A rchive Date
[ 23-10-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2005/03/16/962260.html
Anchorless, therapeutic society
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
2005-03-16
Change is at the heart of life, and it forms the rhythm of the universe.
And yet, paradoxically, without something constant in the flux of things binding matter together and giving meaning to life, these would invariably fall apart into meaninglessness.
Plato posed this paradox in one of his early dialogues, Timaeus, thus: "What is that which always is, and is never becoming? What is that which is always becoming and never is?"
For Plato, the answer in part was the immortal soul in the perishable body, the world of eternal ideas beyond that of impermanent matter.
Religions from around the world have similarly reflected on change and variously answered by insisting on the eternal nature of transcendent truth embodied in the idea of God.
Religion and science both share a common understanding that faith and reason must be anchored on some permanent foundation, resistant to change.
The lack of substantive debate on same-sex marriage in Canada, and the extent to which the proposition is accepted on the basis of feeling good, not sound reasoning, are revealing of the direction our society is moving by jettisoning the idea of core values, rooted in some foundational principle, toward a wholesale acceptance of moral and cultural relativism.
It is the void behind the adoption of same-sex marriage, similar to the void behind our morally neutral acceptance of abortion, that says more about who we are, or have become, than all the rhetoric of our political and religious elites about us being a caring and thoughtful people.
The result being, as some social thinkers have discussed, we have fashioned a highly narcissistic and therapeutic society. Our concerns are predominantly with our tastes, our lifestyles, and the endless engagement with our feelings and our satisfying them.
"Faith and reason," wrote Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, "are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth."
But in subverting both faith and reason, we are left with ourselves to fill the void in the centre of our existence. Priests of this therapeutic feel-good society therefore counsel us to be tolerant indiscriminately. But tolerance for the sake of tolerance is an abdication of critical thought. Neither Jesus nor Mahatma Gandhi would understand, or approve, the piety of our therapeutic society.
Our schools teach our children how to feel, how to express their emotions, and how to develop their self-esteem.
What is not sufficiently taught is how to reason. We teach our children how to speak or write without giving them sufficient grounding in the grammar of speaking and writing.
The late Malcolm Muggeridge, philosopher and critic, wrote about this phenomenon some years ago. His inimitable prose cannot be improved, so let me quote him in full.
He observed: "Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of our intellectual elites. Not Bolshevism, which Stalin liquidated along with the old Bolsheviks; not Nazism, which perished with Hitler in his Berlin bunker; not fascism, which was left hanging upside down from a lamppost along with Mussolini and his mistress -- none of these, history will record, was responsible for bringing down the darkness on our civilization, but liberalism.
"A solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice; blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish."
This is our self-induced condition, of being intoxicated with the brew of liberalism defining widening segments of our Western civilization as it is unhinged from its past, while its future becomes uncertain in the false glory of a gilded present.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays.
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