Once you step out of the various ideological framings of reality, which we are presented for our adoption by the "failed project" of modern thought - I agree with that assessment of it as failed by Marilynne Robinson - you can see a lot of things that you won't see if you remain in them. One of the things you see is that though they present themselves in opposition to each other, even "dialectical" opposition, they share the same motivation if not point of view which make all of them toxic and all of them hostile to The Law, the Prophets, The Gospel of Jesus, The Letters of Paul and, I'd say especially James, and the various other parts of the Scriptures and to the religions that try to express those.
One of the most interesting proofs of the hypocrisy of the secularists who love to hate on the Old Testament is that in almost every other case of them waxing in theatrical outrage over the ancient wrongs of the Children of Israel, ascribed to the commands of the God who has become a cartoon in the secular non-reading or, more typically, shallow skimming of those old and very knotty texts, will inevitably excuse similar and far greater records of wrong done by contemporary forces and governments. That Biblican Fundamentalism shares the same cartoon image of God and the modern conception of how to read a text for literal meaning betrays the fact that Fundamentalism is, as well, a product of modernism.
Some specimens of the various ideological framings:
- A Richard Dawkins type will minimize the horrors wrought by the theory of natural selection, something which the eminent biologist of a century ago, a convinced Darwinist, himself, Vernon Kellogg warned of as he heard his scientific colleagues in the German military give that for their already rather developed plans for conquest, dominance and disposal of those lesser than them. What he learned from his pacifist mission to talk to the Germans before the US entered World War One, turned him from a pacifist to someone who said that that was something which it was inevitable we would have to go to war against. And, I'll remind you, that hadn't turned into Nazism until after World War One had ended. It is the major intellectual force which Hitler's second in command said Nazism was merely an application of when he declared National Socialism was "applied science, nothing else." Dawkins and a number of his neo-atheist colleagues are rather warm to the notion of eugenics, something which will be a recurring danger as long as natural selection is the required framing in which to think about evolution.
- A secular capitalist or, in fact, one who professes religious belief - will totally overlook the horrific violence done by capitalists, those not designated as capitalist, those who are, those who claim to do so from "democratic" countries, discrediting a good which they never had any intention of ever allowing to exist. A Christopher Hitchens will go from being a Trotskyite to being a neo-con, supporting the Bush - Cheney crime family disaster of the invasion of Iraq, overthrowing a secular despot and plunging the region into a regime of violence and upheaval which will be killing and maiming people, providing opportunities for terrorists and other thugs to gain power and impose gangster governance that makes Saddam Hussein's crime regime look relatively benign, it wasn't but what has succeeded it has been far worse.
- Most ironic of all are those secular, anti-religious Zionists who will join in the general modernist mockery and slamming of the Old Testament for the claimed subduing of the inhabitants of the lands Israel was established on thousands of years ago even as they will do anything to protect the present Israeli government from criticism for reenacting those things confessed to in the ancient Scriptures.
I have little doubt that some of the accounts of the wiping out of peoples by the Children of Israel are told with the typical exaggeration of such ancient accounts, perhaps especially around the Mediterranean, just as I have no doubt that God didn't need to tell any kings or local potentates to war against their enemies, people are all too able to do that all on their own informed of nothing more remote from their attention as their own perceived self-interest. I have every confidence that the present day reporting of the crimes against the Palestinians of the secular Israeli government, its other crimes are more reliably taken as accurate. One of the few things I appreciate about modern culture are those rare instances where facts get checked and reported fairly, not that that isn't always easy to separate from propaganda. If you have to read the present day record carefully and, often, not thinking that things are as they say on the surface, reading the Scripture accounts of such things is even less reliably done as if they are reporting an unvarnished accurate record of the facts.
- And there is that other great category of the Marxists who have supported some of the bloodiest. most oppressive, most murderous and enslaving regimes in human history, knowing how their favorite Communist regime, their heroes, were oppressing and murdering, at times issuing manifestos and letters of support for show trials, executions even of their fellow Communists, their fellow writers or artists or academics, even their fellow scientists - the non-famous victims in their millions and tens of millions known but not much considered to count among the generally elite or at least college-credentialed Marxist champions of "the workers" "The Masses".
