Two Big Lies and A Smokescreen

One of the names on any round-up of the people contributing to turning the tide must be Peter Kreeft. He's especially well known for his analyses of the culture, culture wars, and where we go from here. Exhibit A:

Night is falling. What Chuck Colson has labeled "a new Dark Ages" is looming. And its Brave New World proved to be only a Cowardly Old Dream. We can see this now, at the end of "the century of genocide" that was christened "the Christian century" at its birth.

We've had prophets who warned us: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age; and Spengler, 100 years ago, in The Decline of the West; and Aldous Huxley, seventy years ago, in Brave New World; and C. S. Lewis, forty years ago, in The Abolition of Man; and above all our popes: Leo XIII and Pius IX and Pius X and above all John Paul the Great, the greatest man in the world, the greatest man of the worst century. He had even more chutzpah than Ronald Reagan, who dared to call Them "the evil empire:" He called Us "the culture of death." That's our culture, and his, including Italy, with the lowest birth rate in the world, and Poland, which now wants to share in the rest of the West's abortion holocaust.


If the God of life does not respond to this culture of death with judgment, God is not God. If God does not honor the blood of the hundreds of millions of innocent victims then the God of the Bible, the God of Israel, the God of orphans and widows, the Defender of the defenseless, is a man-made myth, a fairy tale.

He goes on to offer hope and make the best diagnosis of the problems and solutions of the modern age available. But the question the above quote raises is: why have we ignored so many different voices speaking with authority and telling truth for so long? Several reasons present themselves. First, the long and fruitful efforts of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, among others, have taken deep root in the Western subconscious. Even those frequently considered conservative have swallowed whole the fundamental lies of the Communist ideology.

1. Possessing power which others do not have/being in a position of authority/having more money/talent/having more makes you an oppressor. Those with less than you are the oppressed.

2. Anything the oppressed do to achieve parity with the "oppressors" is legitimate because they would not need to take action to achieve parity if they had not been oppressed in the first place.

Since any redistribution of the wealth/power/authority/etc. undertaken within this model will almost always occur in the context of unjust acts (the French Revolution followed by the Terror, the Communist take over of Russia followed by show trials and seizure of wealth, the Chinese Communists followed by the long reign of Mao, etc.), a new oppressed class emerges and the cycle begins anew.

Communism is a road into a traffic circle with no outlet. The cycle of violence, begun in the name of ending oppression, does not permit the possibility of ever ending oppression, injustice, and violence, but rather sets in motion a process which may only end with the sort of forgiveness practiced and taught by Christ. Along the way, though, the adherents to these two lies will put in motion the sorts of obfuscation and distortion predicted so accurately by George Orwell. And hence our current state of confusion and fear.

The easiest way to hide the lack of morality consequent on accepting the two lies is to deny the existence of morality at all--or at least, the existence of objective morality. The dictatorship of relativism decried by Pope Benedict is in part a reaction to the deep self assurance of the high modernity, evident even unto our present day in statements of relativism as dogmatic truth, i.e. "There is no such thing as absolute truth". This intellectual self assurance held (and holds) confidently the idea that man's mind may attain a knowledge of truth by the application of reason to the workings of the natural world and man himself. Frequently, such a mind dismisses all religion and belief in the spirit world as mere ridiculous superstition, a viewpoint especially evident in the Sherlock Holmes canon and other literature contemporary to that time.

Ayn Rand and her followers remain prominent adherents to such a view, as do those who take Robert Heinlein and other such logical positivists as intellectual leaders. Taken as a whole, these admirers of the high modern intellectual assurance usually presume that a complete scientific understanding of and explanation for all phenomena within the realm of man's experience is only a matter of time. Partially in a natural reaction to such an evisceratingly anti-spiritual worldview, partly in reaction to the associations of such a view with eugenics, imperialism, colonialism, and slavery arising from the common origin of that method of viewing the world and these evils in the 1800s, and partly because it is so much easier to "win" an argument when one has blunted the force of reason, many people avoid such a belief, preferring instead the false hopes of boundless tolerance, endless comity, and an end to conflict, by denying mankind the ability to know what is right and true. Indeed, they deny that anything is right and true, or that righteousness and truth exist at all.

In the absence, then, of boundaries, we see the coming death of human rights, and law, and science, and anything that depends upon the intelligibility of the universe and the existence of truth--a point laid out by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor. Absent truth, there can be no morality. Absent morality, there can be no justice--for without a standard of law, any court or authority can only be an arbitrary one. Absent justice, the world devolves into an all against all struggle for survival.

So we have the two key lies of the Communist ideology, which are actually the lies humans (and possibly the devils as well) tell themselves when they seek to excuse monstrosity. In order to avoid the accusations or the realization of monstrosity, they deny the existence of any objective, universal standard by which to measure their actions--but in so doing, they unleash hell upon the world. In this, we have another of the key reasons for Rand's continuing popularity--she saw this trend and excoriated it--as well as an explanation for why modern movements are so hard to fight. Whether they be liberal or conservative, jihadi or communist, they embrace obfuscation, justified by the two lies listed above. The only answer? Truth, repeated so that the great lie may not drown it out.