Christians are bound to recognize that the God of Jesus Christ is truly Lord and truly Creator. We are bound to do our best to honestly and courageously and faithfully respond to God’s Creation as we can best know it and as we come into contact with it.
To turn away from Creation or to attempt to impose your own dreams or schemes upon Creation rather than properly responding is an act of rebellion against God, that is, an act of rebellion from the Christian viewpoint. It is also a serious moral fault and courts practical consequences—to virtuous pagans and others as well as to Christians. In my updated Thomistic terms, I think of this rebellion as a refusal to make peace with empirical reality. (See the freely downloadable book, Making Peace with Empirical Reality which is also the name of a part in the much larger collection of essays, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2013. An update of this more complete collection will be coming after end of year 2014.) This refusal to make peace with empirical reality can be an understandable response to a sometimes brutal Creation, but it cannot be sustained without falling into a rebellion against God. Certainly, a major human institution or country or civilization falls into a state of moral disorder and courts disaster by sustaining such a rebellion.
As Jeremiah pointed out in explicit terms, if you know that God has willed that your very country be conquered and your people enslaved, then you have to give in to that will of God. It is rare, to say the least, that the members of a community would be asked by a true prophet of God to surrender their entire community, men and women and children, Temple and home and stores of food and gold, to a brutal and greedy conqueror. Lesser surrenders to political or military subjugation by brutes or simply those who hate your people are sometimes mandated by bad situations. A lesser form of this surrender might well be the fate of the American people if they continue to tolerate leaders who abuse other peoples with American power. We will need to surrender our (quite irrational and historically unjustified) claim to being an `exceptional people’. I think this is already happening and our leader class (power-elite or whatever) is not going down gracefully because they have nothing to contribute to the world but a brutal willingness to use the firepower made possible by American wealth and to use it even against the most defenseless of civilian targets.
How can we understand the sort of rebellion against reality, against the most blunt of facts let alone against reasonable, but speculative, understandings of that reality? Is it a form of Idealism? That article in the link defines Idealism in these terms:
[T]he group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society. As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit. Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind. [Footnotes can be found in the original.]
Presented in these abstract terms, Idealism would seem to be a concern of ivory-tower philosophers. It’s certainly not clear why it would be a problem for Christians or for Americans, Christian and non-Christian. In fact, my view of God manifesting His thoughts as created being of which we are a part and from which we form valid thoughts by way of responses obscures, but in a useful way, the difference between `mind’ and `reality’. By way of a higher level understanding made possible by an `encapsulation’ of reality as a substantial part of our own minds, we can expand our understandings of reality to include larger pieces of Creation. By way of emphasis upon mental activity, my claims bear a somewhat askew but close resemblance to at least a possible form of Idealism. The difference is that valid mental constructs in my worldview are formed by honest and courageous responses to reality, in the small or in the large. Creation itself corresponds to our minds (most completely and most perfectly to the communal mind of the Body of Christ) because our minds correspond to Creation as we best know it. Actually, there is a time-lag which brings about the possibility of serious problems, some of which are realized pretty well in the modern world, especially in the Christian churches and in the countries of the West. Our understanding is always based upon yesterday’s responses and the knowledge formed by those responses. When, for example, the physical and mathematical sciences have advanced so fast as to conflict with our knowledge from yesterday, then our general understandings of Creation are out of synch with our best, and perhaps only partially digested, knowledge of empirical reality. The same can also happen when knowledge of abstract realms, such as mathematical understandings of infinity, has advanced too rapidly to have been properly absorbed by philosophers and theologians, historians and biologists, poets and novelists, clergymen and believers, politicians and citizens.
What does all this mean? Perhaps that Wikipedia article, Idealism, can shed some more light through a passage dealing with more ordinary usage of the term:
In ordinary use, as when speaking of Woodrow Wilson’s political idealism, it generally suggests the priority of ideals, principles, values, and goals over concrete realities. Idealists are understood to represent the world as it might or should be, unlike pragmatists, who focus on the world as it presently is.
The above statement is a large-scale simplification of the sort found in my essays. I like it.
For the rest of this essay, I’ll use the term `Idealism’ for this `vulgar Idealism’ and I’ll ask, “Why is Idealism wrong?”
Idealism assumes that the truth is found in our heads, and perhaps in our hearts. In most cases, this is not a conclusion from personal contemplations or perhaps debates with friends or others. In most cases, this is a result of the very processes I advocate. We form our minds in responses to reality, but nearly all boys and girls form their minds by responding, usually in affirmation, to what they are taught by Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, minister or priest or rabbi and religious teacher, movies and formal schooling. Some are born with a tendency to rebellion which is one of those traits dangerous, or even self-destructive, in some circumstances but valuable to society if not to the rebellious human being in other circumstances. Most tend to absorb what they are taught explicitly or implicitly. Turning the communal mind is akin to turning an oil tanker—it takes a good number of miles or years.
