A Bird’s Eye View
Life happens at a rate of one second per second. We get no other perspective on events as they impinge upon us. If it were possible to slow things down, speed them up, or rewind, our decision making performance would improve dramatically. Unfortunately, time travel is an impossible paradox, but reading history gives us a sense of a different perspective on time. For example, reading the Biblical account in 1 and 2 Kings relays a sense of what time in fast-forward looks like. We see kings come and go. We see the crucial, life-changing decisions that they each make, and they flash by in an instant. All the influences of the time, culture, and environment that impressed upon that decision are stripped away, and it is relatively easy for the reader to see what each man should have done and the choices that he should have made. History can give a different perspective, a sort of bird’s eye view of past events and decisions.
Modern history can give us a bird’s eye view of events that we are living through today. The events, choices, and mistakes of the past century impact our current situation and understanding them can help us understand what to do now. One insightful student of history from the late 1900s was Dr. Francis Schaeffer. He was an author, a theologian, a historian, and a philosopher. He spent his life studying the interplay among all these fields and derived unique insights that were applicable to the decades when he was writing. It is remarkable how salient and applicable his insights are for today’s world too. The conditions and trends that he extrapolated 40+ years ago have come uniformly true and his accuracy validates his credentials as having a deep understanding of the world. Schaeffer was deeply immersed in modern history, but he did not restrict himself to that era. He looked at the arc from ancient Rome to his current day. In his writing, he traces the predominant forces acting through the centuries and isolates the principle components that drive how modern society operates, how people think, and why we find things broken the way they are today.
Schaeffer made many predictions about where society was headed, and we have landed where he said that we would. He also presented two fundamental alternatives for where society will go from here. He described a coming fork in the road, and we are quickly approaching that decision point. The following draws from many of his works, but it primarily uses his book, “How Should We Then Live?” (written in 1976) as the culmination of all of his writings. First is a summary of the historical road that civilization has traveled. Then an enumeration of all of the societal consequences of that historical, philosophical, and theological process. And finally will be the stark choice before us for where we go from here: Shaeffer’s alternatives.
Historical Context
As Christianity began to spread from Jerusalem shortly after Jesus’ death and resurrection, it came up against stiff resistance from the Roman government who saw the religion and its adherents as a threat to society. Their allegiance was to God first and not Rome. However even in the face of severe persecution - burning people alive and feeding them to lions kinds of persecution - Christianity spread. Society and the authorities were forced to acknowledge the inherent salubrity of Christianity, and the state’s zeal for persecution subsided. Eventually, in the year 313 AD, Emperor Constantine allowed Christianity to be a legal religion. Then in 381 AD, Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately, most Roman citizens heeded Theodosius’ decree little. By this time, the empire was already in decline. The people were wealthy and apathetic. They abandoned intellectual pursuits in favor of social activities. They were decadent and expended their energies in pursuit of sensual gratification. Their preferred form of entertainment was violence. While Christianity grew and spread in the empire, the foundation and substance of the empire continued to decline. The wealthy and powerful had the means to sate their appetites and lacked the urgency to sustain the society that provided for those means. The healthy Christian vein spreading through the empire was not enough to prevent its collapse.
With the fall of Rome, society took several steps backwards. Much specialized knowledge and expertise was lost. Pockets of knowledge survived in various places, often through the efforts of monastic orders and other Christian endeavors, but there were no great efforts to build upon it or surpass it. Society entered a period of subsistence and made very slow progress at recovering even the knowledge of the Romans before them. The church entered a period of philosophical struggle between material concerns and transcendent aspirations. The pendulum would swing back and forth between striving for, and approving of, material wealth and rejecting the material world altogether in search of eternal value. Thus the church had periods of lavish wealth and it also spawned enclaves like the monastic orders who attempted to live without using any money at all.
While overt intellectual progress was slow during this time, society learned some foundational lessons by experience and cultural memory. They learned the characteristics of good governance versus bad. They learned the value of honest work. The church learned how to implement a social safety net to rescue the poor and the sick from the most dire consequences of their predicaments. So, while the later secular humanists called this time the “dark ages,” it was not all a waste nor was it all without benefit to society.
