I as privileged to hear the excerpt's author, J. Budziszewski, lecture in Nashville a couple of years ago when my buddy Michael Poore invited him to speak at the Humanitas Forum. (Poore is the guy who hosted the Ted Kluck lecture in Cookeville a couple of weeks ago.) The lectures were great, and can be accessed here: http://humanitas.org/forum/archive/2010_budziszewski/2010_budziszewski.shtml
I certainly wouldn't endorse everything Budziszewski says (he moved from Episcopalianism to Roman Catholicism several years back), but, as the excerpt below will show, he is a penetrating thinker and writer.
"...How did I become a nihilist? Why was I so determined? What were my real motives?
There were quite a few. One was that, having been caught up in radical politics of the late sixties and early seventies, I had my own ideas about redeeming the world, ideas that were opposed to the Christian faith of my childhood. As I got further and further from God, I also got further and further from common sense about a lot of other things, including moral law and personal responsibility.
That first reason for nihilism led to a second. By now I had committed certain sins of which I did not want to repent. Because the presence of God made me more and more uncomfortable, I began looking for reasons to believe that he didn't exist. It's a funny thing about us human beings: not many of us doubt God's existence and then start sinning. Most of us sin and then start doubting his existence.
A third reason for being a nihilist was simply that nihilism is what I was taught. I may have been raised by Christian parents, but I'd heard all through school that even the most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society. That's empirically false--as C. S. Lewis remarked, cultures may disagree about whether a man may have one wife or four, but all of them know about marriage; they may disagree about which actions are most courageous, but none of them rank cowardice as a virtue. But by the time I was taught the false anthropology of the times, I wanted very much to believe it.
A fourth reason, related to the last, was the very way I was taught to use language. My high school English teachers were determined to teach me the difference between what they called facts and what they called opinions, and I noticed that moral propositions were always included among the opinions. My college social science teachers were equally determined to teach me the difference between what they called facts and what they called values, and to much the same effect: the atomic weight of sodium was a fact, but the wrong of murder was not. I thought that to speak in this fashion was to be logical. Of course it had nothing to do with logic; it was merely nihilism itself, in disguise.
A fifth reason for my nihilism was that disbelieving in God was a good way to get back at him for the various things that predictably went wrong in my life after I had lost hold of him. Now of course if God didn't exist then I couldn't get back at him, so this may seem a strange sort of disbelief. But most disbelief is like that.
A sixth reason was that I had come to confuse science with a certain worldview, one that many science writers hold but that actually has nothing to do with science. I mean the view that nothing is real but matter. If nothing is real but matter, then there couldn't be such things as minds, moral law, or God, could there? After all, none of those are matter. Of course not even the properties of matter are matter, so after while it became hard to believe in matter itself. But by that time I was so disordered that I couldn't tell how disordered I was. I recognized that I had committed yet another incoherency, but I concluded that reality itself was incoherent, and that I was pretty clever to have figured this out--even more so, because in an incoherent world, figuring didn't make sense either.
A seventh and reinforcing reason for my nihilism was that, for all of the other reasons, I had fallen under the spell of the nineteenth-century German writer Friedrich Nietzsche. I was, if anything, more Nietzschean than he was. Whereas he thought that given the meaninglessness of things, nothing was left but to laugh or be silent, I recognized that not even laughter or silence were left. One had no reason to do or not do anything at all. This is a terrible thing to believe, but like Nietzsche, I imagined myself one of the few who could believe such things--who could walk the rocky heights where the air is thin and cold.
But the main reason I was a nihilist, the reason that tied all these other reasons together, was sheer, mulish pride. I didn't want God to be God; I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God. I see that now. But I didn't see that then.
I have already noted in passing that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things he has given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I've been given is a stronger than average mind. I don't make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn't do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren't responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students. Now that's sin."
J. Budziszewski, "Escape from Nihilim"
No comments:
Post a Comment