Why Are We in Trouble? “Men Have Forgotten God.”

It is no secret that radical progressives have gone berserk in their lust for power, and they seem to be determined to destroy the 235-year-old American experiment in constitutionally limited government grounded in a Judeo-Christian worldview. In its place, they seek to impose a cultural Marxism grounded in a totalizing materialism. In this article I will explain what materialism teaches about the human condition, the dire cultural, political and legal implications of those teachings, and, finally, whether we should join progressives in their power game.

Materialism 101

What is the philosophical foundation of the current surge of leftist authoritarianism? There is nothing new under the sun, and it turns out that that the foundation of the new authoritarianism is the same as the foundation of the old variety. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suffered in the Soviet Gulag, and he was all too familiar with that system and its causes. In his 1983 speech accepting the Templeton Prize, Solzhenitsyn recalled as a child hearing older people explaining the cause of the great disasters that had befallen Russia under the communists. They said, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Solzhenitsyn continued:

Since then, I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’

In the decades after 1918, the Soviets murdered countless millions. Their Chinese counterparts under Mao murdered millions more. It has been reliably estimated that in the twentieth century, Marxist regimes killed over 100 million people. Lenin declared that “Marxism is materialism. As such, it is relentlessly hostile to religion.” In other words, materialism was the philosophical foundation upon which this charnel house was built.

History teaches us that authoritarian leftist utopians like Stalin and Mao never hesitate to order murder on an industrial scale. For example, Stalin believed the road to his collectivist utopia would need to be paved with the corpses of the kulaks, and so he ordered the “liquidation of kulaks as a class,” and millions were slaughtered. But how can any sane person command the liquidation of millions with such breathtakingly insouciant disregard for human life? The answer is simply this: Stalin and Mao took their materialism seriously and that freed them to kill millions.

To understand the link between materialism and a casual disregard for millions of human lives requires an understanding of what materialism teaches about the human condition. We will begin by reciting what could be the materialist creed:

In the beginning were the particles, and the particles were in motion, and in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than the particles in motion.

“Materialism is the anti-god and Carl Sagan is its prophet” is the materialist’s equivalent to the Islamic Shahada or the Jewish Shema. And the prophet’s message is this: “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be, and we are made of star stuff.”

What does it mean to be made of star stuff? I will explain. The standard model of cosmology posits that the universe began in an infinitely hot dense singularity that began expanding with the “big bang.” As the universe expanded, gravity pulled lighter elements together to form stars, and in the nuclear furnaces at the center of those stars heavier elements were fused. Eventually, some of those stars burned out, leaving the heavier elements behind.  Planets were formed from these heavier elements, and eons later on one of those planets a simple single-celled living organism somehow spontaneously arose from non-living matter. The descendants of that first simple cell evolved into more and more complex living things until, at last, a species of clever hairless apes arose. Those hairless apes call themselves “humans.”

Many of those humans believe they are special because they have an immaterial spirit, but the materialist says they are wrong. He insists that like everything else in the cosmos, humans consist only of the particles that make up their bodies. Ultimately, like everything else, a human is nothing but an amalgamation of burnt-out star dust.

What about consciousness and free will? Surely even a materialist will concede that these attributes set humans apart from mere particles in motion. “Not so,” says the materialist. All things are reducible to material causes because there are, by definition, no other causes. It follows that the phenomenon that we call “mental state” must be reducible to a physical cause. This means that when a person perceives his own consciousness, what he is perceiving can be explained solely by the electro-chemical processes of his physical brain. Everything about us, including our sense of having an inner self and free will, is caused by those purely physical processes. Particles are not self-aware, and they do not choose.

To be sure, materialists do not deny that everyone feels they are conscious. How could they not? But as a famous atheist explains, a person’s experience that he is “an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will” is an illusion. This statement is the ultimate counterintuitive conclusion. To his credit, Hood admits that he feels self-awareness like everyone else, but he insists that feeling is a trick played on him by the burnt-out star dust that makes up his physical body.

