Old Problems with Modern Philosophy

by Joseph Barrett

NASA's media publicists made the headlines recently, claiming that their scientists had discovered a rock which they considered might have fallen off Mars together with the calcified remains of primitive life forms. The response of the science world was almost unanimous - if the implications were proven true, then life was self creating and there was no creating God. Times has passed, a mere matter of months, and the wild claims have died away. It is the age of gaga science, discovery driven by very force of the machine which seems to have cast aside the rigorous and lapidary advance of physical theory, and more vitally, to have lost the sense of cohesion within nature which becomes part of the mind-set of the true physicist. It is the age of magic — as though men in a weird garden stumbled upon wonders much like Alice in Wonderland. In such a garden there is no sense of personal responsibility nor even a sense of direction. "What the hell! Its science! Just go for it. Follow where it leads!" And so life may be made in Mars, or Pluto, or anywhere that is not here.

But not according to scholastic reasoning ... nor to honest science! But that will be looked at later. It is worth considering if such widespread alarms and wonders, more in keeping with the fairground than a serious government agency, could flourish if it were not for seriously damaged perceptions of reality found even among the most well educated people in our Western Civilisation. Thankfully, more and more, the foundation of this widespread carelessness in thinking is being perceived to arise from the modern schools of philosophy developed since the 17th century and almost uncritically promulgated in our higher centres of learning.

Let's take a closer look at these philosophies and begin by nailing up on the door some points for debate!

Many schools of modern philosophy are less the instruments of free intellectual enquiry than a complex of opinions eventually relying for validation upon the assorted scientific theories they were raised in the first place to develop; usually upon theories, which if followed to their inexorable conclusions hold that matter is self-creating and that it formed itself from nothing. Such philosophies are, by that definition, inimical to classical scholastic reasoning.

Is this charge extreme?

A visit to any library will confirm my opening claim concerning the centre of modern philosophy; with particular reference to those who can be said to have founded it by ignoring Scholasticism or abandoning it - Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, John Locke and David Hume. There are also less articulately purposed systems identified by an introversion which practically excludes what is exterior to their own science - such as the huis clos linguistics schools. These would seem to present the ultimate concept of what I will identify as tied-in or state dependent philosophies and represent the antithesis of scholastic philosophy which claims free authority over all other disciplines without encroaching upon the special integrity of any.

But is this, as a child's text book might ask, a bad thing? Can one dare suggest that those who are identified with the Enlightenment based that huge edifice upon flawed reasoning?

Indeed one may so dare to do. In fact each of the thinkers named here can be proved, not only wrong in his conclusions, but that the first principles upon which his system was based were false. Furthermore, it can be proved that such fallacious reasoning and the repugnant conclusions to which it led - and which eventually so grievously inflicted mankind by the 20th century - might have been avoided had any of those "modern philosophers" learned from the deposit of wisdom laid down over thousands of years by the Western civilisations and which are most perfectly enshrined in Aristotelian and then Thomist metaphysics.

It remains a mystery better fitted to psychiatric enquiry than history as to how such a hiatus occurred in the Western academic psyche and as genuine scholarship today rediscovers the accuracy and elegance of Thomist reasoning, that hiatus assumes the piquancy that attaches to any tragedy that might have been so easily avoided.

It now seems certain that by the Middle Ages, mankind, still struggling to find the equipment that could unravel the deeper wonders of material organisation, such as physical scientists pursue, had already reached the summit of the far greater discipline, which is the science of reasoning and the comprehension of knowledge necessary for human wisdom.

One might flippantly describe this phenomenon, which refuses to accept maturity in the one because of the immaturity of the other, as the Mark Twain effect. If you remember that for 21 years his father was less than bright but now that the humorist had turned 24 things changed. "It's remarkable what my father learned in three years!", he quipped.

Before proceeding further, it is important to make some distinctions concerning the role of what we call science and what is meant by philosophy.

