Looking For Something That Is Not There
By DONALD DeMARCO
Dear children: This year’s Easter egg hunt will be different. But it will be better in many ways. It will be “post-modern,” a phrase you may not understand, but believe me, it will be better than the usual boring and divisive Easter egg hunts of the past. This year there will be no eggs! Now, I agree, that this might sound strange, but it is thoroughly up-to-date.
In the old-fashioned hunts, there were eggs to be found. But the finders would gratify their egos and strut around like peacocks as if they had accomplished something important. In addition, they would be the envy of all the disappointed seekers. We do not want to paint children as “winners” and “losers.” In the interest of equality, we must avoid placing a laurel leaf on the brows of some while hurting the delicate feelings of others. Everyone will be included together as seekers.
And that is a title everyone can wear with pride. No one will be left out. Gone is the pernicious slogan, “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”
Returning to sanity, dear readers, it must be said that there is no point in seeking if there is nothing to be found. By the same token, philosophy, which seeks the truth of things, would be entirely vain and foolish if there were no truth to be discovered.
Dr. Alice von Hildebrand, who passed away on January 14, 2022, taught at Hunter College in New York City for 37 years. In her autobiography, Memoirs of a Happy Failure, she reports that she was told not to teach objective truth. But this flight from truth is not restricted to one school. It is pandemic. “In secular universities,” she writes, “the word objective truth triggers panic.”
What is the point of education, we might well ask, if there is no truth to be discovered? Why would anyone begin a search knowing in advance that there is nothing to be found? No one would hunt for a child who is not missing! Ponce de Leon is remembered as being sadly misguided in his search for a Fountain of Youth that did not exist.
Christopher Derrick, a former student of C.S. Lewis, wrote a book entitled, Escape from Skepticism: As If Truth Mattered. In a similar vein, E.F. Schumacher wrote, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. The list could go on: Medicine As If Health Mattered; Law As If Justice Mattered, and Art As If Beauty Mattered.
Ray Bradbury observed that in many cases, people who were assigned to a particular task were doing the very opposite of what they were supposed to do. This notion struck him personally when, as an innocent citizen, he was accosted by the police. The police are supposed to protect innocent people and go after criminals.
With this inverted practice in mind, he wrote Fahrenheit 451, describing a future world where firemen, who are supposed to extinguish fires, set them: 451 is the temperature at which paper catches fire and burns. The reason for setting books on fire is based on the conviction that a search for knowledge leads to social inequality where some people feel superior to others. Thus, all books must be destroyed in the interest of preserved equality.
In the story, there is a scene in which Captain Beatty supervises the burning of an entire library. He pulls two books from the shelf — Aristotle’s Ethics and Hitler’s Mein Kampf — to explain his actions. In addressing Fireman Montag, he says, “We’ve all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal. So, we must burn the books, Montag. All the books.”
When Christ said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32), He was pointing out two important factors. One is that the truth is knowable. The second is that the truth will free us from ignorance so that we can we can know what we should do. Truth, therefore, has a dual purpose. It enlightens the mind and places us on the right path. Psalm 119 states, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”
The “dethronement of truth,” to borrow a phrase from Dietrich von Hildebrand, leaves us without a light. And without a light, we cannot see where we are going. Inevitably, “if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit” (Matt. 15:14). To be equal in the dark is not a status that is in any way praiseworthy. Nor should anyone pay tuition to achieve this undesirable goal. Yet this abject equality is the logical consequence of avoiding all objective truth.
The desire to search — for truth, meaning, justice, peace, or God — is imprinted in our hearts. If we are true to ourselves we will have the confidence that these ends are real and not merely figments of our imaginations. The deepest proof of water is the existence of thirst. The denial of truth leads to a totalitarian world, a dystopian society in which no one can realize his potential as a human being. Truth, not equality in ignorance, is what we should seek. Truth remains stubbornly available.
In the words of Winston Churchill, “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”
- + + (Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus, St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review and is the author of 41 books. He is a former corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy of Life. Some of his latest books, The 12 Supporting Pillars of the Culture of Life and Why They Are Crumbling, Glimmers of Hope in a Darkening World, and Restoring Philosophy and Returning to Common Sense, are posted on amazon.com. His most recent book is Let Us Not Despair. He and his wife, Mary, have 5 children and 13 grandchildren.)
