Fjordman: The Cult of Reason — The Dark Side of the Enlightenment

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published in the Brussels Journal. Some excerpts are below:

There are few books published these days that are worth a second look, but The Suicide of Reason by Lee Harris is one of the exceptions. Many observers currently sense — correctly in my view — that something is fundamentally wrong with the Western world, but they differ substantially in their analysis of the cause(s) of this. The First and Second World Wars were horrible, and most thinking people agree that something went wrong with the Western Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, which unlike the Chinese Cultural Revolution became institutionalized. But does that mean that everything was fine in the 1950s?

The Communist Manifesto was written already in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Marx published Das Kapital in 1867. There are those who believe that Marxism could only have been born in a Christian environment, and there are also those who claim that the real father of Communism was Plato in ancient Greece, not Karl Marx. So where exactly did the West go wrong, and just how far back do we have to go before things were “right”? 1950? 1850? Before the Enlightenment and industrialization? Before Christianity? Before Plato?

Even Christian conservative writer Lawrence Auster admits that modern liberalism “would not have come into existence without Christianity, and liberalism can fairly be described as a secularized offshoot of Christianity,” but he thinks that this does not necessarily mean that all forms of Christianity in every context have been or need to be suicidal, which may be true.

The jury is still out on whether Christian universalism is suicidal for Europeans in a world of global communications where most Christians are non-Europeans, yet I am convinced that we must take a look at a dark side of the Enlightenment which can be dubbed the Cult of Reason.

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As I argue in my online essay Why Did Europeans Create the Modern World?, the West is now dominated by Darwinists who don’t believe in the theory of evolution, or rather, fail to accept the logical consequences of this theory when applied to human beings.. I stand by my previous statement that if you believe that human beings are the product of evolutionary pressures then there is no such thing as “racism,” which is a totally anti-scientific term.

Various human groups will during thousand and tens of thousands of years of natural selection have adjusted themselves to different natural environments, with results that don’t merely include superficial differences such as skin color but probably also mental differences. Yet absurdly, saying this makes you vilified and labeled a “Nazi” in Western countries today.

I have struggled to explain why. My conclusion is that we live in a society where the ideal is not merely Reason Alone but Thought Alone; we are supposed to create an entire society and physical reality purely by thought, which should result in perfect, cosmic, universal justice and equality for all. Anything and everything that impedes with our ability to create this reality must be banned as “irrational” or “hate.” If God and religion prevent us from creating what we want then God and religion must be removed; the theory of evolution can take care of that for us. However, we must be careful not to follow this theory to its logical conclusion because then biology instead of God would inhibit our ability to create perfect equality between men and women and between humans of all races. In short, we must ban reality.

This is in essence what Political Correctness is all about: Banning any discussion of reality so we can create a perfect world based on Thought Alone. In a strange sense this could ironically be seen as the final culmination of millennia of Western use of reason until we finally succeeded in creating a society based on Reason Alone. Although I cannot pinpoint exactly how I suspect you could successfully argue that there is a form of Platonism underlying this mental construct. After all, in Plato’s world the perfect, unchanging Ideas were physically separated from observed reality. In a way this is exactly what the modern West has created.

The dream of a perfect world of absolute equality may be a beautiful dream but it is a dream, based on many different false beliefs. It will quickly turn into a very real nightmare if you try to implement it. Among the largest of these false beliefs is the idea that man is naturally good and a perfectly rational being. I am personally not ready to embrace the opposite claim either, that man is by nature evil or sinful. My preferred view is that man is flawed and imperfect, yet that is quite sufficient to show that you can never create a perfect society with universal justice, just like you cannot create a perfect building using imperfect building materials.

The perfect world of Reason Alone is beautiful in all its symmetry and mathematical precision.. There is only one problem with it: It is a lie. Unfortunately, the media, the political and intellectual leaders as well as the education system have become passionately dedicated to preserving and upholding this lie as The Only Truth and will ruthlessly harass any dissenters who suggest alternative ideas. This means that there will be no reality check until the entire mental bubble is punctured through a painful crash with actual reality. By the time that happens, the collapse may well take much of the edifice of Western civilization with it.

Read the rest at the Brussels Journal.