In Understanding the Times, David A. Noebel has written that since humanists believe that we have been corrupted by our institutions. They are:
...antagonistic towards our present society, because today’s social institutions are inferior to the utopian society the Humanist believes is possible. (207)
Instead of comparing our own institutions to others, the secular humanist compares them to his mental ideal and inevitably finds them lacking. Noebel cites sociologist Lawrence Casper who blames even marriage and family for our neuroses:
[They] have been largely responsible, I suggest, for today’s prevailing neurotic climate, with its pervasive insecurity, and it is precisely this climate that makes so difficult the acceptance of a different healthier way of life. (Noebel, 204)
Dreaming of a utopia, Casper suggests that children would be far better off without their families. Another humanist sociologist, Sol Gordon, has written that:
“The traditional family, with all its supposed attributes, enslaved women; it reduced her to a breeder and caretaker of children, a servant to her spouse, a cleaning lady, and at times a victim of the labor market as well.” (Noebel, 204)
Karl Marx’ analysis was little different:
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness.” (Noebel, 214)
Joseph Stalin was convinced that attaining paradise was a matter of changing the environment – the State and its economy:
Whatever is the mode of production of a society, such in the main is the society itself, its ideas, and theories, its political views and institutions. Or, to put it more crudely, whatever is man’s manner of life, such is his manner of thought.
Similar utopian schemes rely upon the removal of the repressive or capitalistic elements. The Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to suggest that if we could simply remove the capitalist oppressors - the top one percent – we could have a better world. Other movements placed their hopes on the elimination of those deemed evil or less evolved.
Interestingly, all of these “solutions” have one thing in common – a belief in the essential goodness of humanity, or at least our malleability in the hands of “enlightened” leadership.
When we believe that our problems are superficial and external, we will generate constant flow of utopian dreams. Such dreams are usually revolutionary, like those of National Socialism, Communism, and ISIS. They are not content to merely improve the present system but to entirely destroy it in favor of something else.
Utopian thinking has taken a new twist today. Neither human nature nor society needs to be reformed, just our thinking. Instead of our mode of life determining our thinking, it is our thinking that determines everything else. This dream depends upon several considerations:
We have made technological leaps that had been unimaginable several decades prior – computers, airplanes, TVs, and the internet. It is therefore argued that even the sky is not the limit. Instead, we need to dream big.
Gary Zukav and other New Age thinkers have argued that quantum physics has “awakened our understanding of the “powers of the mind to mold ‘reality’ rather than the other way around.” (The Dancing Wu Li Masters, (William Morrow & Co., 1979), 112). Consequently, the only reality is the reality imposed by our minds. After all, “matter is nothing but materialized energy.”
In a recent discussion group, an articulate utopian assured the group that:
- We now have the technology and the ideas to bring about our utopian dream…The only reality is the reality we impose upon this world. Therefore, what we require is a change of consciousness…We have to challenge the anti-change repressive elements who are intent on keeping things as they are.
He didn’t mention violence or revolution. However, if utopia is so close at hand, it is easy to argue that a little violence is a small price to pay for it.
A number nodded approvingly. I therefore challenged them to
look at their own lives and relationships:
- If you can improve your consciousness in regards to those closest to you – your boss, subordinate, roommate, parents, friends, and neighbors – you can start a little sub-utopia and observe to see if it mushrooms out to transform your circle of people. If you succeed there, perhaps also on a grander scale. However, we cannot even change ourselves. How then are we going to change others!
However, we are in love with the idea of being a crusader, a revolutionary. It’s too small of a thing to begin to love our neighbor or roommate. We require something grander to infuse our lives with meaning and self-importance. The late poet, T.S. Elliot, reflected on the dangers of such idealism:
- Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
The need to have our psychological needs met in order to feel okay about ourselves is so powerful, yet so deceptive. The non-okay feeling of “white guilt” had created a new form of idealism, although quite destructive. As a panelist at a conference on racism, Professor Shelby Steele was asked what an ideal America would look like. He writes:
- I said that what I wanted most for America was an end to white guilt... the terror of being seen as racist— [the] terror that has caused whites to act guiltily toward minorities even when they feel no actual guilt. My point was that this terror— and the lust it has inspired in whites to show themselves innocent of racism— has spawned a new white paternalism toward minorities since the 1960s that, among other things, has damaged the black family more profoundly than segregation ever did. I also pleaded especially for an end to the condescension of affirmative action... the benevolent paternalism of white guilt, I said, had injured the self- esteem, if not the souls, of minorities in ways that the malevolent paternalism of white racism never had. Post-1960s welfare policies, the proliferation of “identity politics” and group preferences, and all the grandiose social interventions of the War on Poverty and the Great Society—all this was meant to redeem the nation from its bigoted past, but paradoxically, it also invited minorities to make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority... their entitlement and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that entitlement. (Shame: How America's Past Sins have Polarized the Country)
The need to feel good about ourselves is so compelling that
it forces saner considerations into the bleachers. Instead of a serious
analysis of the issues, our psychological needs chart our course, something
that few of us are able to perceive. Even the best educated live in a world of
shadows, chained within a cave. Jesus had explained:
· And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)
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