Motus Mentis

For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) Among other things, I’ve tried to explain the danger that a secular, materialistic metaphysics presents to liberal social organization.

One hazard is that the absolute bedrock of the American Founding is the doctrine of “natural rights”. This was summed up in America’s ur-document, the Declaration of Independence, in the statement that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Readers may recall, from a few years back, a series of linked posts that began with my having read a review, by Michael Anton, of Thomas G. West’s outstanding book The Political Theory of the American Founding. Mr Anton responded with an email to me, reprinted here as the third in the series, and things went on from there I am particularly indebted to our friend and commenter “Jacques” for his contributions to the conversation.

I was particularly troubled by whether the very idea of natural law, upon which the whole American project rests, could withstand the removal of the transcendent foundation in the “Creator” invoked by Jefferson in the Declaration. (Spoiler: I believe it can’t.) In the last post in the linked series, I focused on that problem, which I think neither Anton nor West has satisfactorily resolved.

In that post, I used a term I’ve relied on often to describe the corrosive effect of the radical skepticism that results from the abandonment of transcendent metaphysics. I see it as a “universal acid” — in that there is, in the absence of a permanent and objective footing for our abstractions, no stopping place that prevent our relentless questioning from dissolving away to nothing every tradition, institution, and moral intuition. (I’ll give credit to Daniel Dennett for the term, which I’ve used many times over the years.) In this post from 2015, I pointed out that a nation that prides itself on being “an idea” — as America uniquely does — is particularly vulnerable to memetic hazards, which are exactly what the death of God in a rationalist society creates. Way back in 2009, long before I began to make any serious movement toward the real possibility of theistic belief, I wrote about the risk of secularism to social cohesion and stability.

Here in 2023, all these chickens are now coming home to roost, in a rapidly accelerating social, cultural, political, moral, and national disintegration. We have been “running on fumes” for several generations now, as the moral and civil premises that made America possible in the first place lingered on despite the death of these axioms at their root — but now the rot has gone so far as to poison all of our institutions, and so the last generation that really kept these beliefs alive as “self-evident truths” is now growing old and weak.

For most of my life, I was, with just the tiniest sliver of doubt, effectively an atheist, and at times quite militantly so. I will say for myself, though, that my personal beliefs didn’t stop me from acknowledging the dangers of widespread secularism at a societal level. I watched the celebrated “New Atheists” — Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris rise to fame with an increasing sense of foreboding about their carelessness, knowing that, although brainy types like themselves might be able to come to terms with the abyss they were staring into, their aggressive promotion of nihilism was profoundly unwise. I don’t think they thought they were doing anything other than nobly pursuing what they, on what I now understand to be shaky “rational” grounds, believed to be Truth; indeed, for them, the nonexistence of God was, no doubt, as much a “self-evident” truth — a matter of faith, even if they’d never admit it — as the basis of natural rights was for the Founders.

So it is with some grim satisfaction now that I see more and more secular materialists — atheists — coming round now, with the same reluctance that I did, to the conclusions I got to quite a long time ago. A good example is the right-wing gadfly Carl Benjamin, who confesses in a podcast interview with Auron Macintyre that the scales have begun to fall from his eyes. Many of the things I’ve been saying for years are in there — the shaky foundation of natural rights, and of classical liberalism generally, in the absence of God; the descending glide-path of modern liberalism having been slowed by the residual influence of Christianity; even the phrase “universal acid” to describe the corrosive effect of the radical skepsis bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. The whole thing is well worth your time, and you can listen to it here.