Religion and Socialism

Religion and Socialism | Peter Kreeft | From "Darkness At Noon: The Eclipse of the Permanent Things", Chapter 2 of C.S. Lewis For The Third Millennium | Ignatius Insight

There is one thing even stupider than modernism abandoning religion in society: theological modernism abandoning religion even in religion. The essence of theological modernism is the denial of the supernatural (miracles, Christ's divinity and resurrection, Heaven and Hell, the Second Coming, and the divine inspiration of scripture). These fundamentals of the faith are labeled "fundamentalistic"—modernity's other F-word. Modernism reduces religion to morality, morality to social morality, and social morality to socialism.

In fact, its instinctive gravitation to socialism is natural. For socialism and religion are the only two answers to a problem Lewis poses in The Abolition of Man: the  problem of the Controllers versus the controlled, the Conditioners versus the conditioned. To see this, we must first review his argument in that book.

Lewis' argument in chapter 3 is absolutely stunning, both in the sense of intellectually brilliant and in the sense of emotionally terrifying. It is that "man's conquest of nature" without the Tao must necessarily become nature's conquest of man. For "man's conquest of nature" must always mean, in the concrete, some men's power over other men, using nature as the instrument. Lewis' examples of the wireless, the airplane, and the contraceptive show this: some men wield the newly-won power over others as its patients. Perhaps they are its willing patients, but they are its patients. Now as long as both the agents and the patients of these powers over nature admit and work within a common Tao, or moral law, they have the same interests, rights, and values. Monarchy is not oppressive if the king and the people are working for a common goal under a common law and share a common dignity. But if the power elite, whether king, voting majority, or media elite, cease to believe in an objective Tao, as is clearly the case in our society, then they become Controllers, Conditioners, Social Engineers, and the patients become the controlled. Propaganda replaces propagation. Propagation is "old birds teaching young birds to fly." Propaganda is programming parrots. Propagation is the transmission of tradition. Propaganda is the invention of innovation. Which of the two is piped into our brains daily by our media?

This new class of Innovators, the Tao-less Conditioners, will themselves be motivated in their social engineering, but not by the Tao, which is supernatural and eternal, a "permanent thing." Instead, they will be motivated by their natural impulses, which are non-permanent things: their heredity and environment, especially their environment, especially the fashionable opinions. This means they will be motivated by Nature, not by "the permanent things," which are supernatural.

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Comments

[LJ]

The lesson that we should have learned from the 20th century is that socialism, sans Tao, is self-defeating. It will stifle technological advancement. The Soviet Union had ships and tanks and nuclear weapons and fighter planes but the inside of the empire was hollowed out. Most of their significant technology was stolen because real creativity becomes scarce in such an egalitarian society.

The supposed purpose of technology, the welfare of men, economic and physical, thus has the same end under socialism. Poverty and ill health become the norm rather than the exception.

Eventually, it self-destructs. That is the long term result of Kreeft's second possibility, when the Tao is lost.

He speaks of regaining the Tao as the first option, suggesting that it is virtually impossible. Actually, the only way that it is possible, in my opinion, is if God intervenes directly.

Just like the universe presents us with cycles within cycles right down to the last atom, human history thus far is the story of human cycles of gaining and losing the Tao, in the micro and the macro. But it is always related to God's intervention. That is what our faith is all about when we look at the big picture of Adam right down to Jesus and then from Jesus to 2009. God's one greatest intervention, the definitive intervention around which all the rest are related, was to enter our world as one of us. That is the center point of human history, yet through that history we have seen many smaller interventions as well, within the smaller cycles of human infidelity to God.

So, unless God wills that we cycle on into our own self-destruction, he can intervene and return what we have already lost. The most painless way is direct conversion of hearts, usually following some catalyst event. The pain involved is based on the nature of that event. It could be some natural disaster, and that, I think, is the most likely scenario.

The best, least painful scenario is if enough people catch a glimpse of where the path leads that we are currently on, and the Holy Spirit is working within them at the same time, and we are right there with the message of the Gospel, then conversion of hearts takes place on a large enough scale that the social momentum can reverse course. That we would call revival or renewal. And, of course, we could ask God for that.

Otherwise, Kreeft is right, and the future is bleak, at least in the short-term, the short-term being well past most of our life-times. In that case we should buckle up, because it will get worse before it gets better.

[Brian]

So is Kreeft condemning any and all technology and saying that we're supposed to be cavemen? If not, then what is he saying? Please clarify.

[Brian]

Excuse me. I shouldn't have been so extreme as to say "cavemen". I was simply asking what exactly he was condemning and what he was condoning.