The Age of the Accuser

I have written in this space in recent days about the modern world view, what I here called Dehumanism. Let me say a word about that word, and also say a word about the spirit of the age.

To be a man means to seek a truth that satisfies the mind, a beauty that breaks the heart, and a good that sates the conscience. Deprive a man of any of these things, and he will find no rest, no happiness.

Consider the scene from the MATRIX movie where Cypher, one of the awakened in the real world, sells out his comrades to the machines in order to enjoy a life of pleasure he knows to be illusion.

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

I doubt anyone in the audience agreed with Cypher’s pragmatic empiricism: we would not be happy eating stake we knew to be nothing more than electrical stimulations having no reference to reality, or taking money we had not earned or to which we had no right, or living in a lie, no matter how comfortable. The idea that there is no truth, which is the cornerstone of the Dehumanist doctrine, reduces us all to the same moral level as that character.

The other two articles of faith in the dehumanist dogma are that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that therefore rank ugliness can be made “Art” merely by declaring it to be so; and that the conscience does not exist because all values are relative. We no longer even talk of virtues, or the strength of character needed to act in a praiseworthy fashion. We no longer talk of the self discipline needed to pursue one’s self interests rightly understood. The relativity of all values at one stoke eliminates goodness, and beauty, and truth.

A creature that exists without goodness, truth, and beauty, no matter what else he is, is not a human being, any more than Gollum is a Hobbit. Read more