— Proverbs 22:28 —
We have, for the better part of a generation, been hard at work hammering away at the underpinnings of Western culture, attacking and dismantling the restraints and boundaries established by many hundreds of years of religious and cultural influence — and have done so, almost ironically, in the name of freedom and liberty. Look back a mere 50 years, and gaze at a cultural landscape drastically different: divorce is uncommon; most children grow up in homes with two parents (always of the opposite sex); sex outside of marriage is strongly censured; pregnancy outside of marriage something shameful. In one generation — though culturally, it seems like a millennium — child abuse, both physical and sexual — have gone from rare to common; serial killers have gone from isolated horrors to the grist of weekly crime TV. School shootings, then unheard of, now depressingly common; newspapers are replete with stories of congressmen soliciting sex from underage pages, buying votes with prodigious pork and sleazy paybacks, or freezing 6-figure bribes in their kitchen Sub-Zeros. Language has coarsened immensely; political discourse is brutal, dishonest, and personal; respect for professions, authority, and government are at a nadir, and dropping rapidly with no bottom in sight.
The crowning achievement of Western civilization is not democracy, as one might suppose — for democracy had been tried in ancient Greece, and later in Rome, with decidedly mixed results: logos alone proved insufficient for rule by the people. It was instead the elevation of the value of the individual and the recognition of the true nature of man: made in God’s image, and therefore capable of great glory and goodness, but fallen, and therefore capable of great evil. This dawning realization and revelation was the gift of the Christianization of Europe, carrying forward to a barbarian land not merely the reason of the Greeks and the moral framework of Judaism (monotheism and the centrality of law in restraining moral errancy), but augmenting it with the Christian emphasis on mercy and forgiveness, redemption and the importance of the individual in God’s design and creation.
But within the burgeoning progress and prosperity of Western culture lay the seeds of its own demise. For the success of science and technology — driven by the underlying assumption of a logical and discoverable universe created by a rational God — gave increasing credence to the idea that it was reason alone which was responsible for the West’s cultural advancement — and therefore the key to its unlimited enlargement. The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and the subsequent Industrial Revolution increasingly segregated faith from reason, rejecting knowledge not empirically obtained and thereby diminishing the influence of more transcendent and spiritual disciplines and insights. With the dawning of the microprocessor age, the rate of information accumulation and technological progress has accelerated to light speed — far outstripping Western society’s ability to integrate such vast knowledge into any meaningful transcendent worldview. Driving electrons through silicon at light-speed has not driven away evil; you cannot fight perdition with faster processors. The modern secular mind sees the solution to evil in knowledge: we may conquer evil (equated with ignorance in the secular mind) with the acquisition of greater reason and understanding. But reason is morally neutral: science may kill or heal, knowledge may decode the human genome or destroy a Hiroshima.
G.K. Chesterton, writing a century ago, understood the mindset of today’s secular culture:
The process whereby these barricades are stormed and toppled — subtly, relentlessly, and mercilessly — is not difficult to discern, if one simply takes the time to look. Over the next few essays, I hope to chronicle the means and methods of this erosion. Such an examination is not merely academic; the pursuit of gnosis without the guidance of faith and transcendent truth leads not to lofty pinnacles of human achievement, but threatens instead a dark age of sterile knowledge and unrestrained power.