After centuries of struggling and learning, of mankind wrestling with his diametrically opposed physical and spiritual natures, the great scholar and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) laid the foundation for mankind to begin harmonizing himself. Among other things, he taught that God had created the natural world and that it was not evil and opposed to the spiritual world. God created man as both a physical and a spiritual being. Mankind could look at the physical world and see the reflected aspects of the nature of God. Thus he sowed the seeds of scientific exploration. Art also began to markedly improve as people understood that painting physical depictions of the world was not debased or irreverent. In subsequent centuries, the Renaissance sprung out of the newfound interest in knowing and understanding the physical world.
However, Aquinas introduced one tiny flaw, a small heresy with his teachings. This heresy provided the foothold for an atheistic philosophy to grow up in contention with the Christian worldview that Aquinas espoused. It provided the foundation upon which mankind in his pride could set himself at the center of the universe in the place of God. It made a way for the defiance of the later Roman emperors — who each set himself up as the object of worship — to return exponentially upon the globe. Man could be the center of worship, but this presumption was available to anyone and not just the emperor. This heresy still fuels the atheistic worldview today that grows in malevolence and strength with each passing decade. It is a simple, seemingly innocent and innocuous heresy. It is this fatal misconception: that in man’s fall into sin his will became corrupted but his intellect remained pure. Rationality was able to reliably arrive at truth independently from Biblical revelation. Aquinas’ misconception promoted the attitude that although mankind chooses to do wrong and sinful things sometimes, if he uses his gift of reason he can derive truths about the universe autonomously from God’s explicit revelation in the Bible.
Initially, the intellectual community did not use Aquinas’ tenants to build an operating philosophy that was separate from Christianity. Aquinas did not see his heresy as a problem because he believed in the truth of the Bible and (rightly) did not believe any of his observations of the physical world would contradict it. The culture was steeped in Christianity and society operated by its principles even if individuals did not personally hold to those values. Scientific pursuits were founded upon a Biblical view of the universe as following regular laws that God established. Without the assumption of regularity and order in the universe, the scientific endeavor would have had no basis on which to begin. The Renaissance, which spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th centuries (occurring at different times in different places) began with people starting from a Christian worldview and combining it with Aquinas’ teaching that the physical world was part of God’s creation and worthy of study.
However, the Renaissance also began in an environment and with a Church which had compromised its worldview with humanist components. With Aquinas’ elevation of reason to the level of Biblical authority, the humanist forces grew even stronger. Much of the Renaissance was a celebration of man and all that he could accomplish and understand. The humanists gradually promoted reason and autonomous beginnings of knowledge and demoted Biblical revelation as the basis of knowledge. Many great thinkers and philosophers fought back against this tendency, but it gradually grew stronger and more brazen. Some philosophers, in an arrogant attempt to relegate God to a place of irrelevance, attempted to build increasingly grand and all-encompassing worldviews starting autonomously from man and what he could know apart from God’s revelation.
The energies of the Renaissance waxed in the 17th and 18th centuries in the form of the Enlightenment when many prominent thinkers discarded God altogether attempting to build a worldview completely independent from Him. This began the downward spiral of the endeavor. For many years philosophers would over-rule each other in their attempts at building a completely atheistic worldview. One would point out a flaw in the leading theory and propose a new one only to be replaced by another. These people had great confidence and optimism about their abilities. They looked upon all of the amazing intellectual and scientific achievements already won and looked upon the world as if every challenge were destined to fall to man’s expert intellect. Conveniently, they forgot that all of their vaunted achievements were built upon the Christian worldview that they were attempting to jettison.
As the years passed and the failures of even the best secular philosophers continued to mount. Pessimism grew in the humanists’ minds, and they sought an alternative. They began to understand that they were not able to describe mankind and the universe with their atheistic principles and their previously irresistible reason. Reason kept leading them to the conclusion that man was nothing and that life was meaningless. It was the ultimate example of “ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.” What is the meaning of life and the place of man in the universe apart from the One who created both? There is no meaning. There is no place.
