Society

Conversation 22, Socrates Worldview 17/22

ADEIMANTUS. Let me introduce my brother. Out of respect for antiquity and your idiosyncrasies, he has agreed to be called Glaucon.

SOCRATES. Welcome Glaucon. Are you, like the Glaucon of old, a flashy and opinionated fellow with delusions of genius and a lust for power?

GLAUCON. I hope not, Socrates?

S. Well, do you ride a bicycle?

G. No Socrates, I am an atheist.

S. You don’t believe in God?

G. That is the accepted meaning of ‘atheist’, I believe.

S. Which God do you not believe in?

G. Any god you like to name, especially the Christian one you are always going on about.

S. Do you mean the God who is described as being a loving, just, and merciful father?

G. I rather think it is the one who makes all those rules, some of which are appalling.

S. Do you refer to the rule, ‘Love God with all you heart, and love your neighbour as yourself?’

G. No, not that one. If you leave out the ‘God’ bit, then everyone agrees with that one anyway. No, that’s just a sugar-coated smokescreen to hide all the nasty rules.

S. What is truly appalling here, Glaucon, is your mixing of metaphors! And I cannot agree that everyone loves his neighbour, even if they pay lip service to the idea. You don’t have to look far to find people attacking others viciously, with words if not with physical violence. But tell me about the rules you regard as ‘nasty’.

G. Well, the prohibition of abortion, for example. It infringes on the liberty of women.

S. All rules infringe on liberty, Glaucon. That’s the nature of rules. Are you suggesting that we should not have any rules to govern our conduct?

G. No, of course not, although we should have as few rules as possible.

S. I heartily agree with you there! So, it’s only particular rules you object to?

G. Yes. Some of the rules you Christians want to impose on us all are unjust or go too far.

S. Then let us examine some particular rules. Do you agree with the rule, ‘Thou shalt not kill?’

G. It is marvellously succinct and does not allow any qualifications, but I suppose I accept it in most cases that I can think of.

S. I think there are qualifications implicit in the context within which the ten commandments are presented in the biblical story. The overall context is that you must not put yourself and your ‘agenda’ before that of God or other people. So, the rule means that you must no kill to gain advantage over others. For example, it might be permissible to kill someone who was attacking a defenceless person, if that was the only way of saving the person being attacked.

G. Nearly everyone would accept that as reasonable.

S. But you are prepared to let a woman have her defenceless unborn child killed?

G. The unborn child is not a person. Surely the rule means we must not kill people, that is, persons?

S. I strongly disagree with you there, Glaucon. When does the child become a person? When it’s born?

G. It would appear so, Socrates.

S. And a child in the womb that is about to be born is not a person?

G. Perhaps the mother thinks of it as a person, but a philosopher might not.

S. And a mother who does not want the child that is about to be born and is considering terminating the pregnancy does not think of the child as a person?

G. It seems that some in that situation do not.

S. So, the question of whether a child that is about to be born is a person, or not, depends on what someone thinks?

G. So it seems, Socrates.

S. But is this not what I have said all along, Glaucon?¹ Anyway Glaucon, whether you meant to or not, you have moved us neatly into a discussion of the topic I planned to talk about today, namely morality.

G. You mean all those rules you want to impose on us?

S. Until today, Glaucon, we have been talking about my worldview and how I reconcile my understanding as a hard-headed scientist with my faith as a Christian. It has been about my individual views and preferences. I am still not sure whether I have persuaded Adeimantus and Critobulus that I am not soft in the head.

E. What about my views, Socrates?

S. I think you, Euthydemus, still regard me as an infidel, or at least a heretic, although I retain hopes of broadening your outlook. What I was about to say was that a worldview must include ideas about how people get on with each other, in a word, about society.

G. Are you saying morality has something to do with society? I thought morality was about how I choose to behave, the rules I submit myself to.

S. Morality is also about the rules you want other people to obey, Glaucon. That being so, morality has everything to do with society.

G. I am against rules in general, Socrates. I am a free spirit.

S. Then you want to impose a rule that others shall not make rules! You can’t avoid rules if you want people to get on with you and each other. You are not, I take it, familiar with the most excellent book, ‘Morality – Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times’ by Jonathan Sacks, who was for many years the Chief Rabbi for the United Kingdom?

