, purge, gulag, and death.  That’s communism.

But the knowledge of communism gained by those who live under it (that is, those whom communism has not murdered) is vastly different from the communist fantasies of Western intellectuals.  While millions under communism’s icy hand starve and die, Western intellectuals tout it as a laudable alternative to the system under which they now exist and flourish -- as if Lenin, Stalin, and all who follow in their train did not hate intellectuals; as if nothing horrible ever happened to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- whom Western intellectuals despise as often as do their communist idols.

Intellectuals are not valued by communism even though some intellectuals ridiculously and inexplicably value it.  “Intellectuals,” Lenin said in a letter to Maxim Gorky, are not the nation’s brains, “They’re its shit.”  For that reason, Lenin drew up lists of intellectuals who were suitable only for deportation, internal exile, or death.  To lose them, Lenin deduced, was to lose almost nothing at all.  Despite all their boot-licking toadyism, the intellectuals fared no better under communism than the kulaks and the Cossacks, who perished for no better reason than that they simply fell afoul of the sinister policy called “death by quota.”  Communism dealt death so often that one of Stalin’s most stunning and disgusting achievements might be called “the necropolis,” or city of death, meaning mass graves for 100,000 to 200,000 persons all at once.  As Stalin himself said on so many occasions:  “Death solves all problems.” 

According to Alexander Barmine, a Soviet diplomat from the 1930s, "Stalin enjoys humiliating these intellectuals." Intellectuals are not held in high esteem by communism because communism knows that, by and large, intellectuals are what Lenin called “useful idiots.”  Those “idiots” are “useful” because they seem never to notice that communism everywhere and always must be a conspiracy to violence.  From its historical record, we know that communism is gangsterism imposed by the power of the state.  We know that it requires repression to survive.  Communism is a derelict and destructive delusion.  Not co-existence or tolerance, but victory over this evil must always be our unwavering intention.  Communism is a wicked idea leading to a miserable existence.  It deserves no quarter.  Like trying to make peace with cancer rather than eliminating it, co-existence with communism is worse than surrender; it is death.  You cannot live with communism; you can live only without it. 

Yet, even caught as we are in this on-going life or death struggle with communism, Americans (both the intellectuals and others) remain addicted to half-way measures -- and halfway measures cannot keep communism from re-emerging.  As often as we kill the monster, it must be killed again.  Communism does not stay dead.  Even when no one else is, Western intellectuals themselves keep conjuring it back to life.  Those intellectuals are proof that evil ideas do not die simply because those ideas have been conclusively and repeatedly refuted.  Refutation and truth are not the friends either of communism or of the intellectuals who fawn over it.

Lenin publically declared that communism, to survive, must be a dictatorship.  Dictatorship, he said, was not an organization for order, much less for freedom -- but for war.  Where freedom reigns, communism cannot survive.  Communism is at war.  Communism sees free human beings as the enemy.  Know this:  If you are a free human being, communism wants you dead.   It wants to add your name to the more than 50 million other names it has enrolled on the rosters of extermination.  If you think that halfway measures are the order of the day, you will die.  Indeed, you are half-dead already.

Interestingly and ironically, communists today also employ half-way measures.  They know that their bizarre economic system cannot possibly produce the goods and services necessary for prosperity, so they permit capitalism a foothold, a half-way entrance into their jurisdiction.  Even under those half-way measures, capitalism works better than communism.  Half-way capitalism in communist countries like China provides the prosperity not otherwise available.  That prosperity feeds the expansionistic fervor native to communism. By means of their half-way capitalistic policies, the Chinese communists make enough to fuel their diabolical engines of destruction.

In other words, to free persons, half-way measures are the very definition of danger, whether we ourselves employ them or the communists do.  Because communism’s objectives are limitless, our opposition to it must never be half-way.

When faced by colossal evil, indifference and half-way measures are never a suitable response.  Yet judging from American apathy and compromise, one would think Ronald Reagan never lived.

Communism is theft.  It steals property; it steals livelihoods; it steals lives; it even steals nations.  Communism is synonymous with theft because communism is anti-God.  It is atheism applied to political ethics, the inevitable result of which is nihilism and tyranny.  Communism is the enemy of God, and because it is, the enemy of humanity too.

