The Sorcerer’s Apprentices . . .

To briefly recap:

The main ideological prop of the modernist mindset is the Darwinian theory of evolution, which has been adapted to reinforce the view that there is no intrinsic purpose or meaning in the universe.

Darwinism has been mined throughout its history as a justification for all sorts of fanciful ideas.  The one with the most far-reaching consequences to date was probably that of Social Darwinism, which emerged in the late 19^th century, and reached its full and logical fruition in the ideology of Hitler and in the death camps of the Second World War.

The modernists use it to a somewhat different effect.  They argue that Darwin showed that there were no purposeful processes of causation in the world.  Everything is, or at least was, accidental. 

Mankind, for example, need never have existed; it is just the random consequence of the interaction of different factors, rather like the jostling of bumping cars at a fairground.  Things happened the way they happened, but they could equally have happened a billion different ways. Those who argue otherwise are simply looking backwards down the wrong end of the telescope.  And such being the case, there is no longer any need—or even place—for the idea of a guiding intelligence behind existence.  In other words, the universe is meaningless.

Yet at the same time as they decry the existence of any natural meaning or order in the universe, the modernists are nonetheless still reluctant to let go of the concept.  Things may have been chaotic and mindless in the beginning, but there is no reason why they should remain so.  Mankind can create its own meaning, its own purposeful systems of causation.

This is what, in its various manifestations, has been happening since at least the Enlightenment, with very mixed results to date.  And, equally, it is what is happening now, and what underlies the ongoing chaos of gender identities and proliferating rights and radical equality etc. etc.

Of course, when they talk of mankind making its own future, the modernists are really talking about themselves, the intellectual elite, so called, who know what is best for the rest of us, and are determinedly set on reprogramming everyone to fit the bill.

Since Reason cannot exist outside or before humanity—which effectively wipes out the legitimacy of divine revelation etc.—mankind is effectively at the ground zero of reasoning.  If the ethicists, formerly the ‘moral philosophers’, are to be believed, we are effectively setting off with a blank slate.  Mankind must build from scratch its own ethical structures.

The unconscious human moral programming that science has recently discovered, and which has already been discussed here, doesn’t at all fit in with these modern categories of thought, and must therefore be dismissed as outdated or incoherent, or else analysed to destruction.  After all it wasn’t something arrived at via the minds of academicians, therefore it can have no real legitimacy.

The methods and techniques and mindsets of this brave new world of ethical theory is something that will be dealt with over the next two or so mailings.