G. No, Socrates.

S. You would do well to read it. He says everything I want to say about society, and more. One thing he says is, ‘a shared morality is essential to society. A society is not simply a collection of individuals doing what they like so long as they do not harm others.’ (Sacks 2020, Ch. 10)

C. Grayling would not like to hear that.

S. No Critobulus, the humanists, as I have said before, are wishful thinkers. They hope everyone will be nice like themselves, but they never seriously tackle the problem of how to deal with people who are not squeamish about doing harm to others.

C. Obviously, they have to impose rules on those recalcitrant people, not to harm them, but for their own good.

A. And since humanists are wise and learned, they know what is best for everyone!

S. Yes Adeimantus, as Sacks pointed out, Rousseau, the architect of the French Revolutionary constitution, notoriously said that in the case of a person who prefers his personal good to the common good, the state may have to ‘force him to be free’, because deep down that person wants to belong to society and so wants the common good, even if he doesn’t know that. (Sacks 2020, Ch. 8).

A. It’s always a problem when an individual’s desires conflict with the common good.

S. I agree, Adeimantus. Sacks also says, ‘A free society is a moral achievement’, and ‘Morality is essential to freedom’ (Sacks 2020, Introduction). What do you think he means by a free society?

A. I would say that a free society is one which allows individuals to follow their own desires, as long as they do no harm to the common good.

S. You are a wise man, Adeimantus. Did you notice, Critobulus, how what Adeimantus said differs from what our humanist Grayling would say?

C. I think Grayling would have said, ‘do no harm to other individuals’, whereas Adeimantus said ‘do no harm to the common good.’

S. Precisely, Critobulus. Do you think it is possible to harm the common good without directly harming any individual person?

C. That’s a curly one, Socrates.

S. Do you remember when I spoke about abortion and euthanasia, how I said that there are always other people who are affected?² One might argue that those other people are not harmed, but relationships are damaged. The social atmosphere is poisoned by a reduction in trust, of hope, and by a reduction in willingness to put the feelings of others before our own. In short, the common good is diminished.

G. Are you saying that to be free, you must follow rules? That sounds contradictory.

S. There are different kinds of freedom, Glaucon. If you and everyone else agree to abide by a minimal set of rules, you can act freely within the limits imposed by those rules. If you decide you want the freedom to do whatever you like, then what is to stop others from doing whatever they like? What those others might choose to do could greatly harm you. The law of the jungle soon comes to apply. I doubt you will feel very free if cruel and unpredictable things are likely to be done to you.

G. So the best we can hope for is limited freedom?

S. That is a fact of human existence, Glaucon.

G. But if we all agree to do no harm?

S. You are taking us round in circles, Glaucon. Sacks points out that the consequences of actions that appear not to cause immediate harm to others may have serious consequences in the longer term (Sacks 2020, Ch. 10). He gives the example of legalising addictive drugs. I have given my examples of abortion and euthanasia poisoning the common good.

G. So, what do we do?

S. We agree to give up a little bit of freedom for the common good. We agree to obey some rules for the good of others. That’s what morality is. In return, we gain the freedom of being able to trust others and to live our lives without strife. Do you know about Chesterton’s metaphor of the walled playground?

C. Tell us, Socrates.

S. Chesterton described a country where Catholic morality still held sway as being like a walled playground on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea (Chesterton 1909, Ch. IX). He said as long as the walls stood, the children felt free to enjoy themselves, but when the walls were knocked down, they huddled in the centre, well away from the cliff, for fear of falling over.

A. Very picturesque, but I see what you mean.

C. What do we do about recalcitrants, like Glaucon here, who break the rules?

S. I think there are three categories of rule-breakers. Firstly, there are common criminals. They generally accept that the rules are valid, but they hope to gthoain some advantage by breaking them. Hoping to get away with doing so. We hope that their thinking can be corrected so they see the folly of their ways. Secondly, there are people that we might call sociopaths. They don’t care about others and don’t accept that the rules apply to them. They are generally beyond correction and may need permanent restraint. Thirdly, there are conscientious objectors. They accept rules in general, but object to certain rules on serious religious or philosophical grounds. They are more difficult to accommodate since they care for the common good. They may occasionally be allowed a dispensation from a rule, as long as it doesn’t involve driving on the wrong side of the road or shirking their taxes. Fortunately, genuine conscientious objectors are rare.

