There was a time when debates consisted in measured
arguments, logical in syntax and respectful of the opponent.
One thinks of the earlier, elevated exchanges between G. K.
Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, whose differences of
belief about almost everything—including the most
important things: religion and politics—were imaged in
Chesterton’s corpulence and Shaw’s emaciation.
When Chesterton said that Shaw looked as if there had been a
famine in the land, Shaw said that Chesterton looked like
its cause. Then they dined with laughter, for they were
bonded by the conviction that there are high ideals that are
objective, even if they disagreed about what they were.
When prejudice and sentiment replace love of
truth, discourse yields to shouting. Serious conversations
have given way to “talking heads” shouting
rehearsed slogans at each other, not letting facts stand in
the way of opinion. This is why a prominent media figure
recently lamented that “journalism is dead.”
The irony is that this degeneracy of discourse
is in the name of free speech, when it actually disdains
such freedom. The power of an argument exists only in the
exercise of power itself: might makes right. “But
wisdom is justified by her children” (Matthew 11:19;
Luke 7:35). Every tyrant tries to defeat truth with drums.
It is the consequence of ideology usurping logic. The decay
of logic began when men confused the two.
The triumph of the will over the intellect was
a subtle attitude even among such sophisticated mediaeval
theologians as William of Ockham and Duns Scotus. Of course
its most violent and vulgar expression was in Islam, but it
leaked into modern attitudes through cynical people like
Nietzsche and Freud who did not think themselves religious
at all. All that may seem obscure, but you meet it daily in
the “spin doctors” of TV talk shows and
newspapers.
Einstein said that National Socialism took over
Germany by suborning the media, the universities, and the
courts of law. That corruption has free play in our time,
when you can tell what a television channel will report
simply by which one it is, when college students burst into
tears when a lecturer says something that contradicts their
conceits, and when judges render decisions according to
their political allegiance.
This mentality is “Voluntarism.” It
is a corruption of voluntas, which means will or
desire, just as racism is a corruption of race, and sexism
is a corruption of sex, and militarism is a corruption of
the military. Our Lady was the opposite of the voluntarist:
“Let it be done to me according to thy word.”
And her Son, conceived by that selfless surrender to truth,
redeemed all creation with the inner dialogue of truth with
truth: “Not my will but thine be done.” Jesus
was not a talking head. We know all this because the
Evangelists were not spin
doctors.
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