The View From 1776

Read Richard John Neuhaus’s commentary on Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. Mr. Dacey is the editor of Philo, a journal of secularist philosophy.

Despite its title, Mr. Dacey’s book is a confrontation with spiritual religion.  Mr. Neuhaus writes:

On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees. I expect he would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality, but one step at a time, and The Secular Conscience is a critically important first step.

Dacey has quibbles with Pope Benedict’s analysis of moral “relativism,” but he admits that “secular liberals find it had to shake the lingering feeling that there is something to the pope’s diagnosis. Something disquieting has been happening to the Western mind over the last half century.” He writes about a philosophy professor who reports that none of his students are Holocaust deniers, but an increasing number are even worse: “They acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally.” Who are they to say that the Nazis were morally wrong? And so it is also with apartheid, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. For these students, passing moral judgment “is to be a moral ‘absolutist,’ and having been taught that there are no absolutes, they now see any judgment as arbitrary, intolerant, and authoritarian.”

...Secular liberalism “has been undone by its own ideas,” Dacey writes. “The first idea is that matters of conscience—religion, ethics, and values—are private matters. . . . By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn’t, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public.” Dacey recognizes the gravely flawed view of John Rawls that public decisions must be advanced by public reasons recognized by all reasonable parties. That is not the case with most questions requiring political decisions. He writes: “A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence..."

Several points touched upon by Mr. Neuhaus in his commentary need emphasis.

First, as he writes, “I expect [Dacey] would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality...” Liberal-progressive-socialism is itself a religion, albeit a secular and atheistic one.  In that regard, see Socialism: Our Unconstitutionally Established National Religion.

Liberal-progressives hubristically apotheosize Reason, as if it were some independent “thing” that provides all the right answers.  In reality, Reason is no more than liberal-progressives’ personal opinions, however, carefully considered.  There are demonstrable laws of science applying to tangible natural phenomena, but not in the realm of the mind, which is far more than a collection of pieces of nerve tissue.  For moral guidance we must look to God’s Holy Spirit. 

Second, a quotation from Mr. Dacey’s book offers validation from the horse’s mouth for the assertion in Liberal-Progressive Mind Control that public-education students are inculcated with a moral relativism that will not even condemn the Nazi Holocaust.

"Something disquieting has been happening to the Western mind over the last half century.” [Dacey] writes about a philosophy professor who reports that none of his students are Holocaust deniers, but an increasing number are even worse: “They acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally.”

Third, as quoted in the text above, Mr. Dacey tells us:

A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence...

That is tantamount to saying that ever-changing, superficial public opinion, gauged in the latest opinion poll, is to be our canon of morality. 

Alternatively it means, as Auguste Comte contended, that only intellectuals with superior understanding of the laws of history are qualified to pronounce upon the content of public morality.  Comte’s view easily slips into the justification for dictatorial regimes, from the Soviet Union to Hitler’s National Socialism.

In either cases, denying timeless principles of morality, what Western civilization, before the French Revolution, termed natural law, opens the door to anarchic disintegration of society.  If the independent authority of our Creator God is denied, every person’s opinion has equal validity.  We are then on the road to Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, a war of all against all, in which life becomes nasty, brutish, and short. 

We are not at the end of the road yet, but the cultural civil war started by liberal-progressives to destroy Judeo-Christian principles provides a foretaste.

The contention that public opinion is the real basis of conduct has a lengthy pedigree, documented most famously in Plato’s Republic. In that dialogue, Socrates is told by a sophist that principles of morality are fine and dandy, but in reality everybody’s conduct is shaped by desires for sensual gratification, wealth, and power.

Since the early 20th century, this sophistic view has enjoyed notable intellectual support in the United States.

Liberal-progressive philosophical and educational theoretician John Dewey taught several generations of Americans that Darwin’s speculative biological hypothesis should be applied to morality.  The import, he said, is that everything, including morality, is continually evolving.  If we accept Dewey’s thesis, moral relativism is the rational conclusion.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., our first socialist on the high court bench, wrote that truth is whatever wins out in the public square debate.  Should public opinion swing toward support for a Bolshevist government, he wrote, then the Constitution should not stand in the way.  That, of course, is an early version of the “evolving” Constitution, so dear to the hearts of the New York Times editorial board.

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