Anything that will not submit to truth is the enemy of God and of us.  Truth, you will recall, is a He, not an it (John 14: 6).  Communism will not submit, either to Him or to it.  Communism wants truth to submit, so it tries to steal the past too.  Every time a new communist regime comes to power, those new powers require their historian lackeys -- ostensible intellectuals -- to re-write the history books, removing the old heroes and replacing them with a coterie more amenable to the regime.  Communists know that whoever controls the past controls the present; so they set about to control the past, no matter what the truth of the past really says.  We have it on the Highest Authority that the truth sets us free (John 8: 32).  Truth is liberating.  For that reason, communism hates truth and will not tolerate it.  Truth has few more resolute enemies than communism and its sycophantic Western intellectuals, under whose insidious influence every academic discipline is now in hopeless confusion.  Of that confusion and its consequent famine of truth, communism has absolutely no fear.

Here is my point:  With the death of learning and of truth comes the death of all things else, first to those persons and things not useful to the regime.  Therefore, whenever a human institution or movement actively resists the truth, intellectuals -- of all persons -- ought to beware, ought to sound the alarm with clarity, purpose and courage.  They must do so because, where there is a famine of truth, famines of other sorts soon follow:  famines of food, famines of freedom, and famines of life.

Froude's Conservatism

“It was not for me to solve the problems which surrounded religion and morality.  Like my own existence, they had their roots in mystery.  I had been born into the Church of England, and the Church of England was an institution of the realm.  It had grown into its peculiar form as the law and the constitution had grown, under historical conditions and influences.  It did not pretend to perfection.  Like the law, it had its local peculiarities.  But the interpretation which it offered of the mysteries of the universe, if perhaps mistaken in some points, was the growth of generations, the product of the thoughts of men as good and wise as had ever lived.  It was immeasurably more likely to be true than the speculations of a single individual, while, as a guide of life, it would be time to ask for fuller light when one had lived up, as one never could, to the rule it offered . . . The [Roman Catholic] Church must have strangely neglected her educational duties if she has allowed a generation to grow up in England, Scotland, Germany who had broken away from her in indignation.  The snakes which had stung her had been bred in her own bosom and nourished on her own breast.”

W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude, (Oxford:  at the Clarendon Press, 1961) pp. 169, 170

Left, Lefter, and Leftest

BHO has repeatedly forced the federal government further and further into the economy, increased the national debt, and printed money recklessly.  In that light, read the following quotations:

(1) ". . . the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure nobody would want history to repeat itself."

(2) " . . . during the last months, we have been witnessing the washout of the entrepreneurship spirit. That includes the principle of the personal responsibility -- of a businessman, an investor or a share-holder - for his or her own decisions. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results."

(3) "Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt -- are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game."

(4) "It is of vital importance that the countries responsible for the world’s reserve currencies offer more transparency for their credit and monetary policies."

Those quotations did not come from Mitt Romney; they came from Valdimir Putin.

Now ask yourself, who's actually further to the economic left, Obama or Putin, the former Chicago community organizer and current President of the United States, or the former KGBer and current head of Russia?  Who learned from the Soviet debacle and who did not?

Voted for the wrong guy, did you? 

Why Atheists Can Have No Moral Absolutes

"No God, No Good:  Atheism's Futile Quest for Morality, and the Unconscionable Practice of Stolen Concepts"

         One often hears atheists assert that the moral virtues are those virtues without which we humans beings cannot, and do not, flourish because they are rooted in human nature.  One also sometimes hears atheists assert that moral virtues are those virtues that enjoy a consensus that spans culture, country, and century, something like the Tao described at the end of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.  That moral values described or derived in either of these two ways are not truly moral values, much less moral absolutes, is the burden of this brief essay.

         First, atheist values determined either by human flourishing or by human nature are not truly right or wrong, not properly moral absolutes; they are pragmatism or utilitarianism masquerading as good and coöpting the language of virtue and of “oughtness,” to which they have no philosophical or (especially) theological claim.

