Immersed as I now am in the world of American Marxist creatives in the ’20s, ’30s, and beyond (e.g., James T. Farrell, his friend George Novack, their rival [my professor] Sidney Hook, et al.), I’m struck by their appeal to philosophical naturalism (materialism) to anchor their work in reality, thereby giving their work ultimate meaning. That’s their touchstone. This presupposition is rarely laid bare and argued for; when it is, its rationale wears its inadequacy on its face. I’ll explore this in future posts.
They all wanted, as I once did, to bring about a more just, more beautiful world, one of peace and prosperity for all, even though they and their revolutionary projects, according to their metaphysics, bore no more significance than the bathroom insect I crushed this morning. As an event, neither its crawling nor my crushing was less significant than, say, Beethoven’s composition of his Ninth Symphony or any performance thereof. When leftists achieve anything they deem success, they crush, not insects, but human beings, by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, and millions.
Created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), however, they know in their hearts that they’re divine intentions, not byproducts of a cosmic explosion, the extrapolation to which their veneration of Received Scientific Opinion drives them and constrains them to honor.
Their symbol-making and -using nature, without which neither science nor art is possible, is just a “lucky accident”; the very effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, the “fit” of number and matter, is admitted to be “unreasonable” on naturalistic terms.
They’d go mad if they believed they were accidents. To inoculate themselves against this cosmic nightmare, they tell themselves stories, including one about how man became a storyteller. These “scientific materialists” project romantic images of themselves in every sentence they dream, utter, or write. In so doing they suppress what they know, wickedly (Romans 1:18).
Before Moses wrote a word of Genesis, God had beheld “every thing that he had made” and said “it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The first esthetic judgment was divine. Human esthetic judgment, if untethered to that primordial truth, may tickle the fancy of its hearers or readers, but it inevitably floats back into in the void from which it emerged—which evacuates it of any noble sentiment it may have borne for a cosmic split-second.