E. So, Socrates, you admit that we sometimes have to force people to follow what we believe to be right! By what authority do you impose your beliefs on others?

S. I was expecting you to speak up, Euthydemus. I gave you a stern warning yesterday not to force your beliefs on others, and your question is an important one. The key to understanding this is the word ‘shared’ in my quote from Sacks, ‘a shared morality is essential to society’. Morality can be shared because it is imposed, or because it appeals to most people. The latter is certainly preferable. People will try to circumvent an imposed morality, but they generally see the benefit of going along with a morality that they and others like. And it is not only authoritarian governments that impose morality. Democracies can also be tyrannical when it comes to imposing morality. If fact, for democracies not to be tyrannical they need a shared morality under which the majority cares for the good of minorities. A shared morality is a prerequisite for a benevolent democracy.

A. How can we go about establishing a shared morality, Socrates?

S. That is the crucial question, Adeimantus. It is a complex one and a full answer would be long, even if I was able to give one.

C. Give us the short answer, Socrates.

S. The first point, I think Critobulus, is that there must be an accepted higher authority who makes the rules. For religions, God is the higher authority. For secular societies, there may be some collective notion of the ‘people’, or tribe, which is seen as the authority, or a monarch. Clearly, God, if accepted, makes a ‘cleaner’ authority, but any generally accepted authority will do. This is one of the areas where humanists seriously misunderstand human nature. No human likes another person to gain advantage over them by imposing rules. It is not seen as fair. But if God or a king imposes the same rules on everyone, then that is seen as fair and acceptable.

A. Does it matter what the rules are, Socrates?

S. Certainly it does, Adeimantus. As I have just said, the rules must accord with human nature. This means they must be seen as fair and equitable, the same for everyone and not impinging on essential freedoms, meaning freedoms people are not willing to give up for the collective good.

A. How do we determine what is the collective good?

S. This was easier in the days of Grayling’s ‘illiterate herdsmen’. For nomadic tribespeople, to be cast out of the group was a death sentence. People needed rules to keep social order and the tribe together. Something like adultery could fracture the group, and so it was regarded as immoral. In our modern, technologically advanced and highly organised societies, it is more difficult to identify our dependence on others. Food and services turn up on demand, usually reliably, and often without me having to interact directly with any person, or through very minimal interactions. I can go in and out of the supermarket now and get what I want without speaking to a soul.

C. But they are watching you on CCTV, Socrates.

S. Sadly, that is the case. What I am saying is that education to promote an understanding of our interdependence would help to foster a shared morality. Because we are still greatly dependent on each other, even though our dependence may not involve personal interaction.

A. Adultery still causes fractures.

S. Yes, Adeimantus. These days the harm might be less about the shame a cuckold feels in a tribal society and more about the loss of trust in someone we relied on, but it still fractures families and weakens society. I would also point out that awareness of mutual interdependence adds to the meaning of life. We find it meaningful and worthwhile to be doing something that we know helps others and which is recognised as useful. This awareness would go some way to alleviating the epidemic of anxiety and depression our society is experiencing.

C. Of course, it would help if we actually had personal interactions in the process of helping others.

S. True, Critobulus. It is hard for a cog in a machine to be appreciated for the good the machine is going.

C. (Sings) ‘I feel to be a cog in something turning.’

S. Lovely, Critobulus. Now, let me ask you all a question. Would you adhere to a creed that felt good for you but would result in a terrible society if everyone adopted it?

A. No doubt you are going to compare Christianity with humanism on that score, Socrates?

S. I am, Adeimantus, although as usual what I say in favour of Christianity could also apply to other religions that have widespread following. I choose Christianity and humanism since we have already discussed them at length, although you could substitute another creed. However, I caution that it’s a massive undertaking for one person to develop their own, comprehensive, self-consistent philosophy and then persuade others to adopt it. I can point you to scientific research that shows how poorly most people understand the basis of their beliefs and how much we depend on others in developing our beliefs (Cook 2017).

