Mr Chesterton, meet Herr Mann

Great men are often seers, and the two gentlemen in the title are no exception. Put together their two adages, both uttered about a century ago, and the jigsaw puzzle of our time is complete.

Thus G.K. Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

In other words, atheism narrows the mind and widens the range of credulity. In still other words, when a man decides to take the Pascal wager, he gains a particle of Logos, the incarnated reason. That gift is denied an atheist, who thus joins the ranks of men one of whom, according to P.T. Barnum, is born every minute.

In practical terms, an atheist rejects intellectual discipline and discernment. He will rejoice in his newly opened mind, not realising that it has in effect become a tabula rasa ready to receive any scribbled message, sound or not. Alas, in most cases he’ll lack the ability or even desire to tell the difference.

A mind needs the discipline of the absolute as much as a general needs a strategy, a traveller needs an itinerary or a builder needs an architectural drawing. Firm belief in the existence of absolute truth equips a man to look for reasonable approximations in any task he sets himself.

A general can change his strategy in response to a sudden turn in the battle, a traveller may decide to take a different road, and a builder may choose to adorn the drawn structure with all sorts of ornaments. But rather than debunking the need for the original plan, such modifications confirm it.

Replacing the overarching absolute with a melange of little relativities will eventually lead to chaos. The general will confuse his troops with mutually exclusive orders, the traveller will find he is going around in circles, the builder will erect a rickety structure ready to tumble at any moment.

People sense this, either consciously or intuitively. Hence, if they can’t satisfy their ontological craving for the absolute by worshipping God, their fashionably open minds are bound to look for other options.

The menu of such options is vast, and it changes every day, with different specials highlighted in bold type. Which ones should they choose? Some of them? All of them? That’s where the trouble starts: they lack the discernment that can only come from a disciplined mind structured hierarchically.

A believer starts from the knowledge of absolute truth, which enables him to think vertically. God sits at the very top, and the believer will use him, wittingly or unwittingly, as the ultimate arbiter not only of moral choices, but also of intellectual and aesthetic ones.

By contrast, an atheist tends to think horizontally. All the dishes on the menu are sitting on his table, cooked, served and looking equally tasty. He’ll choose a few almost at random, only then to post-rationalise his choices by insisting that the dishes he picked have more taste and nutritional value. But he doesn’t really know that, and he has no mechanism for arriving at such knowledge.

That doesn’t mean an atheist can’t be any good at solving the quotidian problems of life. He can – purely practical thought may tick along nicely without any need for the absolute. Thus one can easily imagine an atheist programmer, an atheist banker or an atheist accountant. But an atheist philosopher is an oxymoron. And even, more generally, an atheist thinker is suspect.

Philosophy, when all is said and done, is the science of first principles and last causes – it’s the science of the absolute. Therefore an atheist, no matter how adept he is at double-entry accounting, can’t be a philosopher any more than a man who can’t add up can become good at double-entry accounting.  

That’s Chesterton’s aphorism, decorticated. An atheist culture will gradually disintegrate into a hodgepodge of cults. Each will be at first asserted with quasi-religious fervour – only then to be replaced with another adored with the same passion.

This is where Thomas Mann adds his pfennig’s worth: “All intellectual attitudes are latently political.” Simple observation will confirm this is so, these days. But why is it?

Why do all modern cults demand – and these days usually get – political action? For example, the sustained effort to bowdlerise English in the name of bogus equality is called political correctness. But what are the political implications of, say, following a singular antecedent with a plural personal pronoun? If the crazy idea that otherwise someone will get offended crosses a modern mind, why not call it moral or ethical correctness?

The answer, I think, is that all modern cults are strictly secondary and derivative. Their primary cause was an outburst of negative energy, the urge to destroy the civilisation brought to life by universal commitment to the absolute.

Anything directly attributable to that civilisation made the new breed reach for the wrecking ball. The dominant emotion wasn’t passive, academic rejection – it was a destructive animus demanding action.

That energy had a constantly repleted reservoir and hence a steadily growing level. Over a relatively short time, it produced an anthropological shift. Western Man, the dominant creative force of the old civilisation was ousted by a new species, Modern Man.

The new type could operate productively only at the lower reaches of thought, those involved in producing the material paraphernalia of life. The absolute was beyond his reach, it was something Modern Man perceived as hostile and sought to destroy – while intuitively craving a satisfactory surrogate.

None of his hodgepodge of little cults can function in any creative capacity. But put together, they can chip away at the edifice of the old civilisation. To do so more effectively they have to draw in the powers that be – the state. And a state can only be enrolled as a supporter, protector and promulgator of cults by political action.

That’s how seemingly apolitical feelings, such as preference for some kind of music or art, belief that no type of sexuality is perverse, suspicion of some chemical elements and so on are translated into aggressive political activism.

A sculptor taking a chisel to a slab of marble is driven by rational and aesthetic impulses. A vandal taking a sledgehammer to the resulting sculpture is immune both to reason and beauty. No matter how smart he may be otherwise, how good at his job and sensible with his investments, his reason doesn’t just play second fiddle to his hatred – it’s not even in the orchestra.

This explains why today’s political activists run up their flag posts whole buntings of absurd notions incapable of withstanding even a minute of rational inquiry. It’s not that they don’t realise, for instance, that CO2 is a trace gas of a trace gas whose role in climate changes is minuscule, while man’s role in producing it is smaller still. Such thoughts don’t even come into it.

They see through the red mist blinding their eyes a gigantic, if vaguely outlined, image of a receding civilisation and know viscerally it’s their target. Obsession with CO2 is just one arrow in their quiver, along with many others, such as doctrinaire Darwinism, reducing churches to social services, indoctrination of children in abnormal sexuality, ugly aesthetics and harebrained intellectual ideas – anything will do as long as it hits the mark.

That’s why it’s next to impossible to argue with paid-up Modern Men. That would be like arguing with a cannibal about the delights of a vegan diet. He wouldn’t even know what you are talking about. All he’ll know is that you are his enemy to be silenced – and it takes political action to do that.

That’s why, while accepting Chesterton’s maxim verbatim, I’d modify Mann’s with a qualifier: “All modern intellectual attitudes are latently political.” Come to think of it, they aren’t as latent as all that either. Rather, they are aggressively, destructively political. That’s what makes them modern.