Science as the new ‘Natural Law’

The philosophy of scientific government had resulted in the horrors of two World Wars and the specter of centralized, tyrannical government. But that science could free mankind was still in the offing in the postwar period. And why not? 

As John F. Kennedy put it in one of his last speeches in 1963, “Science is the most powerful means we have for the unification of knowledge, and a main obligation of its future must be to deal with problems which cut across boundaries, whether boundaries between the sciences, boundaries between nations, or boundaries between man’s scientific and his humane concerns.”
 
The focus on science had radically shifted. Science had begun, in the Francis Bacon philosophy, as an aid toward the betterment of man’s material conditions; it had morphed over time into an aid toward the betterment of man’s moral condition, though not the source of morality itself. But now, with God out of the picture and the collective implicated in the worst crimes in human history, science was handed the task of creating a new morality, a new law. The existentialists had reduced human purpose to creation of subjective truth; science provided the last remnant of objective truth in Western thought.
 
Nature, then, was the answer; investigation of nature became the purpose.
 
The legacy of Western thought had relied on natural law—the idea of universal purposes discernible in the universe through the use of reason. Nature was seen not as a justification for behavior, but as a hint toward a broader pattern in creation: things were designed with a purpose, and it was the job of free human beings to act in accordance with right reason in achieving that purpose. What we ought to do was inherent in what is: a hammer was made for hammering, a pen for writing, and a human for reasoning. Human beings could reason about the good, and then shape the world around them to achieve it.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Uprooted from the World

Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the self draws its substance from three basic sources: family, community, and craft. Connections to each of these sources are now either strained or lost to the modern self.
 
First, the family is besieged not only by the plague of divorce and the huge increase in single-parent households generally but by the stresses and strains of life that exact their toll on the marriages that do manage to survive in the modernized world. Families that function together, and that do so with a set of common moral values, are becoming an endangered species. The significance of this change in the context of our discussion is that families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down. The new generation is inheriting a set of values and expectations that is so thin and pale as to be quite unsatisfying. Hungry for additional tutoring in the meaning of life, the young are turning first to the larger culture. Then, unsatisfied with the ambiguous and contradictory moral messages imparted by the popular media, they are turning inward in their search for signals about the meaning of life.
 
Second, modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialisms is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price. Those who belong everywhere can also be said to belong nowhere; they have been emancipated from the small town only to become anonymous, unconnected in our large world. Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost.
 
Third, the self's connection to craft has also been seriously diminished by modernization, leaving many people perpetually dissatisfied with their work. In some case, machines have severed the link between the worker and the work. In other cases, layers of bureaucracy have severed personal links between ideas and products. In still other cases, the kind of work that is required by modernized societies is inherently undignified or boring, and the old virtue of taking pride in one's work becomes harder and harder to realize.
 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

The Total Rejection of Tradition

Political emancipation from the oppression of the past (a key theme of the French Revolution) meant a total abandoning of the political, social, and religious ideas of the past. One of the reasons why Enlightenment thinkers placed such a high value upon human reason was that it relieved them of the need to appeal to tradition for ideas; any ideas worth knowing about were accessible to reason alone.

The Enlightenment thus represented a radical rejection of tradition. Reason required no supplementation by voices from the past. The waning of the influence of the Enlightenment in recent decades has been an important factor in encouraging the emergence of a new interest in and respect for tradition in Christian theology.

- Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, p126

The Hole After World War II

The world survived World War II. Not only did the West survive—it got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded exponentially. Life spans increased.
 
But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since—a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides us the meaning we seek.
 
By the end of World War II, European optimism was dead and buried beneath six feet of human ash. The philosophies of the Europeans—Enlightenment ideals about the value of human beings and the need to move beyond God or Greek teleology—had ended in tragedy. Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte. The post-Locke Enlightenment project had been a Tower of Babel, with the common goal of supplanting reason for religion rather than seeking the congruence of the two. As the tower began to challenge God, its builders went to war with one another, speaking languages all their own. And then the tower fell, and the land was left barren.
 
Europe had buried millions of its sons and daughters; the West had placed its bets on mankind, and reaped the whirlwind.
 
But God did not return. Magna Carta, the first great charter of Western liberties, was signed by King John in 1215, and set limits to monarchic powers based on “regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honour of God and the advancement of his holy Church.” Religious practice remained the norm in Europe until the advent of the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as the children born around World War II reached adolescence, religious observance plummeted.
 
Faith in human reason, too, had waned. After the catastrophic insanity of not one but two Great Wars, the Biblical warning not to place faith in princes had been proved prescient. The Enlightenment hope in mankind’s collective capacity to better itself had collapsed.
 