C. I will look it up as soon as I get home.

S. When we first met, Critobulus, I think you got all your beliefs and ideas from your postmodernist friends.

C. Touché, Socrates.

G. I suppose you are going to say what a wonderful, shared morality Christianity has given us.

S. Well Glaucon, the case for Christianity is not difficult to make. But firstly, we should agree the criteria for deciding the best creed. Do you have any suggestions on that score, Glaucon?

G. I will feel it in my gut when I hear of a good creed.

S. Perhaps I had better help your gut to articulate its criteria, Glaucon. What do you say to this proposal: the best creed is that which maximises the common good while least infringing on the freedom of the individual?

G. I think my gut would be comfortable with that.

S. That’s good enough for me, Glaucon. Who will make the case for Christianity? Adeimantus?

A. I think I could put together a case based on things you have said previously, but it would be quicker if you stated the case yourself, Socrates.

S. Very well. Christianity, and the Jewish religion before it, have a very long track record as a successful moral code for a peaceful society. These religions were designed for that purpose. God wanted his people to be holy as he is holy, and for that they had to live in a society that was not torn by dissention and strife. For long periods of Jewish and Christian history, the moral code was so widely and thoroughly shared that the thought of questioning it would never have entered the heads of most ordinary people. Do you agree?

A. Yes, but what do you mean by ‘ordinary people’?

S. Anyone who was not a philosopher, which was the great majority of people.

G. I agree so far, but what about individual freedom?

S. How do you explain the rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman empire, Glaucon?

G. Christianity evidently had some appeal, the nature of which I can’t imagine.

S. I put it to you and your gut, Glaucon, that Christianity appealed to the Romans, especially the lower classes of Romans, because it offered greater freedom of a sort. The Christians taught that God, as the higher moral authority, regarded every person as of equal value, while most Romans came to see the state religion, by comparison, as favouring the interests of the ruling elite. People could see that the Christians lived to a higher moral standard and that they looked after each other in their communities, regardless of their status in Roman society. They came to understand that Jesus had shifted the emphasis of morality from obeying rules to loving and serving one another, so that obeying the rules did not seem burdensome. They understood what Jesus meant when he said, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden light’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 11:30).

G. Yes, but Christian countries allowed slavery, subjugated women, and persecuted homosexuals.

S. Remember that Saint Paul said, ‘There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female - for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Galatians 3:28). To be sure, the equality was more spiritual than practical. Social norms took longer to change. Men still had more freedom than women, but don’t forget that for most of history working men, which is most men, had very little choice about what they could do. Slaves were welcome as equals in the early Christian church, but it took many centuries before Christian countries made a serious effort to stamp out slavery. As for homosexuality, the prohibition in biblical times was against the practice, not the inclination. It was to protect the primacy of the family as the core unit of society. Don’t forget that marriage could only be between a man and a woman for the procreation of children, and that sex outside of marriage was forbidden for heterosexual people as much as for homosexuals. Divorce was forbidden as much for the protection of women and children as for any other reason, because they could not support themselves without a husband and father.

G. You’re full of excuses, Socrates.

S. I am not saying that society under Christianity was perfect, Glaucon, but if you study history, I think you will find that it was far better than what came before and after. You can make a good case that the United States in the twentieth century was the freest society the world has ever known, in the sense that its citizens could go about their business with the fewest constraints and with the greatest trust in their fellows and confidence in their institutions. Sacks has described the central role that Christianity played in creating the conditions for that freedom to flourish.

C. What you say may be true for white people, Socrates, but it wasn’t so rosy for the black people in America.

S. Rember that it was the British government, motivated by Christian principles, that deployed the Royal Navy to blockade the slave trade to the Americas and bring it to an end. And it was white Christian men you fought on the Union side in the American Civil War, and died in large numbers, to end slavery in the United States. Certainly, discrimination against black people persisted long after the Civil War, but that was because people set aside their Christian principles. But let me turn the question back to you, Critobulus. In the USA at the present time, black people have the same rights as any other citizen - they even have discrimination in their favour – and yet surveys show that they now feel less equal than they used to. How do you explain that, Critobulus?

C. No doubt you will blame humanism for it, Socrates.

S. You are not wrong, Critobulus. As I said before, just as society reaches a peak of prosperity and equality, the rot sets in. People begin to think they can make it on their own, that they don’t need other people to succeed, and that their choices don’t affect others. They see an illusory freedom of doing whatever they choose. As Sacks put it, they put the ‘I’ before the ‘We’. Rather than working for the common good, people now put all their effort into ‘realising their potential’. Humanism encourages this thinking.

