GK Chesterton once said that America was the only country built upon a creed. He thought the American Founders had united the country around certain self-evident truths. The founding credo has been replaced by a more modern one that is aptly captured by the Supreme Court in their 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood vs Casey. Writing for the majority in defense of abortion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” Freedom to choose trumps even reality itself, and relativism in all its forms was enshrined as dogma. The only self-evident truth is that there is no objective truth. Such an exaltation of freedom gives society no foundation upon which men and women may be united. All that is left to bind the people is force, either through the coercion of political correctness or “the compulsion of the State”.
Quite obviously it is not enough to merely identify the problem. We must do something about it. But unless we are going to meet force with force, the only way to correct the problem is to correct the bad ideas that caused it. Some errors are like weeds. It is not enough to merely pluck the leaves of consequences, but we must attack the roots of the ideas that caused the consequences. Relativism is the weed that threatens society so that if we are to give society room to flower, then we must tear out its roots.
The Three Words
Three words was all it took to start the avalanche that would overthrow the Christian World Order. Unwilling to face the Scientistic Zeitgeist head on by restating the higher metaphysical truths of reality, Rene Descartes decided to play the skeptic’s game. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”, set the tenor for modern thought and paved the way for the coronation of Relativism.
Good intentions never cover for bad ideas, even if those ideas are “clear and distinct”. Descartes sought to defend philosophy against the full frontal attack of empirical science. When you have physics, why do you need metaphysics? But rather than fixing the problem, he created a crisis in knowledge. All this because he rejected Scholastic realism, that is, the epistemological position that all knowledge comes in and through the senses. We come to form ideas based on the perceptions we receive from our encounter with reality. Our ideas are true only insofar as they conform to reality. In short, our ideas are means by which we come to knowledge of the highest and lowest things.
Rather than being measured by reality, Descartes thought man was the measure of reality. Knowledge of reality is an impossibility. Instead we can only have knowledge of our own ideas. And not just any ideas, but only those are clear and distinct, the first of which was that he is thinking. In his own words, “I think therefore I am…In this first knowledge doubtless, there is nothing that gives me assurance of its truth except the clear and distinct perception of what I affirm…and accordingly it seems to me that I may now take as a general rule, that all that is very clearly and distinctly apprehended (conceived) is true” (Descartes,First Meditation).
The Scholastics thought that existence was self-evident and could not be proven. Our senses drew data only from those things that existed. This could not be doubted and this was the starting point for all knowledge. Descartes, rather than starting with the senses, began with the one thing he could not doubt, namely his own thought. And this formed the basis for his discovering the truth; having a clear and distinct idea. But because ideas are subjective, truth is no longer objective. Truth reveals not the outside world, but the state of the mind of the thinker.
Connecting the Dots
It may not yet be clear how Descartes connects to Casey until we trace out the consequences of Descartes’ thoughts. We encounter reality in and through our senses and then form ideas about it. Those ideas are called true which correspond to reality as it really is. Truth, then, is the correspondence of reality and idea. For Descartes and his intellectual progeny (Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hume and so on), truth consists only in having clear ideas. Rather than measuring ideas against reality, they are measured by the mind itself and judged true if they are “clear and distinct”. True comes to mean “true for me” and “true for you.” All ideas are equally true, so long as they are sincerely held. This leads to a contradiction because if every opinion is equally true, then the following opinion is also equally true, namely that not every opinion is equally true.
We have grown accustomed to the cognitive dissonance and navigate it the best we can. We learn to “tolerate” different opinions about reality. The problem though is that if each of us is living in a world he has constructed on his own, then there is no means by which a society can be formed. There may be small pockets of “like-minded” people but no real unity. The seemingly esoteric philosophical problem becomes the source of a gigantic social problem.
That is why the solution must also be a social one. There must be a reintroduction of Medieval Philosophy. We must go back to just before the train went off the rails and set it back on the tracks. It starts by properly training the young to think clearly about reality as it really is. We cannot, like Descartes, pick up the scraps of truth on the hems of the Zeitgeist and expect to build anything solid. Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. We must go back to St. Thomas and learn from him truly how to think. We must teach our children to go back to St. Thomas. Catholic schools need to be true houses of intellectual formation and not merely alternatives to the public schools. St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.