The Treason Of The Intellectuals
By ALICE von HILDEBRAND
(Editor’s Note: In honor of Alice von Hildebrand, we reprint here from our September 17, 2015 issue one of her most timeless and profound commentaries.)
- + + The infallible way to gauge the “health” of a nation is by checking upon its family life and its educational system. One need not be a keen observer of our society to perceive, to one’s grief, that both Western Europe and the United States are morally and socially decadent. Statistics tell us that the number of broken marriages, divorces, and homosexual relationships have increased in dramatic proportion in the course of the last 60 years, and possibly longer than that.
The family is the very heart of a nation: a sound and lasting relationship between husband and wife, father, mother, and their progeny is the golden key to the health of any society. Today, alas, there are millions of single mothers, of divorcees, most of them remarried, and moreover, a daily increasing number of an abomination called “same-sex marriage” — officially sapping, nay, waging war on the noble bond uniting male and female since Genesis.
This sociological catastrophe now endorsed by the U. S. Constitution opens the door to further perversions: their adopting children who are, from a very young age, fed on confusion — having two fathers and no mother, or two mothers and no father. Such a society has signed its own death warrant.
History is eloquent on the topic. The demise of great nations always has had and always will have the same cause: moral decadence. Woe indeed to those who call truth error and error truth (Isaiah 5).
Hand in hand with this decadence is the type of “education” that prevails in schools, colleges, and universities. First of all, let us remark that the very word “education” is a misnomer for what children are taught nowadays: a salad of empirical facts and false philosophies. Knowledge of the former is highly valued because it will equip students to get a lucrative job and make “good money” — a key to happiness and “self-fulfillment.” This is pragmatism — limiting teaching to “information” and totally neglecting “education,” the formation of persons as opposed to well-oiled tools that will function well in a society at the service of an impersonal monster: the state.
Persons are in fact just “tools” for productivity — the very backbone of Communism.
What is pragmatism? It is a Weltanschauung — worldview — based on the assumption that a thing, an action, or whatever is to be measured by its usefulness. What does it produce? What is the purpose that it serves? This purpose in its turn is at the service of another one until we come to the crucial question: Is there anything sought out for itself? The answer prominent in our society is “happiness,” that is, “self-fulfillment.”
But what is happiness? For some people it is fame, for others honor, power, riches. Every single one of our motivations should therefore be geared in this direction: “Will this action contribute to my happiness?”
What is in fact happiness? The most depressing answer I ever heard from students in the course of my long career came from a student who told the class: “Give me a glass of beer and a cigarette, and I will be perfectly happy.” She clearly meant “satisfied,” but I wonder if the meaning of true happiness ever crossed her mind.
That many people’s concept of happiness when “fulfilled” does not in fact make them happy, proves abundantly that the satisfaction of “needs” or the flattering of one’s ego, cannot be the right answer. Put it in other words: Pragmatism is not “useful” for its promises will necessarily remain unfulfilled.
How wise the great Pascal was when he wrote that he was no pragmatist: He got much further without pragmatism. The mean “calculation” typical of pragmatism — which by the way is fully justified in technology for whatever is not useful should be eliminated — is not only self- defeating but also debasing. A radical pragmatist is a metaphysical pauper.
Alas, as mentioned above, our educational system has degenerated more and more in eliminating values — all things that give meaning to life, and make it worth living. Statistics inform us that most students today select their major according to the fields which are financially most promising, Science today, particularly computer sciences, is favored. But what then is the worth of culture let alone poetry — “a meaningless game of words that has never fed anyone,” as a professor of mathematics told me.
What are in fact the things that we can “know,” and which are worth knowing? The supposed answer to this question is already offered in grammar schools. What we can “know” are facts proven by empirical sciences — acquired by observation and induction. This field keeps expanding thanks to modern technology. We are now able to view galaxies and stars, the existence of which was, in times past, totally inaccessible to us.
We can detect abnormalities in the bodies of children shortly after their conception and tell their mothers how unwise and burdensome it would be to bring a disabled child into the world. Charity (in the modern sense of the term) commands us to “terminate the pregnancy” — the word “abortion” is cleverly avoided.
Today thanks to our discovery of atomic weapons, we can annihilate a city by clicking on a button and console ourselves that if we cannot as yet create something out of nothing by a mere fiat, we can in fact destroy much of a world that we have not been able to produce as yet, by a mere fiat.
The New Testament informs us that the world will be destroyed by fire that will reduce everything to ashes. Is it quite conceivable that man himself will be the destroyer?
Science, according to the modern view, is the golden key to the secrets of the universe, and therefore should be the very foundation of “education.” By contrast, says moderns, religion and philosophy have a pitiful record: From their very beginning, they have given birth to very many views and theories on the meaning of human existence, on key metaphysical questions offering us a whole array of conflicting “opinions” changing with the spirit of the time — none of them claiming to be final. Clearly they cannot claim to be “scientific,” that is, valid. Anyone has a “right” to his own opinion. No one, absolutely no one, can claim that “his” views and his alone are worth being listened to…and obeyed.
Man has now supposedly discovered his birthright to make his own decisions and take control of his own destiny. There are those who assume that there is a God, Creator of Heaven and Earth; but this is countered by atheists who also offer “convincing” arguments for their position. Who has ever “seen” this all-powerful God? A student once told me that being “scientifically minded,” she would never accept that God exists unless, one day, she could perceive Him under her microscope, to which I promptly replied: “The very day I see Him under a microscope, we shall exchange roles: I shall become the atheist.”
