Epilogue: the Morlocks and Me
A reader asks: “Mr Wright – when you were an atheist, did you write Morlock fiction? Why or why not?”
I most certainly did not write Morlock fiction during my atheist days. (Ironically, the one short story I penned that was clearly nihilist in theme and tone, “Silence in the Night”, was one I wrote after my conversion, not before.)
While I was not a Christian, I was a Stoic, and I upheld and promoted the classical virtues (fortitude, moderation, temperance, justice) as well as the Enlightenment virtues (reason, liberty, individualism, liberty) — and I was also a Romantic. I believed and still believe in True Love. I believed and still believe life is worth living, that reason allows one to discover truth, that truth is better than lies, that logic is better than illogical, beauty than ugliness, life than death.
If anything, I was a more vituperative enemy of the modern culture of death than I am now: I provoked considerable scorn and wrath and Jihadist ire from the Left for suggesting in one book written while I was an atheist that self-control of the passions, especially in the realm of the sexual passions, was a rational and honorable virtue. They had never met an atheist who believed in virtue before, and so their heads exploded.
Another book I wrote when I was an atheist suggested that life was worth living, and that our mission in life was to order our passions, reasons, and appetites to reflect reality and to follow justice — to do what is in one’s own enlightened self-interest and to avoid what is self-destructive. I was saying nothing other than what a Houyhnhnm would say. One reviewer cautioned readers that my book was a work of Christian apologetic.
Again, I recall a private conversation where I pointed out that abortion was against the Darwinian imperative to reproduce the species. Any race, tribe, or clan that had a genetic weakness favoring abortion of its own young would in a few generations be out produced by any race, tribe, or clan lacking that weakness, and their greater numbers would give them a greater talent pool to draw upon. My argument was that any moral code which failed to promote survival was in the long run self destructive, because it was a moral code that would eventually edit itself out of history. My interlocutor accused me of being a Bible-bashing Godbotherer and a Fundie.
This is why I often say that not just Christians are involved in the culture war. In order to make war on Christ, the partisans of the death cult must also take up arms against everything in Christendom, all European accomplishments, all intellectual achievements, all progress in the realm of economics and politics, and abolish as well all ancient wisdom and learning.
What is the ground the Morlocks have chosen to defend? In metaphysics they defend radical materialism; in ontology, nominalism; in politics, collectivism and grievance-mongering race-identity; in economics, socialism, Fabianism, Keynesianism; in ethics, aborticide, suicide, euthanasia, including that form of mass-suicide called multiculturalism; in aesthetics, subjectivism and hatred of the beautiful; and in all things, nihilism, nihilism, nihilism. The only virtue of their creed is to tolerate the intolerable, to promote the morally, intellectually and sexually perverse; and their only form of rhetoric is self-flattery; their only argument is ad hominem.
Because of this, the Culture of Death is not simply the enemies of Christianity, albeit that is, of course, their main target, divided between Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics as the paramount of their ire and scorn. They cannot be rid of Christianity as an irrational superstition without also getting rid of those things Christianity preserved from the Classical Greco-roman tradition, or encouraged in the Enlightenment, such as reason and liberty.
This, by the bye, is the reason why Theist arguments that Atheists cannot be moral, or have no proper groundwork for a universal moral code, leave me unconvinced.
Not only does my personal experience testify to the opposite, but any philosopher willing to take the discipline of philosophy seriously must at least come at least to the melancholy moral level of a virtuous pagan.
It is not only the martyrs of Christ that the modern nihilists hate, it is the prophets of the Jews, the sages of the East, but also the Stoics of Rome and the Philosophers of Athens. They hate Cato of Utica willing to die for honor, Socrates willing to die for Truth, Leander willing to die for love, Horatio willing to perish facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the alters of his gods. And, oh, how they hate Beowulf and what he stands for. You should see what the Morlocks did to him in the animated movie version.