The Long March Toward Insanity
The current state of society exists in the fallout of the great endeavors and failures of the humanists. Seeing the failure of reason to provide them an escape from God, they nevertheless refused to submit to the obvious conclusion of the centuries long experiment. Rather than build a worldview upon the revelations of God in the Bible, they chose to rebel against reason itself which had failed them so bitterly. Schaeffer pinpoints four philosophers that helped lead the humanists away from the reason that had betrayed their ambitions: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, and Søren Kierkegaard.
Schaeffer focuses primarily upon Rousseau as the driver behind the rejection of reason, and he is right in terms of the source of emotional and aspirational values that Rousseau provided to equip his followers to do something as unthinkable as reject reason. But Hegel appears to be the one who provided the intellectual machinery with which society could reject reason. Rousseau saw reason as a part of society which was confining individual freedom and oppressing mankind. Individual freedom was his highest ideal, and it was not freedom to flourish or live a good life. It was freedom to do literally anything you wanted to do and be literally anything you wanted to be. Society today resonates strongly with that sentiment encouraging people to follow any impulse regardless of its healthiness or reasonability. Hegel’s contribution was an intellectual way to reject reason. Rousseau provided the emotional and philosophical justification to abandon reason, but reason is innate to the human mind. It is unnatural for the mind to operate outside of reason. When a person acts irrationally, we call them “insane” and treat them as if they are ill. The human mind needed a reasonable basis on which to reject reason in order to make it possible. This is what Hegel provided.
Hegel looked at the endless train of arguments with points and counterpoints, thesis and antithesis, and he saw it only spinning in circles. He needed a way out of this spiral and invented a tortuous kind of reason to provide the way out. Although his positions were rather complex, the center of Hegel’s argument is apparently a reformulation of the way we understand arguments. He rejected the belief that some things are right and other things are wrong. When two parties or two ideas are juxtaposed in antithesis to one another, he says that they are both right and that the resolution is some form of synthesis between the two. When that synthesized idea runs into another idea that contradicts it, the result is a new synthesis and so on ad infinitum. Thus, the rational person no longer discerns the truth between two positions in an argument. Instead, his understanding becomes some kind of Frankenstein of every idea that he has ever heard espoused. The human mind with its reason and discernment has been lobotomized into an all-accepting sponge. As Schaeffer puts it,
When this happens, truth, as people had always thought of truth, has died.
The revolt against reason is necessary for humanists to avoid the conclusions to which reason was leading them. But mankind still needs purpose and hope to survive. The humanists found a source for hope and purpose by deriving the notion of a “leap of faith” from the work of Kierkegaard. They basically said that reason leads them to pessimism and away from hope but that in a brave, bold act of courage they would believe in hope and meaning anyway. They would find hope and meaning by claiming it outside of the realm of reason. It is ironic that their solution would be the same as the solution of some of the fraught Christians in previous decades. In the face of the humanists telling them that science and reason prove the Bible and Christianity is false, some of the Christians, rather than counter their arguments, said “You can keep your reason. I’m going to believe this anyway.” Now, the hopeless humanists decided that they are going to reject reason and believe in things that do not even have tradition and historical facts behind them. Will they face the same ridicule and derision that they heaped upon their Christian predecessors?
Consequences of Modern Philosophy
The secular humanist endeavor, which set out to create a worldview starting from man alone using his innate reason, wound up with a desperate desire to escape from the problem and even the sacred reason on which they founded their hopes. The consequences for society today are devastating. All of the intellectual capital built up over the renaissance and the enlightenment, built on the foundation of a Biblical Christian worldview, is spent, and society finds itself intellectually bankrupt and trying to escape from its creditor, reason. The rejection of reason and the grasp for purpose and meaning via a leap of faith ruins dialogue, stunts the ability to grow knowledge, and brings no benefit to society.
The philosophy led society to exchange it’s enriching Christian values for the cheap alternatives of personal peace and affluence. Rather than caring about right and wrong and loving one’s neighbor, a majority of people resigned themselves to only caring about maintaining a peaceful lifestyle and the affluence to support it. This peaceful lifestyle is not a benevolent peace. It is a selfish, introverted peace that cares only about maintaining personal peace and cares nothing for everyone else. It does not strive to maintain a community peace or a societal peace, only personal peace. The most that can be said of it is that it is a “live and let live” mentality that agrees to leave others alone as long as they leave me alone. The shallowness and emptiness of these values is not fulfilling, and they do not translate well from one generation to the next. For example, when parents would tell their kids to go to college and their reason was to have a better paycheck, a lot of the kids saw that personal peace and affluence were the only values behind this reasoning, and they sought something more.