First, let us consider this: while it is perfectly legitimate for a man in a laboratory to pursue any wild investigation he chooses and to publish his findings as to whether, say, this or that element had manifested itself without the agency of other materials already in existence or through direct intervention from a non material power, nevertheless, until he does, he may not offer personal speculations on the project as "science". He may philosophise, certainly; but in that case, if he is to display an open and fair mind, the probability of creation through one or the other causes must be allowed for in his arguments. Some concrete systematy, conforming to the rules of logic must inhere if his opinions are to be accepted as philosophical postulations. Otherwise we get a hybrid fish-fowl called Scientism. Of course there is a valid philosophy of science and this will be considered later.

Meanwhile our scientist may not say: "I have failed to prove that matter can make itself so it has not been made at-all." Nor may he say: "Matter cannot make itself so nothing can!". He may not say with Thomas Hobbes: "Nothing exists except matter!" by way of refusing even to acknowledge the possibility that it was ever created at all - there being no possible place in such simplistic vehemence for an immaterial creator. An honest apothecary must face the full issue. Matter is with us. Something made it or it made itself. Or it always was, is and (putatively) always will be and, as such, above speculation. Since science is the investigation of probable causes, he might even set himself to discover what caused something to create itself, if indeed it ever could; or to attempt to prove, in the other case, just why it had always existed. Philosophy even more is about probable causes. If it all ends, though, he may not prove anything and the void will swallow both him and, his coloured bottles together with the weird conclusion of what never began but which had existed immeasurably (from the perspective of hindsight). Alas what follies philosophy may beget when it is not tethered somewhere to common sense.

Now it so happens that the physical sciences, are placing enormous barriers of improbability against the old dynamic creation theories - the Topsy notions that the earth "just growed". And yet "philosophical" propositions continue to proliferate; most of them contradicting the passive physical evidence and dogmatically insisting upon a creation scenario in which everything somehow falls randomly out of chaos and into proper working order, or, as was mentioned before, upon an idea of eternally uncreated matter or, most alarmingly of all, that some non-physical, brainless mind exerts a power of direction and control (randomly, what else?) upon the wheeling universe but only on condition that nobody dares refer to IT as God. (Such people indulge in personification a lot and say things like: "DNA had to make the decision to lie dormant for a few billion years before triggering the organism to dramatically increase its size ..." At this point the common man may be forgiven for assuming that the phrase "philosopher scientist" has become a euphemism for contradictory lunatic.

And yet everywhere we see that such slack thinking has erected great prejudices against an older "first cause" which scientific discoveries passively validate day by day. Despite this current in the ordered examination of material which we call "Science", one can rarely find even a chemistry text book for 15-year-olds which does not imply (in a most unscientific manner) that the random assembly of material properties is a proven fact - an intrusion which, were it to be attempted by a bible thumper recklessly projecting the purpose of Divine Revelation to, say metallurgy, would result in his work being burned by our more enlightened Western academic communities. I would not object about the latter, merely signal my regret at any extreme action; and that children's minds were still being subjected to the former. There are many more books to thump in the bibliography of mankind than the one we respect as touching upon God.

A schools' biology text in common use is burdened with parentheses like this: "Scientists have accumulated a wealth of evidence showing that the life forms on our planet are related - that complex organisms have evolved from simpler life forms."

And: "Every biologically successful organism is a complex collection of co-ordinated adaptations produced through evolutionary processes." That sentence is successfully adapted as an organism not best described as scientific, if you get my meaning!

The hard fact is that any suggestion that the material universe and its chemical elements were assembled out of chaos and that biological forms were constructed, capable of transmitting their intricate replications, by random "collisions" in indescribably elemental soups is, to say the least, unlikely. But the postulation has become so entrenched in the Western academic psyche that to question it is tantamount to self-excommunication. And yet it would never pass through the null hypothesis gate. That's for sure! Try it yourself! Nevertheless, "Science" has accepted as a rule that which cannot possibly be posited even as an element in a theory?