I was never a Communist but I was their dupe which is one of the reasons I have such unending contempt for them. It wasn't until I realized that to reject them and oppose them was not to accept their "other side" that I could really be free of that stupid habit cultivated as "anti-anti-communism". I could be anti-the antis for their own, particular evils. I should note the irony that some of those Commies pose as champions of the Palestinians, who I pity if they are so desperate that they might accept that bunch of bumbling hypocrites professed support of them.
Those are only a few of the major framings of modernism, each of them could certainly be listed with subheadings and you might find exceptions to most of them, though not all of them. Nazis, white supremacists never come in any variety except murderous, racist, homicidal evil.
It can be pointed out that the crimes of the Children of Israel, of Christians, of Muslims are generally opposed by major statements of morality contained in their Scriptures, you can't say the same thing about the foundations of modern secularism for the most part, especially the more developed parts of modernist thought. Modernism, as it develops, tends to go from the morally relative to the morally depraved to the homicidal. The luke-warm "socialism" of Fabianism was capacious enough to contain the proto-Nazi antisemtism and hatred of the disabled and congenitally ill of Karl Pearson to the early calls by another of its stars, George Bernard Shaw, even before the Nazis existed before Stalin or even Lenin came to power, to advocate constructing and using the gas chambers the Nazis did to dispatch many of the same categories of people they would going on in Shaw's lifetime to his open and flagrant adoration of Hitler and Stalin praising their murderous brutality in terms of economic efficency even as they were engaged in murdering people - still being produced as a daring and fashionable figure in the latest thing, a hero to many a bright young thing as he wrote exactly what I just said he said.
It is one of the more tellingly strange things about modernism that even someone like Shaw is to be taken as a normal, respectable figure within it, others who are even more obviously a friend of if not an actual collaborator with even the Hitler and Stalin regimes, or Mao's later can be quite respectable. That is true while someone who believes in, for example, the Resurrection of Jesus will be considered quite outré.
I respect the Jewish tradition of which Christianity and Islam are certainly a part. I have come to see that it has been the primary force in producing that other strain in contemporary thought that leads to egalitarianism and real democracy and whatever measure of decency we are ever to achieve as a society. I can see no other competing candidate for having produced what of it that we have or, perhaps, had than that. That it comes from a people enormously self-conscious of themselves as escapees from slavery, saved from that by divine help is not shocking to anyone seeing the general character of Black Americans. As one outraged woman said in the wake of the George Floyd murder, "White people are lucky that we want equality, not revenge."
I think huge parts of the Old Testament are confessions of crimes and wrongs and shortcomings - especially short comings in the wake of them receiving The Law that they and their governments found difficult to keep - and I think that huge parts of that confessional history are done in some of the most impressive self-criticism I'm aware of in any large collection of writings or in any culture.
I trust the Jewish prophetic tradition far more than I trust modernism, an impressive number of modernism's major figures - people in the arts, in literature, in popular culture, in academic and legal and political life who we were all taught to respect - were supporters of fascism, Nazism and Marxim even as they were known to be piling up mountains of bodies in their scientific regimes. And the atheist haters of the Jewish tradition were some of those most enthusiastic in their support of those well-documented murders.
And I think that most of what maintains that among people who are not supposed to be vulgar materialists looking for personal gain is the kind of learned respectability that is expected of people to maintain their place in the better ranks of life, academia, the media, among those in daily life who have bought into that on an unthinking level and those who merely sense that they'd better go along with it if they want what's good for them. I think there is no one around who has a deeper feeling for that than Marilynne Robinson as can be read in the first paragraphs of that article which I linked to yesterday. If you haven't read it, you really are missing out on a spectacular experience. Notice her critique of criticism and its sacrosanct position that we have been suckered into granting it. I think a lot of that was due to fact checking in paper-based culture to be difficult when not impossible. I'm hoping a lot of that fades as paper gives way to computer and internet based scholarship where documents can be easily had and searched and used. Even the Bible which so few have actually read along with the commentaries on it. I've learned an enormous amount that modernism wasn't about to tell me, it has astonished me how much of what I was never told was known in, for example. the 4th century. Modernism is hardly an advance of the kind we were sold it as being.
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