I wrote in an earlier post about The Inklings and their writing. That came from the second half of our last HS502 lecture of the term. The first half was devoted to what the prof called "The Four Horsemen of Materialism": Freud, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. These were the four leading thinkers of the 19th century who epitomized the worldview of Materialism, and their teachings changed the Western cultural landscape forever.
In each of their disciplines (psychology, science, economics, and philosophy) they espoused the notion that everything we see and experience can be explained by materialistic forces. They rejected the dominant top-down paradigm of the prior several centuries (all authority flows downward from God through created processes and appointed structures). In its place they advocated a bottom-up paradigm (everything derives from aggregations of basic building blocks like individuals, desires, forces, atoms). All can be explained by and within the material realm; the existence of God is no longer required to explain our world. The supernatural and spiritual are rejected as irrelevant at best, harmful delusions at worst.
(Once God was removed, and conscience was derided as harmful, what followed was a movement among the intellectuals and the elite which reveled in decadence and dissipation. (Think: Oscar Wilde) The opium dens of the later 1800s and the popularity of hallucinogens like absinthe were one manifestation of this. The poem quoted at the bottom, "The Decadent to His Soul" by Richard Le Gallienne, is a poignant example of an attempt to wrestle free from conscience, so that self-indulgence could proceed unchecked.)
The logical outcome of materialistic science and philosophy is to see humanity as the highest order of being, and (once religion is removed) human systems as the ultimate expression of that order. Nietzsche dared to take the notion of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" once step further to say that, if it is the natural order of things for the strongest to survive and propagate their superior genetic characteristics, then the superior among us are MORALLY BOUND to dominate and rule, for the furtherance of humanity's evolution. Morality takes on utilitarian dimensions, not religious or even humanist ones.
Naturally, this analysis leaves out what the theologians see as humankind's inherent fallenness, our concupiscence or bent toward evil. No animal is as cruel as the human animal, when uncoupled from the constraints of conscience. No animal other than homo sapiens is capable of schadenfreude, the German term for taking pleasure in another's misfortune or misery. No other animal tortures prisoners, abuses the weak and vulnerable, and kills for pleasure.
And while we see all these twisted behaviors today, they were conspicuous as well in the first half of the 20th century when brutal wars were fought in response to power being exercised in support of greed, ethnic hatred and genocide. The disillusionment that followed these wars, seen clearly in the literature and art of the 1920's-70's, is a direct result of Materialistic Philosophy's obvious and ugly failure.
Materialism removed God, spirituality, and religion from positions of prominence, and relegated them to not only the place of irrelevant myth, but to even something seen as harmful - a mass delusion from which humanity needs to awaken, which has kept it from reaching its potential. Materialism instead places great confidence in humanity's progressive evolution to perfection, and is optimistic about our ability to solve our own problems, without God's assistance (or existence).
But when that philosophy proves untenable, when Materialism fails, and fails badly, revealing not progress but the horrors of man's inhumanity to man, there is nothing left but despair. Because now... there is nowhere to turn. Not to God, and not to self. We are alone in our depravity and ugliness.
And so the Modern Era, with its Renaissance/Reformation humanist/populist roots, rising out of the Enlightenment's liberation of the individual from the chains of the state (and the church), all the way to its zenith in the "death of God" and the primacy of Materialism, ended with a horrifying crash in the middle of the 20th century. What followed is POST-modernism, defined by a general disillusionment with humanity, an estrangement from God, wholly individualized moral standards, and a sense of being disconnected with our traditions... and each other.
What to make of this? How to live in this era? Where to turn for answers, for guidance?
How about having faith in God, learning from the past, and living in caring community? :) Maybe that's a lot to ask in less than two generations post-Modernity, but I think we can get there.
C.S. Lewis coined a term that I like a lot: Eucatastrophe. He links the Greek prefix for "good" with the word for disaster. It's the concept of good coming out of tragedy. And I think that applies here. Good can come of the failures of Materialism in the last century, if from nothing other than the revelation of humanity's inability to fix itself. Our power is basely applied to further our selfish ends. We need power that greater than us, in both quantity and quality; a power that is self-less and focused on the welfare of others.
The kind of power that God has is that which brings good from bad, hope from despair, health from sickness, life from death. Eucatastrophe is characteristic of God. It's God's signature move. :)
And so much better than humanity's signature moves: schadenfreude and decadence.
*****
THE DECADENT TO HIS SOUL
The Decadent was speaking to his soul--
Poor useless thing, he said,
Why did God burden me with such as thou?
The body were enough,
The body gives me all.
The soul's a sort of sentimental wife
That prays and whimpers of the higher life,
Objects to latch-keys, and bewails the old,
The dear old days, of passion and of dream,
When life was a blank canvas, yet untouched
Of the great painter Sin.
Yet, little soul, thou hast fine eyes,
And knowest fine airy motions,
Hast a voice--
Why wilt thou so devote them to the church?
His face grew strangely sweet--
As when a toad smiles.
He dreamed of a new sin:
An incest 'twixt the body and the soul.
He drugged his soul, and in a house of sin
She played all she remembered out of heaven
For him to kiss and clip by.
He took a little harlot in his hands,
And she made all his veins like boiling oil,
Then that grave organ made them cool again.
Then from that day, he used his soul
As bitters to the over dulcet sins,
As olives to the fatness of the feast--
She made those dear heart-breaking ecstasies
Of minor chords amid the Phrygian flutes,
She sauced his sins with splendid memories,
Starry regrets and infinite hopes and fears;
His holy youth and his first love
Made pearly background to strange-coloured vice.
Sin is no sin when virtue is forgot.
It is so good in sin to keep in sight
The white hills whence we fell, to measure by--
To say I was so high, so white, so pure,
And am so low, so blood-stained and so base;
I revel here amid the sweet sweet mire
And yonder are the hills of morning flowers;
So high, so low; so lost and with me yet;
To stretch the octave 'twixt the dream and deed,
Ah, that's the thrill!
To dream so well, to do so ill,--
There comes the bitter-sweet that makes the sin.
First drink the stars, then grunt amid the mire,
So shall the mire have something of the stars,
And the high stars be fragrant of the mire.
The Decadent was speaking to his soul--
Dear witch, I said the body was enough.
How young, how simple as a suckling child!
And then I dreamed--'an incest 'twixt the body and the soul:'
Let's wed, I thought, the seraph with the dog,
And wait the purple thing that shall be born.
And now look round--seest thou this bloom?
Seven petals and each petal seven dyes,
The stem is gilded and the root in blood:
That came of thee.
Yea, all my flowers were single save for thee.
I pluck seven fruits from off a single tree,
I pluck seven flowers from off a single stem,
I light my palace with the seven stars,
And eat strange dishes to Gregorian chants:
All thanks to thee.
But the soul wept with hollow hectic face,
Captive in that lupanar of a man.
And I who passed by heard and wept for both,--
The man was once an apple-cheek dear lad,
The soul was once an angel up in heaven.
O let the body be a healthy beast,
And keep the soul a singing soaring bird;
But lure thou not the soul from out the sky
To pipe unto the body in the sty.
-----Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947)
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