What about morality? Surely that sets us apart from the rocks. Again, “not so,” replies the materialist. Your body is nothing but burnt-out star dust, and dust is neither good nor bad. It just is. Can the particles that make up rocks be immoral? No? Then neither can the particles that make up your body. Richard Dawkins assures us that in a universe of blind physical forces, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Of course, every sane person feels strongly that some things are “right” and some things are “wrong.” Again, materialists do not deny that strong moral feelings exist. But, as with consciousness and free will, they insist that anyone who believes that those feelings point to something real beyond physical brain processes is deluded. Morality, like everything else, is the product of blind, purposeless material processes, and the moral feelings a person has are an evolutionary holdover like their appendix. According to the materialist account, a person has an appendix because at some point in evolutionary history it somehow gave his ancestors a reproductive advantage. And that person feels strongly that it is wrong to torture infants for the same reason. It is a trick played on him by his DNA.

At this point you might think I am exaggerating what materialism teaches. I assure you I am not. To demonstrate this I will allow arch-materialist William Provine to sum up the materialist worldview. He wrote: “Humans are complex organic machines that die completely with no survival of soul . . . [Their choices] are determined by the interaction of heredity and environment and are not the result of free will. No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.”

It is impossible to overestimate how radically transformative materialist ideas are if one follows them through to their logical entailments. If it is true that in the entire universe nothing exists but particles in motion, all traditional ideas about practically everything are overthrown. Vocal atheist academic Daniel Dennett puts it this way: Materialism is a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways . . .” In the next section, we will explore how this has played out in our political life.

Critical Theory is Certainly True . . .

. . . if one accepts its materialist premises. Allow me to explain. Critical theory is metaphysical materialism applied to human relations. As we have seen, materialism posits that the physical is all there is. You and your family and your friends are nothing more than the particles that make up your bodies. You are mere amalgamations of burnt-out star dust. And there are no “moral” or “immoral” particles. Particles just are. Therefore, if materialism is true, it follows with undeniable logical force that there is no such thing as a universal moral truth governing human relations. One can treat other humans as objects, because, at bottom, that is all they really are. And if one desires to discard an object (or 100 million objects) in the pursuit of a utopian fantasy, who is to say that is wrong?

The answer, of course, is “no one.” If universal moral truths do not exist, there are no transcendent rules governing human relations. There is only power and those who have it and those who do not. And this is what critical theory teaches. All human relations are based on power dynamics between those who have power at a given time (the oppressors) and those who do not (the oppressed). But people appeal to universal moral rules all the time. Yes, they do, replies the materialist, but they do that not because such rules actually exist; appeals to non-existent transcendent rules are nothing but a strategy in the power game.

The overwhelming majority of the intellectual elite in our county are thoroughgoing materialists. To them it is obvious that materialism is true. It is no more up for debate than the heliocentric theory of the solar system. Our universities, our legal institutions, the media, and just about every other institution in our country are now dominated by people who take materialism for granted.  For them, it is hardly even a philosophical theory; it is a settled fact known for certain by all intelligent people.

This was evident a few days ago when Politico commentator Heidi Przbyla was explaining the evils of so-called “Christian nationalism” to a panel on MSNBC. She said: “The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists . . . is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.” Przbyla did not feel the need to defend her dismissal of the notion that rights come from God. To her, it is self-evidently true that they do not.

There is, of course, a competing view, the view set forth in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

For nearly 200 years after the American Founding, it was almost universally recognized that the American form of government rests on two self-evident transcendent truths: (1) All men are created equal. (2) The Creator has endowed all men with certain rights. But the rise of materialism among our intellectual elite in the last several decades has undermined that consensus. The materialism they take for granted teaches that Jefferson’s propositions are not self-evidently true. Indeed, for people like Heidi Przbyla, they are self-evidently false. If the universe is a closed system of natural causes, there is no room for a God who creates men with equal moral status and endows them with inherent dignity and rights.

Where do universal rights come from if not from God? For the materialist, they come from nowhere at all because they do not exist. Instead, what we all “rights” are actually privileges that rulers extend to those they rule. And those privileges can be revoked at any time. This is why Przbyla was so exasperated with people who don’t understand that what we call “rights” are actually privileges conditionally granted by human institutions such as Congress or the Supreme Court.

What is to be Done?

