Reason
Fails and Enlightenment Fades
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/22/18
Growing up without running water has tremendous
instructional value. It can teach you to
appreciate water for the rest of your life.
It can also train you to conserve and never waste water or anything
else.
Imagine what it’s like to be sparing with water,
even drinking water. Think “Little House
on the Prairie” and you’ll get the picture, but don’t just think 19th
century. For many rural Americans the
absence of running water continued well into the 1960’s.
Let’s just say that the Industrial Revolution
had not yet reached where I lived. And
I’m talking about as late as 1966 when the last chore I performed before
leaving home was to haul water. I might
add that the Age of Reason and the concurrent Enlightenment sidestepped much of
rural America as well, though not totally.
Each of these important historical periods improved
the living conditions of the human race, particularly the Industrial Revolution
(1760-1840). Yes, the Industrial
Revolution brought child labor, pollution, and other evils and ills, but its
undergirding effect was to lighten the load of laborers. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment of
the 18th century freed Europeans and Americans from the superstition
of the dark Middle Ages. Their emphasis
on science became the new dogma.
But on our way to perfecting the human race, making
life easier, and elevating reason over religion, we have hit a snag. It appears that man is not perfectible after
all, and that machines, scientific theories, and ever-increasing knowledge have
not helped us to love our neighbor or to control violence.
Our teachers and professors have told us that the
Age of Reason and the Enlightenment gave us the modern world. These two movements, however, were not just
about scientific knowledge. They
encompassed philosophy and belief systems.
They denigrated faith and deified reason. Yes, human reasoning as in the reasoning of
Rousseau who elevated “the child” to angelic status, thereby influencing the
field of education to this very day and rendering young 21st century
parents fearful of spanking or of any other form of much needed shock and awe
discipline.
Yes, human reasoning such as that of the brilliant
Napoleon who, seeking to destroy and then “rebuild” continental Europe, carried
millions to their deaths. Would that
“the Little Corporal” had heeded the words of Aeschylus, the father of Greek
tragedy, who opined, “Never, being mortal, ought we cast our thoughts too
high.”
Actually we moderns are casting our thoughts too low
as we edge into dismissal of all things transcendent while our movers and
shakers, as well as most intellectuals, editorialists, media stars, and movie
makers lead the way.
As for elected officials, do they not see the huge,
full parking lots of the mega churches, the schools, universities, hospitals,
and orphanages built by people of transcendent faith, or the continuing
proliferation of pregnancy centers and homeless shelters built by faith
organizations? Why don’t elected
officials speak up more and louder for people of faith? Have they been convinced that we are all
secularists now? Have they accepted secularism
as the new wave just because that’s what secularists wish us to believe?
The Age of Reason and its modern day proponents
ridicule people of simple faith as being believers in blind faith, yet theirs
is a blind faith in reason, the faith that Rousseau, Napoleon, Marx, Freud, and
Voltaire advanced.
Today’s “reason,” which is the fruit of the
Enlightenment, declares war against nature (same-sex marriage, transgenderism)
and declares itself “free of religion.”
But all beliefs are religion. Secularists
say, “I can declare my beliefs because they are not religious, but you can’t
declare yours because they are religious.”
Good try, but in a way the secularists are
right. Many a local government has forbidden
“religious expression” in the public square while allowing secularists free
rein.
Where is enlightenment, where reason, where freedom,
when bakers and florists are being fined for not bending to same-sex
marriage? Or when contraceptive mandates
are hurled at Catholic colleges?
When the great Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
found refuge in America in 1974, we assumed he would turn his pen to praising
American culture. Instead, he argued
that America could no longer be emulated.
In a Harvard address he asserted that Enlightenment thought had transformed
Americans into materialists who saw man’s accomplishments as the measure of all
things. “Reason,” he claimed, “gave
Americans control over nature and possession of riches, but shrouded her with
moral poverty.”
No running water? No problem. Such needs are the least of our
problems. I was rich, because the man
who helped me fill the water jugs, my father, had taught his 17 children what
riches really are and are not.
Roger Hines
4/18/18
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