For example, the universe is now reckoned to be 10 seconds to the 18th power old and the specificities (improbability factors) involved in haemoglobin are in the order of 10 to the 650th power. Against the microscopic T4 bacteriophage assembling itself randomly, the improbability is 10 to the 780,000 power.

That is on a par with the sort of daft "true or false" guess some gullible TV contestant might be asked to make. "A typhoon blew through a Chicago junkyard and assembled a Boeing 707 passenger jet complete with a living (highly trained) pilot, co-pilot, cabin staff and ground support crew, fuelled and all ready for take-off ...True or False!"

The great mathematician Wickramasinghe actually borrowed from that simile to give the one time atheist astronomer, Fred Hoyle, a fleeting concept of the extent of random shuffling required among constituent molecules to assemble the T4 - that tiniest of protein organisms.

Such improbabilities are so stupendous that, considering them, a sensitive laboratory technician might break into an uncontrollable fit of giggles or experience an imperious urge to lie down for a while in a darkened room. Darwinism, if offered as a creation theory, simply cannot serve us. It has, nevertheless, some validity as a vantage point from which we may observe the still mysterious templates in which biological and chemical development seem to embed.

In such controversial textbooks as I have described, flawed philosophies and suspect "science" merge. The intrusive philosophy, here, tends to rely, not upon science as such, but upon "scientific theory" as its first principle and is therefore bound to it; and laid open to the charge that, as I have remarked, it exists primarily as a justification of that opinion in which it is rooted. While, on the other hand, any number of theories, however contradictory, bask in a semblance of universality provided by the tied-in philosophies which they support.

Everywhere one finds dependent criteria instead of extrinsic examination. Under-graduates are regularly asked to examine a particular philosophic proposition solely from the criterion offered by that proposition. It is worth noting also that such "scientific" theories and their slave philosophies proliferate most readily within a particular set of people, whose prejudice forbids them to acknowledge that (so far) it cannot be demonstrated that matter is capable of creating itself or that its most probable first cause, uncreated Act, wholly independent of the observable and measurable limits or extensions of nature, will not go away. Most illogically, some of these people, admittedly accepting that matter exists, nevertheless proclaim that any enquiry into its manner of arriving into being is invalidated by the supposed rules governing the natural or speculative sciences. If that is Science, it is also pure Lewis Carroll.

That the first (scientific method) is excluded by academic protocol from pursuing matter beyond its first foundation in existence, and that the second (modern philosophy) is not free to examine anything which is not itself material, means that neither may presume to consider Pure Act or indeed anything which falls within the ambit of traditional philosophy. From the wide field of human speculation, enlightened by Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas or Ockham who pondered, with open minds, that first and most natural of all question, "Ou sont nous, ou allons nous?" the modern mind has excluded itself . It is forever trapped inside a mean, cud-cropping circle. It may not look upwards and wonder. It is too limited and hopeless ever to admit the shocking paradox that opens so startlingly upon man's honest contemplation of his stars. Modern philosophy cowers from the surrounding abyss unless it can pretend there is no abyss at-all but a nice little middle class nursery where inanimate objects argue and fuss. The ancient thinkers teetered at the vortex of unadorned reality. They were innocent of any subversive agendas and, sensing truth, panted for meaning in everything. They would rather invent a meaning than pretend that there might be none and for their brave cheek they slowly found true reasons for almost everything that could possibly be. But people like Bertrand Russell who are still described as philosophers had no such ventures to dare. Who can envy the gentlemanly effete his shallow grave? He had lived without once admitting profundity. He was not the worst of those who bray for objective honesty but, having no object to perch upon but personal discernment, fail to see the trap of subjective opinion and topple in. It is quite common now for philosophers in a wide spectrum of "philosophies", following Russell, from anthropology to chemistry, psychology to linguistics, to offer as propositions what are little other than emotions or moods. And still, paradoxically, the cry against Scholastic metaphysics goes up that is the system of subjectivism and they, the modern philosophers, are objective.