         As the following analysis will demonstrate, one must not contend that human nature and human flourishing yield moral absolutes, properly so-called, because such a theory fails to account for (1) the origin of human nature, (2) changes in human nature, and (3) the selection of “flourishing” as a category of moral discernment.  I shall leave aside the vexed philosophical question of whether or not human nature itself actually exists as an entity in its own right and has objectively knowable and universal characteristics, or if it is merely a philosopher’s fiction without any extra-mental reality.  I simply note in passing that the atheistic theory of morality here under review assumes an answer to this difficult philosophical question that, if mistaken, devastates the atheist theory of morality by erasing its metaphysical basis.

         (1) If, as atheists insist, human nature arose as the chance result of a mindless evolutionary process, a process behind which exists no divine mind and no divine plan, then moral absolutes disappear.  That is, if human nature is the result of evolutionary accident (time, plus matter, plus chance), and if right and wrong arise solely from human nature, then right and wrong are accidents, not moral absolutes.  Biological chance, evolutionary accident, cannot serve as the philosophically proper foundation for right and wrong; it is their undoing.  If human nature and human mind are the unintentional outcome of the chance collocation of atoms and of the mindless and unpredictable meanderings of natural selection (in other words, if the human mind is a mere epiphenomenon contorting and disporting itself for a short while upon the face of physical matter), then we have no convincing reason -- and no metaphysical justification -- for trusting them as indicators of moral goodness; nor have we any real or enduring right and wrong.      

         (2) Had the evolutionary process been different, or had the primordial soup been mixed from a different recipe, so to speak, or stirred at a different temperature, human nature, if it existed at all, might have been noticeably altered, along with the allegedly moral values atheist theory insists arise from it.  Evolution might well have yielded a quite different array of species than it has, and humans might not be the most intelligent species and they might flourish in ways radically different from those that now obtain.  That is, one can easily imagine a set of markedly different biological conditions, a set of conditions that demonstrated the physiological supremacy of a non-human species, one that flourished after the fashion, say, of an intelligent cockroach.  Cockroach-style flourishing would then become the measure of virtue, and not that means of flourishing that we humans sometimes now employ.  In other words, the moral absolutes yielded by the atheist system of thought (biological might makes moral right) are neither truly moral nor truly absolute.   They are simply that set of actions that the biological winners perceive to tend most effectively toward the pleasure and prosperity of their own species, which is, to put it bluntly, simply species bigotry parading as morality.

         To make the point in a different direction, precisely why the actions that conduce to the flourishing of the most intelligent and biologically innovative survivors of natural selection, whatever those survivors happened to be like, should be called morality is not clear and has not been (indeed cannot be) metaphysically justified or properly established.  In other words, what is here propounded by the atheists is not true morality.  It is an intellectual misfire that bases morality on the philosophically injudicious assumption that somehow biological might makes moral right, or that merely by succeeding biologically a species gets to use itself as the measure of good and evil.  This is not a system of moral absolutes; it is a system of biological relativism.  It is selfishness masquerading as the basis for right and wrong.  

         That those actions which conduce to the flourishing of the most biologically innovative survivors of natural selection should be called "moral" merely confuses with right and wrong those actions that seem to the atheists of that species to permit that species to flourish at one particular point in its evolution.  If in the atheistic worldview species evolve, then the species whose flourishing they appoint as the arbiter of morality was sufficiently different in its earlier stages of development from what it is now, and will be likely be sufficiently different in its later stages of development, that those means by which it now flourishes might be significantly different both from what they once were and might eventually become.  We simply do not know.  But whatever those unknown facts were in the past and will be in the future, the atheist must endorse them as moral, however grotesque and wicked they might actually be.  If so, what are now called right and wrong in the atheist view are not moral absolutes, but simply that set of actions perceived to be most efficient at the moment.  What set of actions will be so perceived in the distant future is still an open question, a question that might receive a starkly different answer then than either it now does or previously did, but which the atheist system of thought must nevertheless consider morally correct and universally binding if it is to employ the language of moral absolutes.  In short, to our previous charges of species bigotry and biological relativism we now must add time relativism and moral contradiction -- but not moral absolutes.  The new atheists cannot find metaphysical grounding for their claims to morality.  They cannot talk about how religion ruins everything because the word "ruins" implies a morality not metaphysically available in the atheist worldview.  They can say they do not like what religion does, and that they prefer something else.  But they can raise no truly moral objection.