The view prevalent in our schools today is that God is a creation of man’s powerful imagination, projecting into a non-existing being all his own endless potentialities, and therefore “denigrating” man by a false humility. It is high time that this lie be properly identified.
Closely related to this distorted approach is relativism, because in some mysterious way, all errors are cousins. Relativism has not only invaded but in fact conquered our educational system.
In grammar school, children are spoon-fed on this notion: Our Weltanschauung depends upon time, place, and circumstances: Everything is changing, everything is subject to the Zeitgeist.
This metaphysical lie is a tempting error because relativism is “relatively true”: tall, short, heavy, light, far, near, fast, slow are dominated by relativity. What is heavy for a child is very light for a man. This is so obvious that the temptation is great to universalize it, and claim that what is true for one person may not be true for another; what is good in one society is rejected as evil in another, what is admired at one time may be rejected at another.
It follows that it is perfectly legitimate to place Picasso’s paintings above Fra Angelico’s, or Michelangelo’s. One of my students tried to convince me that Shakespeare was a very poor writer!
It was typical of the very Dark Ages that men were unfairly deprived of their freedom to make up their own minds, according to modern thinking. In the great age in which we live, all these chains have finally been broken: Not only is man the measure of all things (Protagoras), we have gone further: The individual person is the measure of all things.
This is one of the very many “modern dogmas” that I heard at Hunter College when, as a very young professor, I taught a course on ethics. I was greeted by a student who said to me: “Why should your ideas be better than mine?” When I dared tell him that the value of an idea depends upon its truth, he looked at me with utter amazement. What has truth to do with it? Everyone has a right to decide for himself. This is freedom; this is democracy.
But we should realize that extending the relativity of many facts to metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics has grave consequences. There is in every man, even in every child, a deeply set conviction that there is such a thing as justice.
One cannot be but surprised when St. Therese of Lisieux refers to Heaven as the place where “there will be perfect justice.” St. Teresa of Avila writes that in Heaven, no two persons will have the same degree of glory: It will all be dictated by “perfect justice.” This is why “jealousy” will necessarily be excluded: It is inconceivable that one saint will “envy” the glory of one above him.
One of the great consolations of being in Purgatory, apart from the guarantee that we are saved, will be a full awareness that the punishments we suffer are perfectly just. It is exactly what we deserve. While on Earth, we all have the tendency of assuming that we always get a “short deal” and are unfairly treated.
In his great work, the Republic, Plato devotes much of his attention to “justice,” which should be the very foundation of any state. The state should be not only the executor of justice, but should be based on it; any “unjust” state is condemned by this very fact. It should not be. Alas, it often is not the case.
Justice is linked to objectivity. This noble “metaphysical structure” collapses the very moment this “objectivity” is relativized and is not only rejected but condemned as being the arbitrary will of those in command, imposing their arbitrary will on those under its control.
In fact, when the poison of relativism has invaded a society and its educational system has been infected by this poisonous food, it can be predicted that it is a dying society. To give equal “dignity” to truth and error (whose truth?) to moral good and moral evil (who is to tell?) to justice and injustice, to beauty and ugliness, is to enter the kingdom of Satan — a kingdom where the lie reigns supreme.
Yet it should be obvious that when a person makes a true statement, by the very fact that it echoes what is, this very statement is not and cannot be the possession of the one who formulated it. Reality is not the private possession of the one who sees it: It is “catholic” and is opened and offered to all. The one who perceived it deserves our gratitude for having been willing to “accept” to see.
Alas, darkness and error are oftentimes the fruit of a choice: The fear of “seeing” is a widespread, contagious disease and a welcome “cure” from “having a bad conscience” — this most unpleasant feeling that all of us dread, and that can be psychologically crippling. For to “see” implies an obligation to follow the dictates of what has been seen.
This is precisely what many of us not only do not like but in fact “dread” and, as a result, willfully declare “non serviam.”
Error is often the product of a mind which, alas, prides itself on being “creative” and therefore contributing to “the wheel of endless human progress.”
As there are an unlimited number of errors, and only one truth, it is easy to be “original” — that is, to make a name for oneself is the aim of a thinker. All truly great thinkers were all “receptive” to truth, having taken the right metaphysical position which is to “listen” to what is.
Another threat to education is the subtle change which is introduced in the meaning of words. It is fashionable today to extend the meaning of the beautiful word “compassion” to actions which call for moral condemnation. True as it is — a truth alas often forgotten — that sinners deserve our loving compassion, the action itself should be condemned. Our love for the cancerous patient should not be extended to the cancer.
The word “objective” today tends to be interpreted as redolent of the Inquisition: a ruthless and brutal condemnation of other persons’ views. This is seen as an attack on the “freedom” of the individual person; he and he alone is to decide what is “true” and is in harmony with his temperament, his culture, the spirit of his time.
A teacher’s mission is therefore to offer to his students a smorgasbord of the opinions that have been offered by a variety of thinkers, while making it clear that none of them deserves to be placed above others. Who is to tell? The one opinion which is to be condemned these days is that the value of an opinion depends upon its truth.
The damage done by these “intellectual traitors” — which like termites have undermined our schools and our society — is so grave that all that one can say is: Wake up before it is too late. May God have mercy on a society which has apostatized!