A. I expected you to put most blame on those people you call cynics, you know, the postmodernists, Marxists, and their like.

S. Those cynics are evil, Adeimantus, and there is not much that can be done about them but to fortify ourselves to defend against them. No, it is the people who should have known better that I am most upset about. Nietzsche foresaw the calamitous consequences of discarding religion, yet he embraced the calamity. He gave up hope. And our gentle humanist, Grayling still argues for a rationalist utopia while everything is collapsing around him.

G. Some people refer to Grayling as ‘the velvet atheist’, I believe.

S. Yes, he sounds apologetic when he delivers his ‘harsh-sounding point’ about the major religions being products of ‘illiterate herdsmen’ (Grayling 2013, Ch. 12).

A. What is collapsing, Socrates?

S. Surely you can see what is happening to our Western society, Adeimantus. Suddenly, in the last couple of generations, anxiety and depression are at record levels, life expectancy is declining, trust in civil institutions and politicians is rapidly evaporating, and people see their worst enemies among their fellow citizens. Is that not so, Adeimantus?

A. Certainly, there are problems, Socrates.

S. My father once said ….

E. That would be Socrates Senior, I suppose?

S. That is correct, Euthydemus. My father once said, as he was watching the evening news, ‘What this country needs is another war.’ I was appalled at the time, but now I know what he meant. He was a young man during the dark days of the Second World War, and he saw that camaraderie, working for the common good, was stronger during the war than after it. Can any of you point to one country that has been founded on humanist principles and succeeded?

A. What about modern France?

S. A good example, thank you Adeimantus. I’m sure you know that after the French Revolution, the new France adopted Rousseau’s humanist constitution. I mentioned it earlier. I’m sure you also know that without the constraints of Christian morality, the experiment rapidly descended into the Reign of Terror.

A. Yes, but modern France is a free and stable country.

S. Modern France, like modern Israel and most other Western countries, is a secular state which allows religion in the civil sphere. That is an arrangement that separates the morality needed for the common good from the political sphere. Every regime that has explicitly tried to suppress religion or supplant it with some atheistic ideology has ended in disaster. And anyway, I believe the French are as alarmed as anyone else about the decline of their civil society. We are watching the humanist experiment unfold before our eyes, and it is a train wreck.

C. If the humanists are not the real villains, Socrates, why are you so hard on them?

S. Have you not been listening, Critobulus. As I was saying, the humanists are the bad shepherds that Jermiah referred to when he said, ‘Lost sheep, such were my people; their shepherds led them astray’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Jeremiah 50:6). Jesus, you know, was ‘the good shepherd’ who ‘lays down his life for his sheep’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, John 10:11). The cynics are the wolves in sheep’s clothing, although most of them don’t bother with the sheep’s clothing anymore.

C. So, what specifically did the humanist do wrong?

S. They opened the gate of the sheepfold. They took away Chesterton’s wall without understanding what it was for. They should have known better, but they were seduced by falling in love with their own rationality. You know that Grayling downplays morality when he says, ‘traditional religious moralities are in fact not to the point’ (Grayling 2013, Ch. 21). He promotes ethics, which is about the good life of the individual, and them he says that ‘morality is the responsibility of a social conversation’ (Grayling 2013, Ch. 16) without identifying any authority for deciding what the morals are going to be. He argues against religious morality being passed on from one generation to the next and criticises faith base schools (Grayling 2013, Ch. 21). This is a hopelessly optimistic agenda, each generation having to invent its own moral system to ensure the common good, and it has not succeeded anywhere. All it has achieved is to weaken the defences against the cynics.

A. I take it you are not a fan of multiculturalism, Socrates?

S. Bringing different cultural groups together in one society can have some benefits. The different groups can learn from each other and perhaps become more tolerant of differences. If nothing else, it can make society more interesting. But is a mistake to assume that different cultural groups need no incentive to enhance their common interests. Multiculturalism as an end tends to work the other way, to emphasise different identities and discourage any trend towards uniformity. Fairly obviously, that works against developing the shared moral understanding necessary for a free society.

A. Wouldn’t you concede, Socrates, that Western societies achieved their greatest freedom when religion began to decline and humanism to become popular?

