Juergen Habermas

Juergen Habermas, the Leftist guru, rocked Leftists everywhere  on their heels when he declared not so long ago that

‘Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western Civilisation. To this day we have no other options… We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is Post Modern chatter.’

Chuckling at the Ludicrous Contradictions of Leftism 

 For enemies of neo-Marxism it is of course entertaining to see someone like Habermas articulating the fundamental and ultimately deadly flaw in Post Modernism in action: that, however much they inevitably pervert them, everything Neo-Marxist  Post Modernists hold up as ideals to be cherished above all others and on which the agenda of Political Correctness is based would not and could not exist if Post Modernism were true. All these things rely on the truth of a religion, Christianity, which according to their philosophy is as false as all the others and on the Civilisation associated with Christianity which according to Post Modernists is of no more intrinsic worth than any other. That this is so is because (they say) there is no  God and if there is no God there is no ultimate Truth; no right and no wrong.

 The Enemy of our Ideals

The ultimately fatal flaw in Post Modernism in action; the seething, corrosive contradiction between ideology and the realities of life,  means that while Political Correctness trumpets its adherence to these ideals, it is in fact their deadly enemy.  Post Modern neo- Marxist Ideology does not match up to Reality. But Post Modernism says that Reality, and therefore Truth - does not in fact exist; that we create our own. Conveniently overlooking the fact that if this is correct, Political Correctness is of no more validity then any other system of ethics including those of Pol Pot, Adolph Hitler or Stalin, the neo-Marxists then say that it and we can and should be changed to suit their preferences.

The Left Moulds the Truth to Suit Themselves 

Hence the totalitarian  nature of the  Politically Correct New Labour regime, all of whose efforts are directed into the evil  project of changing Reality – ie Truth – to suit its Ideological view of it. Hence too the hatred of Neo –Marxism for Christianity, which claims to be the Truth (‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’ said Jesus, a reply to the ‘What is Truth ?’ of Pontius Pilate) and its attempts to smooth away those claims and those of competing religions.  Thus in an approving recent BBC report on the impact of immigration on London a little Moslem girl was seen informing us what she had been taught by her Marxist teachers; that one religion was as good as the next. One wonders what Moslems  thought of that, never mind the majority non-Moslem population.

 Other Options' ie Alternatives to Christianity?

But can there ever be ‘other options’ as Habermas puts it? Can there ever be a civilisation worthy of the name which is not associated with religion? The short answer, as T S Eliot remarked (‘Notes towards the Definition of  a Culture’) is no.  Why? Because without religion there is no Truth.  And without an apprehension of the Truth a Civilisation cannot exist.  We can see in our own Civilisation that as the grip of Christianity declines  so too does our Civilisation decline to the point where it is actively being destroyed through attacks on Christianity and absolute moral standards and  the imposition of multiculturalism (the practical outcome of a lack of belief in ultimate Truth) by some of those who are among its main beneficiaries.

 The Origins of Post Modernism

                                                                                 Immanuel Kant

Let’s take a brief look at the origins of Post Modernism. A good place to start is that towering Genius, the 18^th Century German Newton of Philosophy, Immanuel Kant. He was an ontological  realist in that he argued that  there was a ‘noumenal’ world of things- in- themselves, However, we can only know the ‘phenomenal’ world of things as they appear to us, mediated in the mind by certain pre-existing categories.

For Kant, faith was concerned with the noumenal world of things –in-themselves and therefore untouchable.  However, whilst denying all possible knowledge of God he gives no reason why it should be thought beyond human reach to engage in the contemplation of God.

Kant’s two worlds of the ‘noumenal’: things-in- themselves, and the ‘phenomenal'; things-as-they- appear-to-us, led to two diverging  paths of thought:-

1. A rejection of God and the real world as traditionally conceived. All that remained  was the knowledge we construct. This has lead to the scepticism we see today.