Here is the regrettable incoherency of Nietzsche: "Truth is that kind of error without which a certain species of living being cannot exist." Or from Russell: "For my part, I agree with Buddha as I have imagined him. But I do not know how to prove that he is right by any argument such as can be used in a mathematical or scientific question ... I think the ultimate argument against (Nietzsche's) philosophy, as against any unpleasant but internally self-conscious ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions." You would need the mind of an uncritical enthusiast to accept that sort of discourse as being worthy of philosophy. Whatever else it is, it can scarcely parade any longer as objective thought.

It was Descartes who unwittingly initiated the silken drift into real subjectivism, even to the offering of his dreams as a starting gate. His argument: "All is doubt..." was the end of argument had it been taken seriously. To attempt to prove a necessary truth from a syllogism whose first proposition is universal skepticism is breathtakingly illogical. It belongs neither to philosophy nor any other reasonable construct. At its very best, it is no more than opinion dressed as argument. To conclude: "but I think, therefore I am" is just that; an opinion - in fact nothing more than a truism which also contradicts his prior posit. Despite this embarrassing betrayal of a lack of training in scholastic discourse, his was a lively mind and his effort to render argument in forms recently adapted for the physical sciences simply accorded with the enthusiasm of that time. But his followers desired a Summa to contend with the higher thinking of the Church and what lay lightly with science (and might happily do so still) became tragically distorted when aping metaphysical universals. But more than this, Descarte's hubris witnesses to the fact that he knew nothing of metaphysics, or if he did (which I doubt) he had decided to ignore that science.

The fact that he was allowed to progress, like an innocent abroad, from flawed proposition to repugnant conclusion, testifies to another sinister influence upon European thought as a whole, in that period of our history - a dark mood of rebelliousness against the moral and political authority which was provided by the Church. In this atmosphere, so crassly exploited earlier by Hobbes, every and any alternative philosophy was raised and defended, whatever intellectual or social contradictions ought to have impeded them.

It is to the lasting shame of 19th and 20th century academia that this stupefying prejudice has been protected -often by men of great wealth and power - and encouraged. If nihilism at its centre is the abrogation of the human right to chose truth, then Modern philosophy has played a major part in the erosion of that dignitas.

We must consider if any scientific discipline may be allowed authority of itself. The particular sciences, physics, maths, chemistry etc. are driven by the scientists who engage in them, quite as machines are driven - that research or operation must be controlled and directed with due respect for the integrity natural to each. That control depends upon the scientist and its excellence in turn depends upon his wisdom. Traditionally this wisdom, ultimately more important that the science itself as I have already suggested, was provided by the universally accepted constructs of metaphysics.

By precluding these and attempting to control one science by its own construct or by another's, Descartes and the early Moderns gave all such disciplines over to their own authority, in effect to the individual scientist himself, and he, being denied what was before a widespread guide and consensus controlled by man's highest instrument of rationality, went instantly into the leash of his own opinions (however admirable these might be at the start) and in the end he left science to the mercy of whim.

If you doubt the repugnant conclusions possible from flawed premises observe that, before long, Descartes' acolytes at the Lycée were tearing the limbs off little dogs to demonstrate that their screams of agony were of no more account to objective onlookers than was the harsh grinding of machine gears! Bossuet, a fine theologian of the period, had prophesied it would all end in tears, but never, I imagine, in such horrid screams! It certainly puts an edge on the concept of repugnant!

