Our server costs ~$56 per month to run. Please consider donating or becoming a Patron to help keep the site running. Help us gain new members by following us on Twitter and liking our page on Facebook!
(July 29, 2015 at 10:07 pm)lkingpinl Wrote: I would like to discuss this quote from GK Chesterton on the postmodern man and how non theists feel it applies, if it all, to them.
‘But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.' (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1909)
I won't pretend to understand postmodernism, either this week or any other. But I think there is something worthwhile in this criticism. I don't think it applies to all skepticism, but it does apply to reflexive skepticism for its own sake. Skepticism doesn't warrant elevation from a tool to an ideal. Turning everything complex and messy about yourself over to any such ideal is a form a self abnegation and leads to alienation.
That isn't to say that loyalty to the faith of our fathers is any better. Truth be told, there is no easy way out of answering life's important questions which doesn't amount to at least the deformation of the self, if not its annihilation. Certainly all fundamentalist forms of religious faith are even worse than habitual skepticism because there is so much less room for self expression of any kind - unless you count speaking in tongues.