         To take it a step further, not only does the doctrine of evolution entail the notion that the human species and human nature are essentially mutable, but this natural mutability is amplified by the very startling, and very real, prospect of the species itself orchestrating and accelerating its own evolution and alteration by means of its scientific experimentation and acumen.  Like the natural mutability that precedes it, this self-orchestrated mutability is the death knell of any and all moral absolutes supposedly rooted in human nature.  When we do acquire the power to modify the nature of the race -- and some speculate that our ability to do so is soon to be gotten -- will what we produce still be truly and fully human?  Will right and wrong then be rooted in human nature as it was or in human nature as it is in whatever it is we shall have made of it?  Assuming that the alteration in human nature is accomplished only one person at a time rather than in the entire race all at once, and assuming therefore that two (or more) sorts of persons with a defendable claim to human nature exist simultaneously, which version of human nature supersedes the other and is to be considered the fountain from which all right and wrong arise?  Will those who possess the older human nature be subject to a system of right and wrong that arises from a newer nature not entirely their own?  What if our experiments do not always succeed?  That is, what if the treatment does not always "take;" what if it yields occasionally idiosyncratic results that produce far more than merely two varieties of human nature?  Which variety is normative?  Shall we fall into the logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes, each with different content?  The answer to these and other questions are still unknown to us.  In the wake of their ignorance, the atheists are flying by faith.  Though the answer to such puzzling questions might be difficult, or even impossible, to identify, and though the answers to such questions might raise insurmountable difficulties for those who advocate this inadequate atheistic system of moral absolutes, the answers given to those questions make no difference at all to my purpose because any answer given them exposes the metaphysical foundation of the atheistic ethical system as shifting sand, not moral bedrock.  Nothing transitory can yield moral absolutes. 

         Furthermore, if humans did not exist at all (and under the direction of a mindless evolutionary process they easily might not), and if right and wrong arise from human nature, then right and wrong would not exist (regardless of whether we considered right and wrong as either moral absolutes or as the biological relativism that emerges from biological success).  In other words, because the atheist theory of ethics ties morality to human nature, the fate of human nature is the fate of morality.  That fate, if the second law of thermodynamics is correct, is oblivion.  The material world is winding down to something like an amorphous, motionless mass of dead matter at a low temperature, incapable of sustaining life.  Along with the demise of the physical universe go all the atheist's alleged moral absolutes, the true name of which we now see is “nihilism.”  In this system, morality, like everything else, comes precisely to nothing.  When human beings cease to exist sometime in the future, as any worldview that leaves out God must assert, right and wrong cease to exist at that same moment.  In short, what is intended by the atheists to be the foundation of morality is really its death warrant.  

         (3) Why flourishing (and not something else) should be the measure of morality cannot be proven, cannot be metaphysically rooted or justified.  To select flourishing as the measure of moral discernment, or to define flourishing as one thing and not another, is merely to elevate both one's own personal preference for flourishing and one's own definition of flourishing (whatever it happened to be) to the level of a moral absolute, which they neither are nor ever could be.  One might just as easily have selected private pleasure at the expense of another's pain as the measure of moral conduct, as might someone like the Marquis de Sade.  One might even prefer death to life, as do virtually all suicides.  That happiness or prosperity, and not death, is the proper content of flourishing cannot be established upon a merely evolutionary basis, except that an atheist simply assert a preference (pragmatic or otherwise) for the one and not the other.  Again, whatever else such private preferences might be, they are not moral absolutes.

         The un-Godded worldview does not, and cannot, yield moral oughtness. It yields only competing sets of preferences to which some atheists unjustifiably try to attach the language of oughtness. Other more astute atheists refuse to make that mistake. On that point those more astute and consistent atheists deserve full credit because they understand that no atheistic explanation of morality has the metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes. Their worldview precludes it. They know that when other more inconsistent atheists want to hold onto atheism and to avail themselves of the language of oughtness, they fall afoul of what atheist Ayn Rand called the error of stolen concepts: They employ ideas and categories to which their system has no metaphysical access.  Atheists who invoke morality are idea thieves.