Hobbes was the first, shamelessly, to play philosopher while justifying tyranny against the church that had priested his reckless father. He ended by offering as a syllogism that which was in effect a boorish denial: Mill would make a science of taste about which no true philosopher may argue; and others - like Bentham - thought to bring sums of numbers to balance judgements when these were made for little else than balancing books. Almost alone against those who abandoned God was the strange Irish Protestant Berkeley, whose name is enshrined in the great Californian university. Alas, his best response was to shoo creation away from the violence of skeptical atheism into another, even wilder, skepticism known as Solipsism, where in a sort of Cartesian parody he seemed to argue: "Nothing exists whatsoever but God made it whatever it is?" I poke fun at him (tenderly I hope) but it is hard to reduce his ideas to their essentials any other way than through this little exercise in reductio ad absurdum. However, most of what we have termed modern philosophies - that rash of opinion systems which rose first in atheist France - have something in common, and that is the anger to tear at any authority higher than the pundits who preach them. They are marked by denial if they can be grouped to be marked at-all. Theirs, essentially, is the science of Shan't! And that is a poor response from anybody confessing to love Wisdom which asks: "Perhaps?" and whose echo is eternally, "Yes!".

The most comprehensive overview of developments in those fields of study related to the generation of matter or the crossing over of one species to become another, or the chain of biological development from a simple source to its present differentiation, is included by Richard L Gregory in his The Oxford Companion to the Mind. (The Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-19-866124-X). Colin Patterson, as Senior Principal Scientific Officer of the Natural History Dept of the British Museum sums up his own brilliant and comprehensive essay thus:

"Darwinism and neo-Darwinism are concerned with historical transformation of organisms. Despite more than a century of work in evolutionary biology, it remains true that the only transformations of which we have empirical knowledge are those observed in the life histories of organisms - the acorn into the oak, or the egg into the caterpillar, pupa, and then butterfly. It is remarkable that these transformations remain almost as mysterious today as they were in Darwin's time."

Now I lift that more as a razor than a full explanation of the paucity of Evolutionary theory as a creative accident rather than a possible template. But the learned paper by a senior figure in the British Science establishment goes far beyond making that obvious but forgotten fact. By empirical he does not mean other than satisfactorily proven theory - rule. In fact his main thrust is a quite brilliant demolition of scientific reductionism.

He points out: "..an immediate inference from the reductionist viewpoint of randomly mutating genes is that anything is possible, and it is natural selection which sorts out what is possible.

"Yet the regularity and uniformity of embryonic development in plants and animals seems to demonstrate that anything is not possible."

This essay which, in the passing also routs neo-Lamarkian theories, is one of the most important of this century and yet it is being wilfully ignored. Dr. Patterson grinds no axes whatsoever. He describes the "laboratory" as it is presently furnished.

If you nip into your library you will find the most telling passages in column 2 of page 241.

You may also consider this in reference to any dead bugs from outer space; what applies mathematically on earth, the same probabilities pertain upon the heavenly bodies. Dr. Patterson might just as easily base his reasoning on Martian soil as on an Arkansas farm.

Whatever the provenance of those microscopic space remnants, if they were indeed biological, they were most unlikely to have created themselves, be the fissures in which they birthed and died never so deep or so damp. But that is according to science, not philosophy which acknowledges nature within the lesser understanding of natural law.

One must sympathise with parents of school age children. Overwhelming pressure is exerted from every side implying that their religious Faith in the Creator is extraneous to reason and practical reality when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. The negative reinforcement of an idea even by peer pressure is enough to deflect the most intelligent person from believing his own common sense. If I say in a shop: "I should have six dollars and five cents change and everybody, including the queue behind me roars: "Nonsense! It should be five dollars and six cents!" I tell you, I would apologise, try to stop shaking and leave. When he is standing alone, attempting to hold on to a concept arrived at with difficulty, contradiction from a group is not easy for a lad to withstand. It follows that when an entire teaching body with all the authority, foundation and pomp of a great university insists that some theory is proven truth, it is a rare undergrad indeed who can stand by the product of his own reasoning - especially since the primary purpose of his being there is to imbibe what knowledge he admits he lacks and believes (or trusts) his lecturers to possess.

It is small wonder then that so many gullible graduates are in our midst or that so many fools continue to stride the lecture podium.