We hold “ideals, principles, values, and goals” and believe them to be absolutes because we adopted them or they were pushed into our heads or—more realistically—both, starting with the very first attitudes we picked up as infants. When reality seems to differ from our absolutes, we go with our absolutes. I could say it’s even broader than the above list by including even facts. We hold ideas of what “must have” happened during, say, World War II or the Vietnam War or the campus protests during the late 1960s and early 1970s or Watergate. Those fairy-tales, sometimes with as nasty an edge as any from Soviet propaganda, overrule any potential facts which present themselves to our senses or minds. Americans are so good and pure in the mind of these juvenile patriots that they don’t even question what really happened when we hear of Vietnamese or Afghan villagers, sometimes with weapons in their hands, being killed by Americans carrying heavy arms. Who was in whose backyard? Who was carrying military rifles and explosives near whose children? We don’t even question the meaning of the context; we know any villager who killed an American soldier was clearly one of those gooks who have no respect for human life or a raghead who hates us for our freedoms.
More generally, that refusal to accept God’s Creation on its own terms—terms set by God in His freely chosen role as Creator—is an act of defiance against God. This doesn’t mean we’re called to accept our fates in some passive way; it does mean we are called to respond to God’s Creation rather than to attempt to impose our own rules upon that great Work of all works. We play within God’s rules which include the 5th Commandment so spectacularly violated by the United States and its allies since the dominant countries of the West decided to fight the gangster regimes of Hitler and Stalin by becoming more skilled gangsters.
God’s rules also include the rules covered by modern physics and mathematics and the general principles of evolution and development which are so central to physical cosmology as well as biology and history and sociology and creative writing. Even highly educated scientists are having trouble learning how to truly accept all of this new empirical knowledge, and the theories built upon it; even philosophers with flexible minds can’t readily make the strangeness of quantum physics a natural part of their thinking though it is quantum physics that is true and our minds which are wrong or at least inadequate. (See Shaping Our Minds to Reality for my responses to some powerful insights by John Polkinghorne, physicist and Anglican priest.)
Our worldviews, our overall understandings of all that exists, are largely matters of speculation and are necessarily limited and impoverished compared to Creation, but we should be careful to avoid willful wrongheadedness. We should also avoid wrongheadedness in our understandings of lesser realms of Creation, such as the history or moral standing of our country. Our understandings are limited and impoverished because of the ways in which an imperfect creature has to learn over time, his own lifetime and the generations over which develop the communal human beings into which an individual human being integrates his own individual being while yet keeping it and remaining himself. To be wrongheaded is to be morally culpable for willful ignorance and the resulting stupidity—however inherently intelligent those ignorant and stupid human beings often are. The ultimate wrongheadedness is to willfully misunderstand the very meaning of God’s Creation, imposing our own—often self-righteousness—schemes or failing to courageously respond to signs that we need to rethink some matters and come to a somewhat different understanding of what is, for example, the Body of Christ. In Christian terms, this is a sin as well as a serious and dangerous moral fault. In terms of virtuous paganism (think Aristotle), this is still a serious moral fault. It’s not a simple mistake, it is an effort to impose your own preferences upon God’s manifested thoughts, even an effort to assert the superiority of your own `moral vision’ over the work of God.
Human beings can be in a state of seeming rebellion against reality, or at least in a state of separation from reality, for a variety of reasons which might carry no moral culpability or only partial culpability. A schizophrenic who weaves fantastic tales of being a disinherited granddaughter of a very wealthy man, only half believing it herself—if even half, isn’t evil. A seemingly sane President or Vice-President of the United States who weaves fantastic tales of vast international conspiracies against Americans—“They hate us for our freedoms?”—is evil, no less though he believes his own fables. American citizens who continue to follow men who present only updated or even more outlandish versions of these fantastic tales are in a state of sin or moral fault after these decades of Cold War followed by a “Clash of Civilizations” and the huge body count, disproportionately composed of the Vietnamese villagers we were `saving’ and all those Iraqi children evil enough to live under the rule of an American bastard our leaders no longer wanted.
Let me step back and speak in terms of centuries. The current separation of the intellects, or communal minds, of the West from reality are a highly possible, though not necessary, result of the rejection of evidence that God’s Creation doesn’t correspond to the ideas held by those who persecuted Galileo who was trying to respond openly and honestly to that evidence. (In this, I simplify by using the most prominent martyr to the truth of God’s Creation as a symbol.) To be sure, however stupid some of Galileo’s persecutors were, they were the holders of what were honorable and quite plausible speculations on the nature of this concrete realm and of what might lie outside of it. Plausible but wrong as it turned out, though we should allow some sympathy for those with inflexible minds and rigorous training in a worldview about to be superseded. But, mostly, we should criticize them strongly for not even losing their confidence in their worldview in the face of strong evidence it was not adequate for understanding empirical knowledge in even the early decades of the “Age of Discovery”—they were willing enough to profit from the new lands being discovered where no new lands should have been by their mainstream understanding of geography.
As it turns out, Galileo himself knew that some of the great contributors to that ultimately wrongful understanding, such as the Christians Augustine and Jerome and Thomas Aquinas, taught that reality is the ultimate judge of our understanding of reality—to put it in a modern way. Popes and other Christians can criticize the modern tendency to impose fairy-tales upon reality, evil fairy-tales when it comes to the Nazis, but that is a tendency first born in the Catholic Church’s intellectual and ecclesiastical institutions in the so-called Renaissance and then developed in parallel in the corresponding Protestant and secular institutions of the West. Reject reality in favor of your own dreams and schemes and reality might reject you. Sadly, in the short-term, the victims might be quite innocent and not even involved in the struggles to maintain an outmoded worldview or to establish a new one to the tastes of men willfully separated from reality.