Materialists don’t play fair. Unconstrained by a commitment to moral truth, a progressive (practically a synonym for “materialist”) can assert mutually contradictory positions regarding rights without a hint of irony. For example, not long ago, progressives were the great champions of the right to freedom of expression. Now, howling progressive barbarians try to stifle all dissenting speech. Progressives have learned well Maud’dib’s dictum from Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune:

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

For a progressive, there is no contradiction. When they were not in charge, they championed freedom. Now that they have power, they crush their opponents. They never regarded freedom of expression as such as a universal principle to be upheld for its own sake. It is a tool to be used in the critical theory power game, and when that tool has served its purpose, it is put on the shelf like a wrench after the bolt is tightened. All that matters is to have and to wield power.

This is enormously frustrating for conservatives. For example, progressives scream “the justices that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade are bent on destroying our democracy!” Let me get this straight. In 1973, the Supreme Court took away the people’s right to vote on whether to allow women to kill their unborn babies. In 2022, that same Supreme Court restored the people’s right to vote on that matter. Restoring the people’s right to vote is an attack on democracy? Who knew?

Well, progressives knew because they have redefined the word “democracy” to mean “that government which implements policies progressives favor.” With this new definition of “democracy” in mind, progressives howling about overturning Roe v. Wade makes perfect sense. When the Supreme Court takes the people’s right to vote away to secure a progressive policy goal, that is pro-democracy. And when the same court restores the right to vote and that policy goal is threatened, that is anti-democracy.

Critical theory derives its logical force from materialist philosophy. The Declaration of Independence derives its logical force from the fundamentally Christian idea of the equality and dignity of all persons as image bearers of God. The two worldviews are incompatible at a fundamental level. And one need only scan the headlines of this morning’s paper to know that we have reached a critical point in our Nation’s history where those two worldviews are colliding like never before.

What can we do? A few days ago, a friend and I were discussing this topic, and he suggested that since progressives do not feel constrained to follow the rules and norms of our institutions, then perhaps conservatives should start ignoring them too. For example, there is a strong argument that the Constitution does not allow Congress to impose a national abortion policy, whether pro-life or pro-abortion. That is a matter that the Constitution leaves to the states. Whether that argument is correct is beyond the scope of this article. The point is that conservatives of goodwill disagree about the matter. Not so with progressives. If progressives control Congress and the Presidency, they will not hesitate to impose a pro-abortion policy on the Nation. I am not guessing. This is what they say they will do. My point for present purposes is that it never occurs to progressives to stop and consider whether the Constitution permits them to do this. For a materialist, the Constitution is nothing but words on a piece of paper, and if those words get in the way of achieving their goals, so much the worse for the words. They will simply ignore them.

Progressives are perfectly happy to undermine the Constitution if doing so allows them to achieve their policy goals. They have been doing this for a long time now and they have made enormous advances in achieving those goals. My friend’s point was why shouldn’t conservatives start playing the game the same way? Why should we be the only ones who consider ourselves bound by the Constitution if we can achieve our goals by subverting it?

Here is why. Abiding by the Constitution’s restrictions is morally right. That is the only justification that matters. Conservatives, are, by definition, committed to preserving the Good and the True. In other words, the Good and the True are what conservatives strive to “conserve.” If we abandon that fight, all is lost. In a very real sense, the Constitutional process itself is more important than the results of that process at any given time. The rule of law is a precious thing. It has never been the norm in history. Progressives have proven over and over that they are ready to give it up. If conservatives follow their lead, what do we have left to resolve our differences? I will tell you what we have left. Power. When differences are resolved by raw power, violence is the order of the day, and the strong will prevail and the weak will succumb.

At the end of the day, despite our best efforts, we may not be able to avoid violence. For me, the children are the red line. We have already seen progressives passing laws in some states allowing the authorities to take children away from parents who disagree with radical transgender ideology. And if those efforts spread and progressives are widely successful in making criminals out of parents who disagree with them, I don’t see how violence can be avoided. In the meantime, I will cling to the hope that the people of this Nation will awaken spiritually and come to their senses and that the rule of law will prevail.

And if that happens “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and . . . government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” I hope. But it is hard to be optimistic.