Because society had abandoned the Christian values and worldview, the idealistic youth sought meaning and values in all kinds of other destructive places. They experimented with drugs. Schaeffer points to the middle of the 1960s when, led by the philosophy of Aldous Huxley, drug taking became a way to find meaning in life. At the beginning, the belief was sincere. People thought drugs would free them from the confines of normal life and allow them to understand the world and find meaning. This philosophy did not last long. After a few years, the consequences of the philosophy became apparent and drugs returned to their historical place as a means of escape from the questions of life rather than an answer.
Another foray into grasping for meaning outside of reason came through the New Left. A group of German professors adhering to the belief system of the “Frankfurt School” relocated to the University of San Diego California after World War II. They taught a repackaged form of Marxism which appeared to be a novel alternative that could provide meaning for their naive and searching students. Naturally, many of the students embraced the philosophy and spearheaded a radical new communist movement that spread across the country. The violence and destruction inherent to the worldview disillusioned many people and the belief system lost momentum, but it did not disappear. Ironically, most of the appeal of the ideology comes from the language that it plagiarizes from Christianity. The philosophy is atheistic and materialist and has no basis for concepts like the dignity of man, equality, or fairness, yet it speaks in those terms. The concepts resonate with people because of their nature as creatures made in God’s image, and those searching for meaning, especially youths, are drawn to it. Schaeffer explains the phenomenon as a Christian heresy,
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base — the dignity of man — and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression.
The fact that Marxism brings forth only violence, oppression, and misery is the reason that it is a leap of faith. It belongs in the camp of belief systems based in non-reason because it grasps for idealistic sounding values via means and a system that could never produce them. The adherents blindly hold to their belief system, against all reason, because of its words, even though its actions defy those words. Sound logic, a clear understanding of man’s heart, and the facts of history all show that the hypothesis of communism is not true and belongs to non-reason.
There are many other philosophies and worldviews that belong to the revolt against reason. Eastern religions became popular in the 60s and 70s because they offered knowledge (“enlightenment”) and meaning outside of the sphere of reason. Jean-Paul Sartre promoted a philosophy that people could authenticate their existence by an act of the will. By making a decision and doing something, making a difference in the world, you have given your life meaning and shown that you are something. The Swiss psychologist, Jaspers, spoke of having a “final experience” where something so transcendent and sublime happens to you that you have meaning and significance because of it. All of these leaps of faith are examples of what modern man has been relegated to in the face of a rejection of reason as a basis for finding purpose and meaning.
Ramifications for Society
When reason leads to pessimism and meaninglessness and meaning and purpose come from a leap of faith into some belief system independent of reason, the consequences for society are numerous, variegated, and severe. Society has been cutting free the moors to its historical Christian base, believing them to be unnecessary hindrances to progress. It feels justified in this because there have been no obvious, serious consequences for this unfettering. Unaware that the persisting societal stability was due only to residual dependence upon its disintegrating Christian base, the philosophical pioneers have proceeded to shove off into the chaos of new and unfounded belief systems. Now, as the Christian base is dissipating out of relevance, the consequences of cutting those ties are becoming quickly, painfully, and frighteningly obvious.
Without the Christian base, many of the foundations of society have shaken loose. The foundation upon which science is built has crumbled. In Schaeffer’s words,
Science, as it is now usually conceived, has no epistemological base — that is, no base for being sure that what scientists think they observe corresponds to what really exists.
Scientists can keep pushing forward with their pursuits, following the established process, but their philosophical basis is gone. Only the technical process remains. The harm of this shift is that the purpose of science changes. No longer are scientists primarily dedicated to finding out the truth about the universe. Instead, their purpose is to advance affluence (assuming their values are personal peace and affluence) or their science becomes what Schaeffer calls “sociological science” with the goal not of finding truth but of affecting society in whatever way the directors deem desirable. The shift in foundation allows science to become a manipulative tool rather than a source of truth.