2. Affirmations of the idea of God as ontologically independent of the universe that God had created whilst nevertheless being immanent in it, and of the idea of the real world which our claims to knowledge seek to approximate.

The First Path from Kant

Hegel  rejected all ideas of the world independent of the one we know, denying the foundation of realism, bivalence.  Hegel’s pantheistic ‘God’ is the insights of rationality, which emerge in human beings through an ongoing dialectical process.

Marx rejected the spiritual.  For him, the material world was the only reality.  Where Hegel was positive about the spiritual, for Marx, religion was merely a device for keeping the lower classes under control.

Nietzsche  rejected God and with him any possibility of a view of the world in an absolute perspective. Human beings discover in things only what they have put into them.  There is no aim or point in the world.   However Nietzsche is not a relativist because for him there is a good: the  highest human aim is to be validated by one’s own will alone.  We can see the Nietzschean will to power in action in the attempt by the atheistic Politically Correct to impose their own preferences - their ideology on the rest of us.

Nietzsche does not so much argue his case as proclaim it. This (by the standards of rigour required in British philosophy) unacceptable  looseness is also a feature of Nietzsche’s heirs in  Post Modernism, the ‘litero-philosophers’ such as Foucault. As Merquior pointed out, they were subject to the illusion that ‘absence of method and neglect of argumentative rigour’ led automatically to a grasp of real problems. ('Foucault' Fontana 1985, p158). 

Nietzschean Postmodernism with its view of all human knowledge and reality itself as humanly constructed, represents the culmination of the first path from Kant.   

                                            Soren Kierkegaarde

The Second Path from Kant.

Kierkegaard was a realist who affirmed the existence of a truth to be accepted or rejected.  Faith represents an unproved and unproveable  assumption, on which we must stake our lives,  that the unknown which he termed ‘God’ existed and that truth means living in relationship with this reality, which is the only way out of our despair into full personhood.  It involves subjectivity as it means an inner appropriation of a commitment to a relationship with God.

Wittgenstein reached a very similar conclusion to Kierkegaard  by a different route.  His work in language games showed that the search for foundations for truth is folly.  However, this does not mean that there is no truth to be sought.   Individuals grasp at the transcendent through their words, and some stake their lives on claims made through language that cannot be proved. This does not mean that these claims are wrong.   But a perspicuous understanding involves the apprehension of the need for humility and ambiguity because they may be.

The Present Post Modernist Age

We live in an age when Post Modernism is fashionable to the extent that the alternative path from Kant through Kierkegaard is hardly mentioned amongst the soi-disant leftist  intelligentsia and certainly not in any evidence on the BBC, which scarcely bothers to conceal its contempt for religion and Christianity in particular. (After having had an atheist as head of Religious Broadcasting it has recently appointed a Moslem to that post).

Nevertheless as Kierkegaard pointed out, the possibility of God and therefore of Truth exists. And with it the possibility of a true Civilisation exists also, a position confirmed in the work of the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin who argued (‘Social and Cultural Dynamics’) that historically civilisations rose and fell according to their orientation to the spiritual.

 The Future for our Civilisation

But if Truth can only be grasped by religious faith, what then is the outlook for the Civilisation of the West and Britain in particular?

Whilst Britain is amongst the most irreligious  societies on earth, a fact reflected in its ongoing social disintegration and its status as also one of the most amoral, materialistic and selfish (It has  some of the highest ranking indicators of social pathology such as crime, drug-taking, abortion and single motherhood among the advanced countries), the  Death of Christianity overall  has been overstated, a fact reflected by such recent books as ‘The Twilight of Atheism:  The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World’ by Alister McGrath,  Oxford Professor of the History of Christianity.  

Sorokin argued that the dynamics of society would bring about an inevitable reversal in the atheistic,  materialistic trend we see all about us.

We should pray that when our country embraces the spiritual once again that it is Christianity it once more takes to its bosom.  Because if it doesn’t, it will almost certainly take Islam instead.