To return in conclusion to the hard and unarguable fact that random creation is what the man in the street would call eyewash and that Darwinism throws up many more exciting questions than there are dull and quite incorrect answers presently attempted - we know that we can inseminate a horse from an ass and get a mule. We should be staring at the resultant "brick wall" which bars access to separate species, the bar which makes an ass of a mule trying father progeny. What we do instead is to pretend that the wall between a chicken and a pig is not there at all, lest it upsets not so much a theoretical model as a sacred cow.

I noted instantly at university when a tutor tried to gull me into accepting a colour tone drift on black-headed gulls, whose coiffeurs alter from dark to grey across the globe. Or when Galapagos was raised as the sacred shrine of deus fortuitus. All I saw and said so was that distance in the first and sea between islands in the second had limited the secondary genetical shuffle. Thus a crew of red-heads, blonds and brunettes scattered after shipwreck and prevented from getting together again from their various rocks would, in time, produce on each island a dominant form quite different in accidens from those elsewhere. The last thing it shows is cross speciation.

What faces honest scholars is a great map in which one species from afar seems to run into another, like rivulets running to rivers and then to seas or like a maze of interconnected roads in a sprawling metropolis. The stunning reality is that, as one gets closer to any rivulet (or pathway) and follows it down, each is found to be a dead end. It is a great map made of cul de sacs. The walls that enclose these dead ends are there to be climbed, not ignored as though by some suspending of the intellect we may safely walk through them. For that is what science and philosophy are really trying to do at present.

If I might borrow from the problem of hybrids generally, it is enough to make asses of us all. Indeed it has done so.

Perhaps some day the barriers locked against one species and another will be explained. And we shall see, looking back, what pressed the great stamp of family line upon us all. Then I shall revere even the little spider more because in truth I may call him my earth brother and a template within the temple of my own lofty being. But that day has not come yet, nor will it come if scientists paralyse themselves dozing over half truths promulgated, not for the purposes of corruscatingly lucid observation, but to enable false philosophers to obfuscate an entirely separate issue - the oceanic awareness among men that a friendly authority is present in their cosmos. We have seen what happens when those who, hating the idea of clear authority advising each individual's conscience, turn our nations into "caring" prisons where behavioural control is exacted by law and the police. This is the age of the crisis of authorities and wild perceptions of dislocated freedoms. It is the drama of the warden in the wilderness. Scholasticism alone remains a credible intellectual instrument capable of discerning what choices are before us and to illuminate and advise our choosing.

That wrong decisions promise to lead nations into nihilism, where the spectre of criminal warlords - once the stuff of novelettes - is no longer a proposition in political economy class. It is being proven, geographically, as I write this.

The question is now writ large and cannot be avoided. It asks if educated man prefers the authority inherent in his acceptance of a Higher Power within and above the created order or whether he fears this rule to such an extent that even the uncontrolled authority latent in nihilism (aye even the comprehensive authority which a Hobbesian humanist tyranny must muster in its defence against nihilism) is preferable. It is the question that has dominated genuine philosophy since it took to itself an identifiable form.

Thinkers in ethics are considering, almost jealously, the iron authority of the ancient pagan ethos despite its often whimlike strictures which to break brought death or torture. Wiser minds remind us that Christianity superseded the rule of ethos and primitive bonding by interiorising moral imperatives. But, this one or that one, there is no escaping authority which envelops civilised man as an atmosphere. The sprawling cities of the earth float upon infinitely complex webs of protocols, rules, regulations and laws. I do not hesitate therefore to draw the attention of this class to the understanding that it is authority and problems attending it which is essential to tensions and crises within our civilisation and that only good philosophy is empowered to address these.

