When I read the title of this post at WhatfingerNews, I thought for sure it had to be an Onion article. It’s gotta be satire, right? Wrong. A couple, postmodern relativist liberals through and through, who thought human beings are fundamentally decent and good, were killed by terrorists. How sad, but instructive: reality will not be mocked. This is an object lesson for the futility of a certain 21st century secularist mindset that says what we think about reality, as opposed to what we discover in it, is what ultimately counts.
In what could have come from another Onion piece, this secularist mentality was described perfectly by recently retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1992 in a case that upheld a constitutional right to abortion:
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.
How did that work out for Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, both only 29 when the evil they didn’t believe existed befell them? And they were killed on my birthday, July 29. They had decided to leave their government jobs in Washington, DC, to bike around the world. They did it not only because their jobs were unfulfilling, but to experience how wonderful and fascinating people are, and I agree can be. But Jay Austin took this in a completely secularist direction:
You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.
It would be difficult to write a parody of postmodern liberal relativism better than this. Yet it is exactly these thoughts that got Austin and his girlfriend killed.
It’s hard to fathom that anyone could believe that “Evil is a make-believe concept.” Unfortunately, such ideas have a long pedigree in Western intellectual thought. The first thinker to articulate ideas that would lead to Austin’s conclusion was 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He argued that human beings are basically good, but that society corrupts them. Evil is imposed upon us; it does not dwell in us, nor is it a part of us. If you fix the society, you fix the man. What could go wrong? Only everything.
It wasn’t too many years after his death when his fellow French citizens, inspired by his ideas, took up arms in a revolution that ran, literally, rivers of blood. What Rousseau, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan got terribly wrong was their anthropology. The word comes from the Greek anthropos, which means man. What we take human beings to be, our anthropology, has enormous implication for how we live our lives, and order our societies. The irony is that if we believe in the basic goodness of human nature, we get worse results. Why would this be? This tragedy gives us an answer: people are not fundamentally good!
To throw out another philosophical term, our anthropology does not determine our ontology. This simply means the study of being, and whatever we might think human beings are doesn’t make them so. And this gets us to an essential dividing line in American and Western culture. The largely irreligious secular left believes reality is malleable; we can make of it what we will. Thomas Sowell in his classic work, Conflict of Visions, called this the “unconstrained” vision, in that human nature is malleable and perfectible. The “constrained” vision sees human nature as selfish and not capable of fundamental change. This would be the biblical view of fallen human nature, and I learned the classical take as well from recently reading Victor Davis Hanson’s, Who Killed Homer. The ancient Greeks and Romans had a very pessimistic view of human nature because, well, they weren’t blind.
Going back to the quote of Justice Kennedy. Such nonsense has received deserved ridicule from conservatives, religious or not, since it was first penned, but from secular liberals, not a peep. In fact, this is exactly how people on the other side of the dividing line I mentioned see reality. There is no objective, external existence to discover, but a subjective, internal reality we are exhorted to create. As I discuss in the section in my book on Truth, this is the “true for you, but not for me” take on reality. Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan’s death is another sad example I can use to teach my children that reality doesn’t care what we think. It is what it is, and is what God has revealed to us, that we as Moses prayed “we might gain a heart of wisdom.”
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