S. It is like a rocket that continues to rise under momentum after its motor cuts out, before succumbing to gravity and falling to the earth. The individual freedom offered by humanism to choose your own ethics gave people a feeling of freedom, while residual Christian morality kept society on an even keel for a while. Christianity has a concept of God: humanism has a caricature of Christianity. Humanism has been characterised as Christianity without religion, and that is not far from the truth. I contend that humanism as it is today could not have come into being without Christianity. Some of its ideas may come from the ancient Greeks (funnily enough, humanists like to say they descend from the Stoics and Epicureans, who fact were quite religious, of a pagan variety), but humanism could not have grown through history without the benign sufferance of Christianity, which created the conditions for it to survive the depredations of tyrants and ideologues throughout the years. If I wanted to give a harsh saying, I could say that humanism is parasitic on Christianity. Like any parasite it doesn’t do the host any good, but it can’t survive without the host.³

G. A pretty speech, Socrates. I don’t suppose the comfortable professors ever thought of themselves as parasites.

S. I will have more to say about that in a minute, Glaucon. When I say that they should have known better, let me refer you to the Freedom of Thought Report 2022 (Humanists International 2022). It reminded me very much of similar reports about threats to Christianity around the world. Indeed, threats to freedom of thought and freedom of religion have much in common. For both, these threats came from fundamentalist religions and from authoritarian secular states.

A. You have to admit that fundamentalist religious regimes have a bad track record on freedom of thought.

S. I do, Adeimantus. It’s the old problem of weaponizing religion to shore up unpopular political power structures. But one of the things those religious fundamentalists are trying to defend themselves against is the insidious influence of Western individualism. I think, as I have said before, that humanists are busy arguing against the old enemy, religion, while failing to see that the cynics have snuck by them. Humanism has tried to occupy the unstable ground between religion and cynicism.

A. Are you saying, in effect, that Rationalism as a way of life is untenable?

S. I believe so, Adeimantus. Rationalism takes more time and effort than most people have. Rationalists can't sustain it themselves and fail to notice that they give in to their own irrational preferences. Rationalism doesn't help people troubled by guilt or injustice; it offers no hope. And worst of all, Rationalism offers no effective defence against malevolent ideologies.

C. So, are you saying we should not be rational?

S. As I have said many times before, Critobulus, rationality is good in its own domain, but it doesn’t work for all human experience. Humanists fail to grasp a fundamental truth of human nature, that good and evil is in all of us. They think they can arbitrate on good and evil but can't agree among themselves. They fail to understand what the 'illiterate herdsmen' understood: that the authority to say what is good and what is evil has to be above humanity. Humanists turn out to be the useful fools for evil thinkers, the cynics. They have fiddled while Rome burned as the cynics made their ‘long march through the institutions’ of Western society.

C. I was wondering when you were going to get to the ‘long march’.

S. Do you know what we are talking about, Euthydemus?

E. I haven’t the faintest idea, Socrates.

S. Look it up on the internet, Euthydemus. You will soon find something,⁴ but let me give you a quick summary. In the 1930’s in Germany there was a group of academics of a Marxist persuasion called the Frankfurt Group. I’m not going to dignify them by giving their names, but you can find them. They were puzzling about why the working class in the free democracies of the West were not rising up to overthrow their capitalist oppressors.

C. I suppose they were comfortable professors.

S. Yes, but when the Nazis gained power things became uncomfortable in Germany.

E. What did these brave professors do? Did they stand up to the Nazis?

S. Not at all Euthydemus. The brave professors were too clever to fall into that trap. They knew it would be dangerous to stand up to the Nazis and they naturally thought that fighting and dying was more suited to the working classes they championed when it was safe to do so. So, they high tailed it to America.

A. That would explain the propensity for all ‘progressive thinkers’ to call anyone who disagrees with them a ‘Nazi’.

E. And were they accepted in America?

S. Of course. The USA was a liberal and open society that tolerated even idiots like these neo-Marxists. It rewarded them by giving them comfortable professorships.