         Put differently, it makes all the difference in the world whether we say mind came from matter or matter came from mind. Because ideas have consequences, if you choose the former, you cut yourself off from the consequences that attach solely to the latter. One of those lost consequences is the metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes, that is, for a morality that rises above the level of mere preference.

         Finally, as much as I value the work of C. S. Lewis, in general, and his The Abolition of Man, in particular, I would be misusing his book were I to argue from it that, because there appears to be substantial agreement among the peoples of the world about the rules of right and wrong, therefore these rules of right and wrong are moral absolutes.  Consensus, regardless of how extensive or how enduring it might be, is no sure measure of morality.  All too often the majority has consented, either explicitly or implicitly, to colossal evil.  Atheist governments have made it happen time and again.  Morality is not determined by nose count (or by power).  "Majority" is no synonym for "morality."

         In a word, if there is no God, there is no good.

The Theology of Invective

         I can see no other way.

         We must learn once more to confront nonsense in all its forms and to call things by their real names.  We must learn that euphemisms are lies and that patience and gentleness sometimes do no good.  Worse still, they often do injury.  Count on it, when you treat a fool with nothing but kindness, he remains a fool.  If you pat him on the back and stroke his ego, he does what any fool does:  he mistakenly concludes that everything is alright with him, rather than realizing that you are simply being kind to ignorance the way you are kind to all other forms of poverty.

         We must revive the ancient and honorable art of invective, which is to language what justice is to law -- a means of giving people what they deserve.  What some of them deserve is a good kick in the pants.  This article, therefore, is dedicated to telling the fools to bend over and grab their ankles.  The beatings will now commence.

The New Testament

         If, like me, you are a Christian, you often encounter brothers and sisters in the faith who are, to put it plainly, well-intentioned but mush-minded invertebrates.  They seem unwilling and unable to grasp with clarity or conviction that some things are wrong and some are wicked.  Even if they could grasp that fundamental truth about the world, they lack the courage to call evil and error by their real names.  They do not understand that, if you fail to call evil evil, then you are treating it no differently than you treat goodness, which you do not call evil either.  The only thing they seem able to oppose publicly is that small collection of Christians who speak forthrightly, Christians who are less afraid of giving offense to the offensive than they are of aiding and abetting wickedness and error with sloppy and unjustifiably lenient language.

         This will never do.

         We Christians rightly recognize Christ as the very embodiment of love.  But Christ was no bleeding heart, and He was no invertebrate.  The "gentle Jesus meek and mild" never existed.  He is a nineteenth and twentieth century fiction.   The historical Jesus was another matter altogether.  At various times, and when the situation demanded, the real Jesus publicly denounced sinners as snakes, dogs, foxes, hypocrites, fouled tombs and dirty dishes.  He actually referred publicly to one of his chief disciples as Satan.  So that his hearers would not miss his point, He sometimes referred to the objects of his most intense ridicule both by name and by position, and often face to face. 

         No doubt His doing so made the invertebrates around him begin to squirm because they realized how offensive this tactic would be to outsiders.  Nevertheless, Jesus persisted.  He did so because He knew better than his jellyfish camp followers that alluding to heinous acts, and to those who continue to practice them, in only the most innocuous and clinical language does no one, least of all the offenders themselves, any good.  I cannot say it forcefully enough:  Christ did not affirm sinners; He affirmed the repentant.  Others He often addressed with the most withering invective.  God incarnate did not avoid using words and tactics that his listeners found deeply offensive.  He well understood that sometimes it is wrong to be nice.  I deny that we can improve upon the rhetorical strategy of Him who was Himself the Word, and who spoke the world into existence.

         The objection raised by the invertebrates that Jesus spoke aggressively only to self-righteous Pharisees simply misses the point.  Any sinner who rejects repentance, or any sinner who holds repentance at bay because he somehow believes it is not for him, is self-righteous.