Without God, and without the collective, all that was left were individuals. Alone.
 
Thus, the philosophy of existentialism came to the fore.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Kierkegaard: Subjectivity is the Truth

Existentialism truly began in the nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a Danish philosopher bothered by the problem of Enlightenment reason, which he saw as arrogant—the notion that a universal ethical system could be discerned by human beings was a fool’s errand, the idea that history was an unerring unfolding of Hegelian dialectics far too simplistic. The universe was cold and chaotic—man’s search for meaning could not begin with an attempt to look outward for that meaning. Kantian universalism was too hopeful, Comtian scientism far too self-assured.
 
Instead, Kierkegaard posited that human beings had to find meaning by looking within. The system by which one chooses to live is a leap of faith—but in that leap, man finds his individual meaning. “Subjectivity is the truth,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Objectively there is no infinite decision or commitment, and so it is objectively correct to annul the difference between good and evil as well as the law of noncontradiction and the difference between truth and untruth.” Truth can be found in ourselves.
 
To Kierkegaard, this meant making the leap of faith to believe in a God beyond man-made ethics—his famous “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Kierkegaard focused on passion as opposed to reason—he deemed passion the most important driving force in life, and concluded, “The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.” He hoped, of course, that the passionate leap would be toward the Christian God. But his belief system would lead not to God, in the end, but to worship of subjectivity.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

 

Kant on Subjectivity

Kant established the modern rules for discussing how it is that someone knows the external world, and in doing so he initiated the breakdown of the old distinction between subject and object. When this breakdown crossed over into theology, it resulted in an overemphasis on God's immanence and a diminished emphasis on his transcendence. This change had profound implications for the meaning of Christian faith.
 
Prior to Kant, the reigning epistemological paradigm held that the mind was simply a mirror in which the external world was reflected, that an objective world imprinted its reality on minds that were passive, inert, and uninvolved in this transaction. Kant rejected this model. Instead of beginning with the objective world, he began with the subjective conditions for knowledge, with the shape and functioning of the mind. He argued that the mind is active in and a constitutive part of what is known. It sorts into categories the stream of information contributed by the five senses and then synthesizes the data in ways that do not necessarily correspond to what is externally existent. He maintained that space and time, for example, are categories of the mind rather than realities in the world. Whatever can be said in favor of this, it should immediately be recognized that a fateful move had been made. Once the mind was seen as itself a source of knowledge, knowledge that was then superimposed on the data of the outside world, and once this knowledge was cut loose from control in the knowledge of God, a juggernaut was launched.
 
In literature this inescapable pluralism has been pursued by the post-modernists with purposeful vengeance. In their different ways, such post-modern critics as Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Fish have each made the argument that texts have no stable, unchanging meaning, that they mean only what individual readers perceive them to mean. Fish asserts that this approach does not amount to imposing meaning on the text, that it is simply a recognition of the fact that words have no independent meaning apart from specific contexts. Moreover, the contexts that are crucial for meaning reside not in the sentences and paragraphs of the texts but in the reader's internal psychology, in the ways the reader is inclined to understand life. Thus the subjective triumphs completely over the objective.
 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 
 

Subjectivism Reigns in Societal Morality

Defining deviancy up has meant stigmatizing those who obey the dictates of traditional sexual morality as fools, ascetics, or latent homosexuals. It has also meant stigmatizing moralists as fascists and hypocrites—fascists, because we wish to impose our morality on others; hypocrites, because inevitably, some of us have not been completely pure.
 
We are not fascists—in fact, fascism’s Nietzschean ideals are antithetical to traditional morality. We are Republicans and Democrats. We have the right to vote for general societal morality as expressed by our duly elected lawmakers. Social liberals seek to impose their amorality, albeit far less democratically; they push their viewpoint through pop culture, the education system, the judiciary, and the media. As for hypocrisy, that too is a weak argument—it is always better to do the wrong thing but say the right thing than to both say and do the wrong thing.
 
Yet it is impossible for all but the most extreme liberals in our society to ignore the truth: that tolerance of every social behavior is now the norm. In the absence of community-promoted traditional standards, subjectivism reigns. Nothing is expected of anyone; everyone may make his own rules about what is best.
 
The “live and let live” societal model is a recipe for societal disaster. The myopic question posed by advocates of the new, “Tolerant,” morality is: “How does my immoral behavior hurt you?” But the overwhelming truth is that these are not individual acts, but inherently social acts with social consequences. And when society sanctions and encourages your immoral behavior, that does have an impact—it doesn’t just hurt me, but it hurts my future children as well.
 

- Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation:

How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future, 2005.