Do you think education is the enhancement of all that is fine and noble in your souls? Indeed, it is! But it demands a price, for nothing attracts the forces of destruction more than what is least deserving of waste; so, yoked to the beauty is the duty to defend it. And there remains this truth, that authority is in the nexus of all social reality and the correct choice of which among the many philosophies contending for the right to rule us can best be made by those who accept the burden and labour required for right thinking. In short those who accept the high natural authority of trained reason as a joy need courage to use it well - even in the face of hatred and the mockery of fools.

God knows, authority, ubiquitous and essential to the nature of man the religio/political creature, is another paradox. For who can blame a man who fears to hand control of his own destiny to a power he cannot understand or influence? This fear, paradoxically, cowed men into post reformation tyrannies but in the end validated democracy in America (certainly never in England) as Thomas of Aquin had centuries earlier defined it, "despite its weaknesses and compromises but preferable to the dangers from a bad king". But democracy had never the weakness in it exposed as at present when, in the name of democracy, the would be destroyers of its fragile structures are licensed to tear at it freely, nay their onslaught raised by many as its most virtuous fruit. Citizens are being gulled into believing that by some unwritten ethic of democracy they must abandon their right to defend it or impose sanctions upon its enemies.

Even then Democracy's defence would be simpler if there were, any longer, a common consensus of what constitutes right action - an agreed ethic which is perhaps the only defensive wall ever erected by democratically founded communities. But that consensus also radiates moral authority and - what distresses many Liberal thinkers most - carries with it the powerful social constraints which it imposes upon members of a morally sensitive community.

Simple theatrical television idylls like The Little House on the Prairie, or the Waltons appear to them as nightmares of constraint. They seem to live in terror of those bounds traditionally erected within social organisms to encourage sane behaviour. Fear of this seems, from observation at least, equal to if not greater than fear of extreme changes in national government. In fact consecutive administrations are sensitive to this social phenomenon when formulating policy. Indeed, a significant section of what is called the Liberal press relies upon the "moral/freedom" tensions within the community for mindless comment, ideologically fashionable feature articles and simplistically slanted news attitudes.

A cynical media, which is hugely advantaged in an "anything goes" social climate, willingly echoed in Hollywood, the centre of the world film industry, has accommodated its standards accordingly and less than surprisingly has become the main propagandist for the worship of disconnected or disassociated freedoms - so long as these are not proposed as fiscal freedom (the good old American way).

Powerful platforms are always available for sophists such as Gore Vidal to prey increasingly upon fomented public concern over any constraint being placed upon their freedoms which they have already been taught to perceive as best expressed in Liberalism. Sanity and training are no longer recruitment considerations in the media. Indeed morally concerned staff is perceived as a potential impediment in newspapers and broadcasting companies probably because they would find it difficult to co-operate in the bizarre antics of publishers desperate for high ratings and readership figures - usually to be found at the lower end of the intelligence spectrum. Thus, obfuscation and irrationality settle into the common consciousness and become the norm. If there is any doubt about this, the moral degradation which enabled widespread abortion as a means of limiting families (originally of the very rich) bears closer examination in the light of my present argument. You may ask any person in the street what he or she thinks of 40 million women agreeing to have their babies killed while still in their wombs and the answer will usually include some such triteism as: "A woman has a right to her own body.." Meanwhile very, very many women are walking the streets whose psychological condition may be less secure than medical science has had time to investigate.

Abortion is perhaps an end sign, not just a serious indication of a social moral malaise in a civilisation. Consider the public reaction had Sadaam Hussein struck such a deadly blow upon American lives in the security of their own homes! It is a most striking phenomenon that human beings have been successfully habituated to accept what is repulsive to their natural instincts and seriously detrimental to their social well-being. It is worth noting that in Ancient Rome, Caesar Augustus fulminated against matrons seeking abortions. His prophecies of what was sickening that civilisation could be considered fairly accurate.

But, as to the present, we are offered an insight into the structured and coherent effort made (from a myriad of motives) to habituate whole nations into unnatural behaviour and that it resides not in the media itself, or in the film and TV entertainment circuses alone but first in the educational establishments of the Western world.

