Are the culture wars getting too weird? Too confusing? Are you not sure where you stand on Doctor Seuss or Potato Head gender? Do you have mixed feelings about cancel culture, or the future direction of identity politics? Don't just trust to your gut, a la Donald Trump. I would like to propose a reliable guide to the culture wars.

I believe your attitude toward each culture war issue will be determined by your position on a single question: the total depravity of human nature. This is a theological concept of course, and a bedrock principle of Christianity, both the orthodox Roman Catholicism  variety and the Calvinist Protestant derivation. Although we are not as theologically literate as we used to be, I think it is a good idea to review this concept, because it still exerts a profound influence in the very secular United States of America, whether we are conscious of it or not.

 I am sure we all remember the Garden of Eden story and the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, whether we are believers or not. We tend to think of that story today as being quaint and a bit silly. It is anything but. It is the basis of the concept of the total depravity (hereafter abbreviated “TD”) of human nature, and the foundation of everything that is harsh, vindictive, and punitive in Christianity.

The TD of human nature means not just that human beings are prone to sin and error. It means that they are incapable of anything BUT sin and error. It means that, left to our own devices, we will always do the wrong thing, think the wrong thoughts, and make the wrong decisions. We are utterly incapable of doing anything good on our own. Only with divine intervention (salvation or redemption) can we walk on the right path, which is not normal and does not come naturally to us.

So how do we get saved or redeemed? That question is the origin of endless other culture wars, but let us leave the mechanics of salvation for now and go on to the more important question: WHO will be redeemed? Everyone? Or only special people? Almost all Christians would answer the latter. The implications of this are profound.

If some but not all are redeemed, then the redeemed will be living amongst the totally depraved. How should society be organized then? Who should make and enforce the rules, the saints (the redeemed) or the sinners (the totally depraved)?

Modern representative democracy will inevitably be ruled by the sinners, since they will most likely constitute the majority. To the saints, this state of affairs is agony. The totally depraved must be restrained until they can be redeemed, not empowered. Of course, the saints should rule. If you are a TD adherent you are going to want a theocratic police state, not a secular representative democracy. And if you are a Christian soldier you are going to fight for that kind of society, issue by issue, culture battle by culture battle. And if you do not rule, you know you will be oppressed and humiliated by the totally depraved unredeemed sinners.

But what if you are not aTD adherent? I think there are several possibilities. There are those who think that human beings are inherently good, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. There are those who believe that, while not perfect, humans have the gift of reason, and therefore capable of continual improvement. And there are those who believe that human beings are neither good nor evil, but are capable of both, as well as a good deal of action which has nothing to do with good or evil. (I wake up, take my medications and make my coffee. What is the moral content of those actions)?

There are those who believe that human beings are basically economic creatures pursuing profit in the marketplace, and moral and ethical concerns will be sorted out in the course of those pursuits.

If you are not a TD adherent, your position on particular culture war issues is not predetermined, but it is likely to be very different from the positions of those who do believe in the total depravity of human nature.

So bearing in mind the position of the TD adherents, we can reliably see what we disagree with, even if it is not always clear where we stand ourselves. And since the culture wars are consistently initiated and fought byTD adherents, I think this is a reliable guide as we wander in the endless wilderness of the American culture wars.

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Robert Wilfong reporting for The Humanist Advocate

April 4, 2021

The second in a series reviewing Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2018.)

If, said I, it is sweet to refuse to do good, it must be heavenly to do evil.

 

"The Dark Divinity of Nature"

The writings of Dontien Alphones Francois, Marquis de Sade, from whose name we are indebted to as the origin of English words such as sadism, sadistic, and sado-masochism are filled with “descriptions of orgies….which feature highly ritualized fantasies of torture, incest, coprophagy and sexual murder,” reports John Gray to open the chapter on another of his seven types of atheism. Sade, (1740-1814) hailed from a from an aristocratic lineage dating back to the twelfth century and was “if not the first, then certainly the greatest modern prophet of misotheism—the current of thought that hates God as the enemy of humanity.” So, by Gray’s own metric, it is only natural that he would serve as a good example of his “god-hater” type of atheism. One could surely suspect that Sade hated something—if not from his writings alone, but by some of the scandals that followed his reputation (flogging an indigent widow, cutting her flesh, and then pouring hot wax into the wounds, for example; and another in which he and his manservant were condemned to death and executed in effigy for arranging and participating in a orgy in which four females where offered aphrodisiacs and—along with Sade—whipped and sodomized by the manservant), eventually  leading to his imprisonment for extended periods of his life. And, one might be perfectly within reason to suspect him of having bouts with “insanity,” and that his group debaucheries were not about sex, but cruelty.

The philosophical wrong turn that twisted the marquis’ outlook on life and led to his depraved behavior Gray surmises is this: with no gods, the natural world and all it contains becomes, from its sublimest of pleasures to the horror of its  most perverse cruelties, is all we are given in this life, and stands as the as ultimate arbiter of incontrovertible truth. “There is not a single virtue that is not necessary to Nature and conversely not a single crime which she does not need…)” Sade relates in A Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man. Sade, in the voice of the dying man, tells the priest that which he wants to repent is not the sins he has committed, but “the fact that he did not commit more of them,” and regrets he “made so little use of the capacity for pleasure that Nature had given him...and wishes he had followed her commands more faithfully.”

But he confesses in his work Juliettte (1797, but not published openly in France until the early 1960s)  “...yes, I abhor Nature; and I detest her because I know her well...I have experience a kind of pleasure in copying her foul deeds…” And though he held that  “The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind,” and while his libertine characters rebelled against God to serve “the divinity of Nature,” Gray points out that Sade has replaced one insufferable deity with another. For atheists who really leave theism behind and return to Nature, Gray opines—as the Epicureans  did—there is no problem of evil, at least evil delivered by an agent, whether the agency be “God” or Nature. Shit happens, and, for the Epicureans (and humanists), human suffering should be deserving of our compassion and not a condition that we should be trying to increase or exacerbate.

Some of us have gotten this question: Why do you hate God? If it happens to you, take a minute to reflect “WWMDSD? What would the Marquis de Sade do?”—just don’t do it; and be wary of deifying Nature.

 

This chapters also contains similar studies of Dostoevsky and William Empson which I have chosen to exclude, at least for the time being.

 

Reviewed for The Humanist Advocate
by Marty Bankson