E. Then what did they do? Did they come to see the good side of capitalism?

S. No, Euthydemus. The malicious cowards demonstrated their gratitude to the free society that gave them refuge by setting out to destroy it from within. They didn’t see the irony in this, but then it is a rare Marxist that has a sense of humour, and they seem impervious to irony. Realising that the working class had it too good in America, they thought that what they needed was a coalition of minorities. The plan was to stir up the grievances, often legitimate, of minority groups by convincing them of the virtue of their victimhood. They developed ‘critical theory’ as an academic technique for criticising every good and useful institution in Western society, from religion to the family, universities, schools, financial institutions, business operations, and so. Thus was born what we now call ‘identity politics’.

A. They seem to have been spectacularly successful, Socrates.

S. Yes, Adeimantus. Their ‘critical theory’ has all the hallmarks of evil. It is another wolf in sheep’s clothing. It makes a cunning appeal to the better instincts of people in order to entrap them. So, not all the learned and wise are good, they may be evil. Critical theory has become the standard technique of historical analysis in the humanities departments of universities throughout the Western world.

E. Why did nobody stop them?

S. Oh, you simple soul, Euthydemus. The comfortable professors of humanities were all, unsurprisingly, humanists. They were so busy criticising their old enemy, religion, that they failed to see the danger. Our old friend Grayling was Master of the New College of the Humanities in London. He is quoted as saying, ‘Much of the talent that goes into law, journalism, the civil service, politics, financial services, the creative industries, publishing, education, and much besides, is drawn from people who have studied the humanities.’ (The Parrhesia Diaries 2020). And so the rot of critical theory has spread through the institutions of Western societies, which are now falling apart under the influence of identity politics. The humanists turned out to be the ‘useful fools’ of the new-Marxists.

C. God help us, Socrates.

S. Perhaps God will help us, Critobulus. Do you now see the true colours of your postmodernist friends? And do you see why I prefer Christianity to humanism? There is a social dimension to my preference as well as a personal dimension.

C. Yes, I do see. Socrates.

E. Do you think Christianity will survive? Churches are in decline everywhere.

S. In the West, certainly the Churches are in decline. But I think they will survive. The Holy Spirit is more than a match for the forces of darkness. But I don’t expect we will return to the past where the Church was the dominant institution in Western Society. I think it is more likely that the Church will be a seed and stimulus for a new morality of the common good.

E. So you are hopeful?

S. Always, Euthydemus. Hope is the hallmark of the Christian. But I think things may get worse before they get better. It is possible that the cynics might fool so many people that they become bold enough to take up burning heretics. The future Bishop of Chicago might yet end up being burnt in the city square.⁵ I predict that when the fire is lit there will be two humanists burnt with him, one on the bishop’s right and one on his left.

C. That would be fitting.

S. Well then, enough of this gloom. Next time I will fulfill my promise and return to talking about science. I want to tell you about quantum mechanics and the limits of science.

A. Until tomorrow, then.

References

Chesterton, G. K. 1909. Orthodoxy. London: John Lane/The Bodley Head.

Cook, Gareth. 2017. "You Do Not Think Alone." Scientific American. June 20. Accessed June 30, 2017. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-do-not-think-alone.

Grayling, A. C. 2013. The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism. Bloomsbury.

Humanists International. 2022. "Freedom of Thought Report 2022." Humanists International. Edited by Emma Wadsworth-Jones. Accessed March 21, 2023. https://humanists.international/what-we-do/freedom-of-thought-report.

Sacks, Jonathan. 2020. Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. Hodder and Stoughton.

1985. The New Jerusalem Bible. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd.

The Parrhesia Diaries. 2020. "The Marxist “long march” into the age of identity politics." The Parrhesia Diaries. February 2. Accessed October 2, 2023. https://theparrhesiadiaries.medium.com/the-marxist-long-march-through-the-institutions-and-into-the-age-of-identity-politics-6a7042b235dc.

Unamuno, Miguel de. 1912. Tragic Sense of Life.

1. See the conversation on The Person.

2. See the conversation on Objections to Humanism.

3. Some time after this conversation took place, Socrates found that the same idea had been expressed before. In his book ‘Tragic sense of life’ (Unamuno 1912), Miguel de Unamuno quotes from one Arthur James Balfour who in the 1895 edition of the J The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, Chap. iv, said “So it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay, and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them”.

4. For example, see (The Parrhesia Diaries 2020).

5. See the conversation on Objections to Humanism.