Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (11 page)

Revenge of the Romantics

In a typical university, this radical form of reductionism is likely to be held in the science department, where the expectation is that most professors embrace materialism. If you walk across campus to the arts and humanities buildings, however, there you will find that most professors embrace postmodernism. In many ways, the two worldviews are diametrically opposed. Yet both lead to a dehumanizing reductionism.

For many people, the term
postmodern
seems somewhat arcane, but it is easier to understand if we trace how it developed. Its roots reach back to the Romantic movement, touched on briefly in Principle #1. One of the heroes of Romanticism was Schopenhauer, who said, “Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.”
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That is, a materialist looks outward at the physical world, as though that were the sole reality, and “forgets” to look inward at the self. Yet the inner world of consciousness is equally part of the reality that worldviews are required to explain.

The Romantics were not interested in recovering only the individual mind, however. They were enamored of Kant’s idea of a transcendental ego or universal mind, with its godlike powers to create the world of experience. For many, it was a springboard to pantheism. Theologian Ian Barbour says that, for the Romantics, “God is not the external creator of an impersonal machine, but a spirit pervading nature.”
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The Romantics wanted to overthrow the Enlightenment image of the universe as a vast machine and replace it with an organic image—the universe as organism. In their vision, explains Randall, “the world was no machine, it was alive, and God was not its creator so much as its soul, its life.”
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As we saw earlier, the philosophical label for this is idealism, the claim that the real causal power in the universe is the mental  realm of ideas. The Romantics wanted to knock down the idol of materialism (ultimate reality is material), so they proposed the idol of idealism (ultimate reality is mental). They wanted to counter worldviews that absolutize matter, so they absolutized mind. Novelist Walker Percy says materialism stuffs everything into the “box of things,” while idealism stuffs everything into “the mind box.”
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Or to return to the metaphor of two stories in a building, each movement tries to live in one story.

Western philosophy divides into two philosophical “families”

ROMANTICISM

The Box of Mind

ENLIGHTENMENT

The Box of Things

Each of these two streams grew into a richly interconnected network of philosophies, which today are called the analytic and the continental traditions. The analytic tradition traces its roots to the Enlightenment and tends to highlight science, reason, and facts. The continental tradition traces its roots to the Romantic movement and seeks to defend mind, meaning, and morality.
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Worldviews are not a scattershot of disconnected ideas; they tend to cluster in groups connected by family resemblances. When we learn each family’s connecting themes, it will be easier to identify its form of reductionism.

Emerson’s Over-Soul

When the Romantics reached out for conceptual tools to defend their spiritualized conception of the world, they revived neo-Platonism, a version of idealism with roots in the third century. University courses in philosophy often skip neo-Platonism. (I did not have a course on it until graduate school.) Yet it had a significant influence on Western history.
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As the name suggests, neo-Platonism started out with Plato’s thought, which was patched together with bits and pieces from other Greek schools of thought and then spiced with Eastern pantheism. From these diverse sources, neo-Platonism crafted a “big tent” worldview. You might think of it as the New Age movement of the ancient world, combining elements from both East and West.

The central tenet of neo-Platonism was that the world is an emanation of a spiritual substance called the One or the Absolute. Like a fountain cascading down through multiple levels, the One emanated a descending series that flowed down through several levels: from spiritual entities to human beings, then to sentient creatures (animals), living things (plants), and finally material things (rocks). This was called the ladder of life or the great chain of being. The goal of the spiritual life was to re-ascend the ladder, escape from matter, and reunite with the One.
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What attracted the Romantics to neo-Platonism was the idea that nature is permeated by soul or spirit. For the idealists, says Eagleton, the Absolute served “as a form of secularized divinity.” This was not a personal God who thinks, feels, wills, and acts. It was a non-personal spiritual essence or substance. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it the Over-soul: “the soul of the whole … the eternal ONE.”
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Hegel’s Evolutionary Deity

Neo-Platonism was given a novel twist by the philosopher Hegel, who added the concept of historical development or evolution. Until then, the ladder of life had been static. It was a fixed list or inventory of the things that exist in the universe. But with Hegel, the ladder became dynamic. To picture the change, you might think of the ladder tilting over to become an escalator, with the entire universe progressing upward through a series of stages.
Hegel called his pantheistic deity the Absolute Spirit or Universal Mind. And because it was the soul of the world, it was said to evolve along with the world.
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What Hegel was offering was a spiritualized version of evolution. (Nietzsche even said that “without Hegel, there would have been no Darwin.”) The difference is that Hegel applied the concept of evolution not to biology but to the world of ideas. His claim was that all our ideas—law, morality, religion, art, political ideals—result from the gradual “actualization of the Universal Mind”
over the course of history. Everything is caught up in a vast historical process advancing toward a final perfect state.
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For many people, the law of historical progress functioned as a substitute for divine Providence. “When science seemed to take God out of the universe, men had to deify some natural force, like ‘evolution,’” explains Randall.
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A goal-oriented version of evolution comforted people with the hope that every event has a reason, a purpose, within the upward progress of the universe as a whole.

Hegel’s philosophy is a form of historicism, the doctrine that all ideas are products of historical forces—that what is “true” at one stage of history will give way to a higher truth at the next stage.
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In essence, Hegel surveyed all the conflicting philosophies and worldviews, all the competing religious claims, all the warring camps and cultures, and proposed to overcome the strife by treating each one as a partial and relative truth in the upward progression of Mind, the evolution of consciousness.