This is the reason why I strongly urge what can rightly be called a battlefield ecumenism. The various different branches of the Church, what are technically known as heretics and schismatics, together with the observant Jews and any peaceful Mohammedans willing to repudiate Wahabism and Jihad, together with truehearted atheists who were driven to atheism from a sense of honor and not merely from a disgust with monotheism, and all virtuous pagans and honest heathens must realize that we, and all of mankind, is faced with a common enemy. We must circle the wagons: the savages are upon us, and they will not spare any of us.
The dehumanists—and forgive me if I repeat myself, but the point bears repeating—supports an incoherent mixture of Machiavelli, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Nihilism. They hate Christ most of all, but the Light of Christ, either by historical accident or divine design (take your pick) informs and is informed by classical learning back to Socrates. In order to throw out the Bible, they have to throw out the Great Books. In order to be free of Christ, the modern mind must reject all Western literature, art, science and civilization, all the way back to the pre-Socratics.
And they reject the East, but not as vehemently. While the Dehumanists from time to time make friendly gestures toward the accomplishments of Oriental civilizations, the stern logic of Confucius or the passive yet stoic quietism of the Buddha, the gestures are pathetically insincere. Western writers who dabble in Oriental mysticism do not take it as a serious program to introduce into the West either the strict ceremonies and purity of the Tibetan monks, nor the rigidities of the caste system. Despite the occasional and sincere fans of Taoism, or serious students of Zen, the vast majority of Modern spiritualism is merely New Age piffle and play-acting: no one means to replace Christianity with the severities of a real heathen or a real Oriental religion, philosophy or world view.
Machiavelli, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Nihilism are just hostile and as alien to Buddha and Lao Tzu and Confucius and Vyasa as they are to Christ and Socrates, if not more so.
They do not seek a return to pagan practices such as sacred prostitution, sacred orgy, sacred sodomy or burning children to Moloch. They seek these practices without making them sacred. They want the peyote of the Shaman and the drugged delirium the priestesses of Delphi knew, but without the tedium of bowing to Phythian Apollo or the Rada Loa. The Aztec who sacrificed a girl-child to Tláloc the rain god thought the tears of the victim as she was beaten, flayed and burned to death were a good omen to halt the spread of leprosy and rheumatism, and to placate the gods, and to deter the drought. The abortionist who sacrifices a girl-child does it for the mother’s career or convenience, or to placate the mother’s live-in boyfriend.
Dehumanism does not seek to destroy Christendom to replace it with the Umma of the Dar-al-Islam nor with the Middle Kingdom ruled by Confucian sages nor again with any other world view or world community. Dehumanism is antithetical not just to Western Civilization, but to all civilization whatever—it is hostile to the very root ideas of civility, law, righteousness, purity, and order. They are in rebellion against the Tao, the moral order of the universe, that same moral logic that all men, even avowed atheists, by their actions show they recognize as valid and authoritative. They are in rebellion against Right Reason.
And perhaps the rejection goes further, and include pre-civilization. Primitive man with his primitive animal gods and his life of hunting and manslaying was based on family and tribe, and hedged about with taboos and moral absolutes. But Dehumanism, in rejecting Christian theology and Pagan philosophy, also rejects tribal lore.
While perhaps a Modernist from time to time expressing a Rousseau-flavored and condescending admiration for the primitive world, no savage of the primordial days was a moral relativist or antinomian.
The indecencies of savages, their exposing infants to the elements, and other abominations, are at least innocent indecencies, the products of devil-worship rather than atheism. The pragmatic reasoning of these illiterate philosophers of the prehistoric world was sound and solid: each boy in the tribe learned the arts of hunt and war from the fathers and elders, while crones taught maidens to tend the sacred fire and grind the meal for bread. They learned from experience. The idea of rejecting learning and wisdom on the grounds that learning and wisdom are old and time-proven is an idea that could not occur to anyone not corrupted by foolish over-sophistication: because even a savage would know that learning cannot be learning until it is old. Before it is old it is untested, unproved, untried: not a new learning but a daydream, a figment.
Therefore Dehumanism rejects the primitive was well as the civilized things of life. In rejecting reason and experience, West and East, saints and sages, old and new, it rejects everything that makes us human.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
