Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty

Chapter Thirteen: The Plagues of Desecration

t h i r t e e n the Plagues of Desecration roger scruton and richard rorty on life after religion Mark Dooley twenty years ago the english philosopher roger scruton published a remarkably prescient essay entitled “the Philosopher on Dover Beach.”1 the title was a play on matthew arnold’s richly construed poem “Dover Beach” (1851), in which the poet agonizes over the decline in religious faith. arnold mourns: the sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now i only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. Once drained of the religious urge, mankind “hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light / nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” We 312 the Plagues of Desecration 313 are then nothing but bewildered creatures scattered across “a darkling plain, / swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / where ignorant armies clash by night.” in “the Philosopher on Dover Beach,” scruton shows that arnold ’s pessimistic picture of our postreligious condition was neither misguided nor misjudged. For ours is a world that has been transformed by arnold’s atheistic contemporaries, Karl marx and Friedrich nietzsche. it is one in which the latter-day disciples of Charles Darwin and sigmund Freud are everywhere in the ascendant, and one where the postmodern protégés of michel Foucault have hijacked contemporary culture. according to scruton, “From that disenchanted vision of the cosmos flow two rival moralities: the atheistic one of selfaffirmation , and the political one of utopian justice” (pp. 4–5). Gone thus, is the time-honored view that “we are creatures who need to be joined not only to each other, but to our forebears and our progeny, and who are called to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of collective survival ” (p. 6). Gone is the idea that “religion is the voice of the species, which becomes articulate in us, in order that we should more willingly obey it” (p. 7). instead, we moderns are unsparingly subject to the secular doctrines of those who “regard God as deriving his nature and purpose from our own activity” (p. 6). Put otherwise, in the world shaped by nietzsche, marx, and Freud, Christianity and the Kantian morality that was shaped by it are condemned as “illusions of the resentful, distorting mirrors in which the strong are crumpled and the cripples stand tall” (p. 4). For scruton, however, what constitutes the real illusion is secularism’s declaration that salvation can be attained only by placing God’s “redemptive capacity in the hands of man” (p. 6). like matthew arnold, he believes that when man elides God at the epicenter of existence, we have neither joy, nor love, nor light: if you point to the actual unhappiness of modern man under the rule of secular doctrine; if you mention the Holocaust, the Gulag and the self-expanding system of enslavement which has been built from the new morality of marx and lenin; if you say that here, for everyone to see, is the proof of original sin, and the evidence that man is 314 Mark Dooley after all not sufficient for his own redemption, failing most dismally in emancipating himself precisely when he seeks to free himself from God: if you say such things, a thousand excuses are offered, and a thousand accusations made against the old transcendental faith. and it is indeed right to insist that all human institutions— religion included—are contaminated by man’s vanity and imperfection . nevertheless, rather than dismiss the accusations that are made against the marxian and nietzschean religions, we should look more closely, i believe, at what is peculiar about the cruelties that have been perpetrated in the name of them—apart from the fact of their astonishing scale. (p. 7) if we follow scruton’s admonition and look critically at the totalitarian systems spawned in the shadow of nietzsche and marx, we will encounter there “a severance of evil from the network of personal responsibility.” We will find a “depersonalization” and a “desocialization ” of the world, or a process in which “human life is driven underground, and the precious ideas of freedom and responsibility— ideas without which our picture of man as a moral subject disintegrates entirely—have no public recognition...