What is the logical flaw in historicism? It is self-refuting. The claim that every idea is a partial and relative truth must include its
own
claim. Like every other evolving idea, it is relative to its own moment in history, and therefore not true in any transhistorical sense. As philosopher John Passmore says, you cannot “maintain, as a timeless philosophical truth, that there are no timeless philosophical truths.”
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Hegel avoided this devastating conclusion only by tacitly making an exception for himself. He wrote as though he alone was mysteriously able to rise above the evolutionary process—as though he alone was capable of an objective, timeless, complete view of the entire historical process.

But of course, by making an exception for himself, Hegel implied that there was one thing that his system did not cover—namely, his own thinking. In this way, he introduced a logical inconsistency into his system. And of course, any inconsistency within a system of thought discredits it. (Many worldviews are subject to this same logical flaw. We will probe it more deeply in Principle #4.)

Triumvirate of Race, Class, Gender

In our own day, we have progressed far beyond the Romantic era, yet the continental tradition continues to exert enormous influence. It moved from idealism through a series of successors (such as existentialism), which we will not take time to discuss. In recent decades, it has given birth to postmodernism. The tragic irony is that although Romanticism was embraced to counter Enlightenment reductionism, postmodernism has become equally reductionistic and inhumane.

In everyday life, we encounter postmodernism most often in the form of political correctness. Multiculturalism. Identity politics. Speech codes. Rules for politically correct speech have become de rigueur in most social institutions: schools, newspapers, law, politics. A Harvard professor complains that on many university campuses, students are “muzzled by speech codes that would not pass the giggle test if challenged on First Amendment grounds.”
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These rules define the accepted ways to speak about race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, and so on. Postmodernism virtually defines a person’s identity in terms of the groups to which he or she belongs.

How did we get from Hegel to postmodernism? For Hegel, the real actor in history is not the individual but the Absolute Mind or Spirit, which expresses itself through a community’s laws, morality, language, social relationships, and so on. Hegel accepted Kant’s idealism in which the world is constituted by consciousness, but for him it was a collective consciousness. As one philosopher explains, the Absolute Mind creates the world “through the shared aspects of a culture, a society, and above all through a shared language.”

Indeed for Hegel, individuals do not even
have
original ideas of their own. Their thoughts are merely expressions of the Absolute Mind. In his words, individuals “are all the time the unconscious tools of the World Mind at work within them.”
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Over time, Hegel’s pantheism was secularized and his Absolute Spirit was reduced to a metaphor—the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist.
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(In German,
Zeit
means time or age;
geist
means spirit.) What remained, however, was the idea that individuals are “unconscious tools” of the Zeitgeist. They are not
producers
of culture so much as
products
of a particular culture.
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Individuals are shaped by the communities they belong to, each with its own shared perspective, values, habits, language, and forms of life.

In our own day, this has led to the extreme conclusion that everyone’s ideas are merely social constructions stitched together by cultural forces. Individuals are little more than mouthpieces for communities based on race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity.

What is the idol here? Postmodernism absolutizes the forces of culture or community. Dooyeweerd calls it the “ideology of community.”
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Truth has been redefined as a social construction, so that every community has its own view of truth, based on its experience and perspective, which cannot be judged by anyone outside the community. One postmodern theological makes the claim in these words: “There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate.” Rorty says truth is merely “intersubjective agreement” among people within a particular community.
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Postmodernism is thus a form of anti-realism, the doctrine that reality depends for its character and possibly even its existence on our minds. The term
anti-realism
was coined by Nietzsche to describe his own view, which he summed up in the slogan “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Or as one postmodern writer puts it, “Reality has now become a mere bunch of disparate and changing interpretations, a shifting loosely-held coalition of points of view in continual debate with each other.”
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If reality has shattered into clashing interpretations, so has the concept of personal identity. Postmodernism says there is no unified self. Instead the self is simply the locus of the shifting points of view absorbed from various interpretive communities, each defining its own “truth.” Recall that the Enlightenment treated the individual as a disembodied mind, capable of transcending time and space to achieve a God’s-eye view (see Principle #1). In reaction, postmodernism tethers individual consciousness tightly to communities whose perspective is conditioned by history and geography.

Even science, the golden calf of modernism, is not considered true in any universal sense. Like all other forms of knowledge, science is a social construction. Postmodernists agree with Nietzsche, who wrote, “All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which
we
bring to things.”
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If science is just another creation of the human mind, why should it be granted any special status over other ways of thinking?

And if there is no objective or universal truth, then any
claim
to have objective truth will be treated as nothing but an attempt by one interpretive community to impose its own limited, subjective perspective on everyone else. An act of oppression. A power grab.

Roots of Political Correctness

Like other idols, postmodernism gets some things right. It has done good service in countering the lonely individualism of the Enlightenment’s autonomous self. It rejects the modernist project of thinkers like Bacon and Descartes to start history over from scratch within the isolated individual consciousness. It denies that we can reach an infallible foundation for knowledge by direct intuition into the contents of the individual mind.
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In the process, postmodernists have debunked Enlightenment claims to neutral, timeless, value-free knowledge. They insist that real, living individuals always bring to the table a complex panoply of prior commitments, interests, goals, and ambitions—even in fields like science, where objectivity is the expected norm.