         Paul talked the same way. 

         Although his invertebrate comrades probably considered it offensive and indelicate of him to do so, Paul did not hesitate to suggest to several churches -- publicly, plainly, and in writing -- that his many detractors ought simply to emasculate themselves (Gal. 5: 12).  If you believe that circumcision makes you right with God, he argued, why not go the whole way and really get right with God?  If Lorena Bobbitt was reading the Bible on the night that made her famous, this was the verse she read.

         Furthermore, in the same letter, (in fact, in the space of but three verses) Paul twice refers to his Galatian readers, the very people he is trying to convince, as fools (Gal. 3: 1, 3).  Subsequent events indicate that his shocking words, though clearly offensive, were not ineffective.  The Galatians chose to follow Paul rather than the Judaizers, whose tactic was, in Paul's words, to "win the approval of men," the very tactic urged upon us so indefatigably by the invertebrates -- though never in gender specific language.

         In short, if the religion and practice of the New Testament offend them, the invertebrates need to argue with Jesus and Paul, not me.

Christian Literature

         Furthermore, like Christ and his chief apostle, the greatest Christian writers of the Western world also refused to subscribe to the principle that language deeply offensive to one's readers or listeners ought always to be shunned.  Neither the greatest writers of Western tradition (such as Dante, Erasmus, Milton, and Swift) nor the best of the present day permit their language to be censored or vetoed by the hyperactive sensitivities of the spineless.  Great writers select one word over all other words because that word, and that word only, most fully conveys their meaning, and because that word, and that word only, can best be expected to produce the author’s intended effect.  That meaning and that effect are occasionally, and sometimes intentionally, offensive.

The Rules 

         Verbal precision, not inoffensiveness, is the traditional hallmark of the West's best writing and the West’s best books, some of which were deeply and intentionally offensive to great numbers of those who first read them.  Dante's Inferno consigns a number of Catholic notables -- including popes -- to Hell.  Erasmus's Praise of Folly excoriates monks and theologians as a shameless and squalid mob.  His Julius Excluded locks Pope Julius out of Heaven because he was an adulterous, blood-thirsty, syphilis-ridden, mammon hound.  Some of Milton's political pamphlets and poetry are, among other things, timeless handbooks of insult and invective.  Great portions of the works of Jonathan Swift constitute a veritable scatologist's Bible.  These works and many like them would never have been written or published had the modern preoccupation with inoffensiveness been then the controlling consideration.  Because that preoccupation now prevails, these books and many like them are being harried out of the literary canon.  In other words, the guidelines according to which the invertebrates want us to write are guidelines that not only would have radically recast many of our culture’s great books had they been followed, but would have prevented some of them from ever being written at all.  Had modern guidelines been previously in effect, they would have banished many of our civilization’s most important and memorable texts far more effectively and extensively than has the politically correct curriculum at Stanford, Harvard or Oberlin.

Freedom and Virtue

         Invertebrates cannot comprehend that despicable conditions inevitably arise in a fallen world.  Those despicable conditions sometimes require us to employ the language of shock and of confrontation in our unflagging efforts to push back the frontiers of evil and error.  But the spineless do not like it when we do.  They want to police the way we speak.  They want, literally, to erase words from our language.  I have been told by one Christian professor, whom I like and whom I respect, that there was never a time when shock language was right.  Such language, I am asked to believe, ought to be eliminated.  But though others delete it, I shall not.  The fewer words you have at your disposal, the fewer thoughts you are able to think or to articulate with full precision, and the fewer points you are able to make with your desired effect.  When the range of words is small, the range of thought is small and the power of speech is diminished.  In that sense, word police are thought police.  The invertebrates want to put you under arrest. 

         Resist.

         Language, like liberty, is not normally lost all at once.  It slips through our hands a little at a time, almost imperceptibly.  Don't let it happen.

         Slang words and shock words have their legitimate use.  Sometimes the right word is a slang word or a shock word because no other word conveys your meaning as fully or as accurately, and because no other word elicits the response you desire.  Sometimes the right language is language that falls beyond the pale of polite discourse –- but not of virtue. 

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.