It may be that an early need to avoid a truth essential to intellectual integrity invited obfuscation into the fabric of Western scholarship in the first place. Dr. Eamon Duffy's definitive history of that disaster, Stripping the Altars, makes clear that there was a lot to hide. But a sudden antipathy for scholastic lucidity alone would not answer the whole problem which in fact does not firm up until the "age of enlightenment".

Certainly in the aftermath of the English Reformation terrors, Thomas Hobbes successfully silenced the surviving Oxford philosophy rump by hinting that the arguments they were assembling against his novel atheism smacked of Popery. But he was an atheist too early and had to pipe down himself in the end. But there was no great enthusiasm for scholasticism thereafter at the university which had first adorned it . Anybody who works in the academic ambience is aware of many obfuscations - some designed to exclude unwelcome, potentially competing, disciplines, others of a diplomatic hue, to protect tender egos. But in that conjunction of sciences and philosophies working contingently to problems concerning the generation of life and the provenance of humanity and matter, a more unworthy "mind smoke" has been drifting around for far too long. There are signs that, at last, it begins to disperse.

It had been welcomed by many to hide from normal thought processes, or to escape the authority of nature itself, but its suffocating presence came to be accepted as an essential ally. That is why, in all disciplines of learning, all philosophies in all of mankind's affairs in the free world, there are those who have welcomed the blindness which lax thinking brings. Law, legislation, politics; one need only breathe "authority" and men huddle down for fear of Nazis, loss of freedom and other dreadful bogeymen, quite unaware that the smoke in which they think they lie secure is the very womb where such monstrosities most proliferate. That is why Adolf Hitler and his thugs, before they did anything else, tore down the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, its colleges, schools and presses. Then they struck at the other lesser or more disparate Protestant Christian groupings. When society crumbled, they went for the sick and maimed, then the little gypsy caravans and when terror was a normal thing and men began to pretend it wasn't there, they enveloped and consumed the Jews. In this cloud, good postures as evil and calls evil good. When I hear PC-speak I listen also for goose-steps and jackboots.

It took Hans Christian Anderson, a fairy tale maker, to provide a parable for today's scholars - especially those reading philosophy. A clear-eyed boy, brought to court to see the king, saw through more than the tricky fraudsters who had convinced the vain fool that his robes were invisible because the "expensive material" was so fine. He saw the royal underpants too and, fine as they no doubt also were, understood at once that they were private considerations and not the public robes of State. Hans would have added that last little touch had he thought of it, I'm sure!

Many scholars maintain that this terrible cloud came upon the minds of men when they were encouraged to perceive the universe as an acid bath rather than a life support machine. That certainly began about the time of Thomas Hobbes who first distorted the long line of clear thinking which leads from nature to the certain proof of a providing God. But scholasticism is a strong system and has survived here and there - as it survived for centuries, lost and then discovered by chance in the library of a forgotten Benedictine monastery in Europe during the Middle Ages.

It took another hundred years before, first the Mohammedans and then, through Albertus Magnus and Aquinas it was used to pull close man's notion of the God of Christian Revelation as theology. It is perfected as scholastic philosophy and if we grasp it, we may also seek the summit of all open philosophy, which is theology - by which men may be said to borrow the eyes of God, and in a dim but certain way see themselves; and in so doing, recognise Him and admire creation more.

But before we reach those heights, true philosophy, if it does nothing else, will offer a happier vision of the pulsing, fecund womb which is creation and open up our minds to apprehend the wonders therein. Aristotle or Aquinas, pagan and Christian, did never make a bastard of its progeny by denying a fair hearing to whatever fathers it.

If the scientist sticks to his last and the philosopher frees himself once more and accepts the rigorous disciplines of scholastic metaphysics, legitimacy, at least, will return to academe and from there a few good men of sense may walk out some day soon to defend us from the present nonsense.

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This item 1226 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org