As I’ve gone through my exercise of learning about the decline of marriage in America, its causes and results, what’s beginning to strike me is just how naïve and simplistic secularism is. As we have jettisoned organized religion, we’ve also jettisoned the intellectual foundations of morality.
Do you know how to build a jet engine? You don’t, do you? And yet, every time you fly, you rely on them and implicitly you rely on the people who have studied the design and construction of jet engines. You trust yourself to the collective experience of the jet engine industry.
When we abandon religion, we are discarding the collective experience and thought of centuries of theologians and replacing it with ... what? Catholic theology and morality is the result of generations of thinkers, both great and small, each building on each other and upon the observations of the secular world around them. St. Thomas Aquinas built his theological constructs on philosophers dating back to ancient Greece. St. Augustine’s contributions to theology are built primarily upon his desire to reconcile that which he observed in the world around him with religious and moral theory. His book Confessions is the story of his intellectual journey from hedonism to morality.
What is the secular corollary to this? Certainly secular philosophers like Rousseau produced great works, but where is the corresponding St. Augustine? St. Augustine turned from the Manichees to Catholicism because it became clear to him that the former did not fit the reality of the world around him. Now that it’s clear that hedonism and a self-focused lifestyle is detrimental to society, who in the secular world is leading the movement back to the success of traditional morality? Bill Cosby?
It might be possible to separate morality from theology, but I would suggest that it is impossible to separate morality from a deliberate construction of it from first principles. The secular world is paying the price, as we all are, for discarding the basis for morality.
3 comments:
I'm a big fan of the concept of "collective experience"... certain things work in society because people have figured out they work.
Cos' is fighting an uphill battle, of course, because his rationale basically puts people like Sharpton and Wright out of business.
...and why do I have this sudden urge for Jello Brand Puddin'?
The theme here, which is the same theme as you find with the mortgage crisis, is the long view vs. the short view.
In the short run, the libertine lifestyle and borrowing for a house you cannot afford is the better choice. Over the long run, it is not. The uphill battle is all about deferred gratification.
Great clip of Bill. I agree he's really fighting an uphill battle telling folks what they don't want to hear.
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