With sociological science, the scientific process is twisted to achieve its new purpose. The scientists produce data and conclusions to match the message and the position that they want to advance. Often the motivation is monetary but ideological reasons are gaining influence as well. Data becomes the servant of messaging rather than the shaper of it. The messages are powerful because of the store of confidence and trust built up over the years as scientists followed a philosophy that called them to be dispassionate and unbiased pursuers of truth. Society trusts science with almost religious fervor, but this trust is abused under the shifted, non-reason base for meaning.
Similar to science, law has become unstable in the wake of its eroded foundation. The rejection of the concept of absolute truth and that things can be right or wrong, the idea that conflict between ideas should result in a synthesis rather than a choice, is anathema to everything upon which the modern legal system is built. Traditionally, law and the judicial process was preoccupied with truth. It sought to find truth. It assumed a real, fixed meaning in a written law. It would not be subject to kings, politicians, or majorities. It ignored wealth or status. Its goal was to compare deeds and words with written statutes and find the closest adherent to the law and decide in his favor. It relied upon past judgements for the purpose of consistency and reliability of the law. It dispelled chaos and promoted order in society. After eroding the Christian base, law has become variable and unreliable. It claims to champion truth, but truth changes from day to day under the secular philosophies. Schaeffer says,
Much modern law is not even based on precedent; that is, it does not necessarily hold fast to a continuity with the legal decisions of the past. Thus, within a wide range, the Constitution of the United States can be made to say what the courts of the present want it to say—based on a court’s decision as to what the court feels is sociologically helpful at the moment.
He further clarifies the current position about how vulnerable and adrift society is without its Christian foundation,
This means that tremendous changes of direction can be made and the majority of the people tend to accept them without question—no matter how arbitrary the changes are or how big a break they make with past law or consensus.
The field of law is adrift, left to the current whims and opinions of the judicial decision makers, and society is so saturated with the modern secular philosophy that it does not care that it is adrift and assumes that drifting is right and natural. The logical conclusions of this belief system are offending the sensibilities of decent people across the country who see law applied unequally according to stature, influence, and popularity. Rather than becoming a more advanced and enlightened system, law is degenerating into the backward and corrupt systems that existed before the Christian base advanced it to the state we recently enjoyed.
Similar to science and law but possibly even more dangerous is the transition to a “sociological news medium.” The rejection of the Christian base changes the philosophy behind the concept of reporting the news in a similar way that it changed science. Reporting the news used to be about finding as much information as possible about a topic and conveying it to the audience so that they could form an opinion based upon the truth. Without the concept of objective truth, the whole philosophy of news reporting is undermined. The news shifts from an endeavor to seek out the truth and report it, to a means of influencing society. According to Francis Schaeffer’s assessment,
The distinction between the news columns and the editorial page has, in many of the most influential papers, become much less clear.
One must remember that Francis Schaeffer died in 1984. The blurred lines that he saw in his day must seem like the most objective and reasonable reporting to us today. After four more decades down the path of sociological news, it is practically impossible to find a trace of objectivity, or even a reporter who believes in it. Even in the past 20 years there has been a discernible shift toward narrative and away from truth as the objective of journalists. The professional news organizations have lost most of their value to society by turning from seeking the objective truth to pushing a predetermined agenda.
This corrupting of the primary functions of society, including science, law, and news reporting, traces directly to the erosion of the Christian base as the primary foundation of society. The philosophies that grew up in opposition to Christianity have born their fruit and only now do we see plainly how spoiled and worthless it is.
Three directions remain for how to align society in the face of its lost Christian worldview and Biblical beliefs. People can embrace hedonism where each person seeks self gratification. They can accept the principle of majority rule where 51% of the population determines what is right or wrong. Or they can accept authoritarian rule. Hedonism is easy to dismiss because it leads directly to chaos. When each person is simply fending for himself, there is no cooperation, no consideration of others, no society to speak of. The other two options are more viable.
Majority rule holds a lot of sway in American culture. People associate this principle with democracy and think of it as the best we can do. They do not seem to remember the days when one man could stand up to a crowd and show them in the Bible where they are wrong. With majority rule, there is no anchor to draw society back from dissipation. A moral society might survive for quite a while on the principle of majority rule, but it will tend toward degradation. People will end up doing what is easy rather than what is currently considered “right.” Healthy principles will tend to decay into unhealthy principles and there will be no external force to rebuild them. When people accept an external source for their values and laws, they have a place to return to even when society falls away from their beliefs and into deep decay. As a Biblical example, king Josiah came to power after the northern ten tribes of Israel had been carried away into exile and the tribes of Judah and Benjamin had forsaken God’s law for several generations. Josiah was a good man, but he had no knowledge of how his people were supposed to live and so was powerless to lead them in the right way. In his 18th year as king, one of his servants discovered the book of the law in the house of the Lord. Josiah read the book, believed it, felt convicted, and led his kingdom in a deep and sincere repentance for the disobedience they had been practicing. Without the book, even a good king would have nothing with which to lead his people. Majority rule puts society adrift in an ocean of possibilities with no direction or anchor showing what is good for it.
The final possibility is authoritarian rule, and Schaeffer sees this as the inevitable end for the society that holds to the secular philosophy that we are predominantly embracing. Hedonism and majority rule both tend to be chaotic. In hedonism, each person determines what is right for himself. In majority rule, pockets of people will determine what is right in different places. One city will have different values from another city according to the inclinations of their local majorities. One state will uphold vastly different principles than another because of what their internal majorities decide. And 51% of the country will decide contentious things for the whole country leaving large minorities disenfranchised and disgruntled. Although Schaeffer understands it well, Milton Friedman states the problem best in his book “Capitalism and Freedom,”
The use of political channels, while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society. The strain is least if agreement for joint action need be reached only on a limited range of issues on which people in any event have common views. Every extension of the range of issues for which explicit agreement is sought strains further the delicate threads that hold society together. If it goes so far as to touch an issue on which men feel deeply yet differently, it may well disrupt the society. Fundamental differences in basic values can seldom if ever be resolved at the ballot box; ultimately they can only be decided, though not resolved, by conflict.
As various majorities come in conflict with each other and one gets overruled by the other, society will fragment. In this way, majority rule eventually has the same drawback as hedonism. And this is the point where Schaeffer says,
only one alternative is left: one man or an elite, giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. … Society cannot stand chaos. Some group or some person will fill the vacuum. An elite will offer us arbitrary absolutes, and who will stand in its way?
Schaeffer’s Alternatives: Authoritarian Rule or a Return to the Biblical Worldview
After seeing the circumscription of all of the forces and events driving society to its current point, only two paths forward remain, one seemingly inevitable and the other obvious but neglected. Schaeffer offers the options of authoritarian rule or a return to a Biblical worldview. We are careening toward authoritarian rule, but we seem to have forgotten that the Biblical worldview does not lead in this direction. It all began with a bifurcation from the Christian consensus and base upon which society relied.
Authoritarian rule seems to be the only logical conclusion of our current trajectory. Strong elements of authoritarian rule have been seeping, even gushing, into American culture over the past couple of decades. Power continues to centralize. Freedoms that were assumed and even taken for granted have been swept away in an instant. As a society, a majority seems to be resigned to the fact that authoritarian rule is inevitable. People are open to the idea of the “elite” making decisions for the rest of society. We are content to leave all the important decisions to the “experts.” There is no great outcry against Google, Facebook, or Twitter for manipulating their search results or muting conversations that they do not find acceptable. Although most will not yet openly admit it, a significant portion of society is already leaning toward being ruled by authorities rather than coping with the chaos of the other options of the secular worldview.
If we imagine authoritarian rule, we often picture overt authoritarians like Stalin or Hitler, but the authoritarian rule of the future will be a manipulative version. It will not need the clumsy and offensive methods of the old authoritarians as its primary mode of control. The pessimistic conclusions of the brand of science built upon an atheistic worldview have permeated our minds. We no longer acknowledge our special place as created in God’s image. As Schaeffer puts it,
people consciously or unconsciously have opened themselves to being treated as machines and treating other people as machines.
Science used to be a study of the physical world with God and man as the outside forces and observers. As philosophy amputated God from its worldview, man’s special place disappeared as well. He became part of the machine to study. Modern scientists reduced man to an “electrochemical machine.” And seeing man as a machine softens the aversion to manipulating those machines. We openly talk about attempts to control and manipulate society as a whole, acting as if society is something other than a collection of human beings deserving of dignity and respect. Atheistic scientists talk about controlling the gene pool in terms of who should be born, who should be encouraged to procreate, and who should be prevented from procreating. Big tech companies feel willing and justified to manipulate their users to act, think, and believe in ways that the elites in control find desirable. In the recent pandemic, the government assumed the authority to make decisions about almost every aspect of life which previously had been in the domain of the individual. Ostensibly objective news agencies cut details, accentuate other details, and inject unnecessary information in pursuit of a narrative to an extent that the news is lost in the telling. Video footage, the most unmistakable form of proof today, is always edited and/or an incomplete picture of a scene. The manipulation surrounds us. Even in Schaeffer’s day, he said
there are suggestions for the emergence of an elite to manipulate society… And the technical breakthroughs necessary to make this possible have largely been accomplished. Any modern authoritarian government has almost endless means of manipulation.
After 40 years of honing their craft, they are practicing it in earnest.
The breakdown in society, the dehumanizing tendencies we see in the world, the rise in authoritarianism and manipulation, the loss of man’s dignity, and a myriad of other problems we see today all trace back to the philosophical base upon which people are operating. People talk about fixing these problems, but any meaningful change will have to start at the foundation. In perhaps the most prescient paragraph in Schaeffer’s book he explains the dumbfounding implosion of the formerly enviable news apparatus in America, and ties it beautifully to the emergence of secular humanism as the dominant philosophy in our country,
With an elite providing the arbitrary absolutes, not just TV but the general apparatus of the mass media can be a vehicle for manipulation. There is no need for collusion or a plot. All that is needed is that the world view of the elite and the world view of the central news media coincide. One may discuss if planned collusion exists at times, but to be looking only for the possibility of a clandestine plot opens the way for failing to see a much greater danger: that many of those who are in the most prominent places of influence and many of those who decide what is news do have the common, modern, humanist world view we have described at length in this book. It is natural that they act upon this viewpoint, with varying degrees of consciousness of what they are doing, and even varying degrees of consciousness of who is using whom. Their world view is the grid which determines their presentation.
The problem with the news is bigger than the problem of companies getting too big or hiring from the same echo chamber institutions. The problem with authoritarians is bigger than just a problem with a bloated government that cannot moderate itself or a bad apple that managed to ascend to power. The problem with a society that does not respect life or man’s dignity is larger than the pathological effects of social media platforms. The problem springs from the sinful heart of man that we are nurturing rather than reforming today. The Christian foundation has been eroding into dust for decades and we have finally reached the point where its remaining strength is failing to uphold society.
As the memory of the Christian consensus which gave us freedom within the biblical form increasingly is forgotten, a manipulating authoritarianism will tend to fill the vacuum.
The intriguing detail that we seem to have forgotten today is the reason this bifurcation in world views began which has led us to abandon the Christian base in this country. Philosophy did not show that God was a logical inconsistency or incompatibility with life. Science did not show that God does not exist. No one did a proof which forced man to attempt to build a philosophy of life starting from only himself. Man began this 500-year-long quest to build a philosophy without God out of a rebellious heart. People who did not want to submit to the world that God designed or His laws for how we should live set out to build a competing theory. So, they latched onto Aquinas’ heresy and began building their own world views independent from God. The endeavor has been a protracted disaster. We find ourselves in a place where reason and meaning are divorced from each other, where all of our attempts at restoring and improving society have the opposite effect, where all of our solutions only speed the decay and the oncoming demise of our society. Yet, the effectual solution is simple. We need to go back to what worked in the first place: establishing our worldview in biblical principles.
Schaeffer offers a summary of his alternatives,
The central message of biblical Christianity is the possibility of men and women approaching God through the work of Christ. But the message also has secondary results, among them the unusual and wide freedoms which biblical Christianity gave to countries where it supplied the consensus. When these freedoms are separated from the Christian base, however, they become a force of destruction leading to chaos. When this happens, as it has today, then, to quote Eric Hoffer (1902-), “When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom.”