Epistemological Impudence and the Post War Consensus

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Introduction

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the flush of that spectacular victory provided an opportunity for the secularists to make their move—and make it they most certainly did.

With the American industrial machinery untouched by the war, with a massive number of soldiers coming home from the war eager to get to work, the juggernaut of the American economy began to move in truly impressive ways. And also remember that the war had ended with those two atomic exclamation points in Japan, a fact that produced a certain amount of awe around the world. Even when men don’t worship power, or like it, they do have to take it into account.

So the stage was set for a massive revisionist move. That revisionism rejected the God of our fathers, and set up the pretense that we were a secular nation, and always had been. But we were in fact a Christian nation, and always had been, but now we were on the brink of a massive backsliding into apostasy and epistemological impudence.

Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that asks how do we know that we know anything. And once we answer the question, it asks us “how do we know that?” Epistemological impudence is when rebels against God like to pretend that they don’t already know things that Scripture says that they do know. “They knew God [but] they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Rom. 1:19, 21).

And what came to be known as the post-war consensus? That charade was directly connected to the impudence.

But There Was Some Post-War Dissensus

After the trauma of the Second World War, in which even the victors were scared sideways, a soft relativism descended upon the elite eggheads. It was decided—among them it was decided—that wars were caused by decided convictions, by dogma, by a conviction that you and your people knew “the truth.” If you knew the truth, then the people who differed were clearly in the wrong, and so it was the wars arose. So the thing to avoid was any kind of settled conviction. The gentle breezes of liberalism began to waft over us.

These secularists were able to point to the Nazis, and say something like, “See what happens when people believe stuff?” One time, back in the seventies, I was in a class that got into a rambunctious discussion, and one girl in the class said something like, “You Christians are just like the Nazis—so cock-sure you’re right. You fill the earth with your wars, and you make me sick.” She provided a fine example of the post-war consensus. Hard commitment to the truth as you understand it is the catalyst of all conflict, and so it is our responsibility to mix a little relativistic paint thinner in with our convictions.

But what I said to this girl in the class discussion was that you couldn’t get me to go fight Nazis unless I was sure they were wrong, and I couldn’t be sure that they were wrong unless I knew what was right.

Now of course, such relativism is only plausible in a world without God. So the relativism that would help us remain at peace with one another was something that could only arise from within a secular perspective—either civic atheism or civic agnosticism. This was the view that took root among all the Approved Voices. However—thanks be to God—there were in fact dissenting voices. On the official register there was only a post-war consensus.

But if we take the dissenters into account, as we should, it would be better if we called it the post-war dissensus. You can always get a “consensus” if you throw out the people who disagree, a favorite technique of the elites in the know.

But insightful Christians nevertheless saw what was taking shape, and sought to warn us about it.

And Lewis saw this taking shape while the war was still on—Abolition was published in 1943. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien would have agreed with this completely. In his Letters, Tolkien goes so far as to say that many men “to be met today” are as horribly corrupted as the orcs are (p. 190). This would include not a few men who were ostensibly on the side of the Allies. There is no truth at all within their mouth (Ps. 5:9).

And Francis Schaeffer warned us about the developing arbitrary rule of arbitrary rulers with their arbitrary values. All of this was the result of the post-war erosion of the Christian consensus:

The unbelief that made its move after the Second World War was the same spirit of unbelief that had motivated the French Revolution. This is actually all the same war. It is just that the era of affluence that followed the Second World War provided the serpent with a good opportunity to blinker and bribe the Christian believers in America into thinking that this beautiful woman named Neutrality was somehow not a witch. And we bought it into it too.

But not all of us. If we are allowed to head off into the black market of theological ideas, it was possible to run across advocates of the post-war dissensus. Here is just one more example, if it’s myself that says it.

Secular neutrality is a wisp of smoke, an evanescent vapor, an impossibility, an opium dream—flashing eyes, floating hair and all—and a thundering scam. And always has been.

Christ Church was established here in Moscow in 1975, just thirty years after the close of the war. That date was twenty years closer to the end of the war than it is to the beginning of Trump’s second term. And for that entire time, going on fifty years now, our ministry has been in opposition to the liberal kultursmog, the secular consensus, the stinking lies that have befuddled the American right for three generations now.

Stand by for a bit more exposition. I want to explain this to you.

The Nuremberg Cringelords

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try.

When the time came to try Nazi war criminals for their evil deeds, this was done at Nuremberg, and a number of Nazi operatives and organizers were there tried for “crimes against humanity.” And what might the definition of that be? It turns out, given secularism, a crime against humanity is anything displeasing to the nation that developed the atomic weaponry first.

Had Germany won the war, a crime against humanity would have been whatever it was the Jews had been doing.

But in the aftermath of a truly impressive victory, and with the shock value provided by the revelation of Nazi behavior in the concentration camps, it was easy for the Allies to do a little hand-waving, summon up an impressive sounding non-category called “crimes against humanity,” and then to try those evil Nazis on the basis of it.

But we therefore found ourselves trying Nazis on the foundation of a fundamental Nazi principle—that is, that there is no God above us to whom we are all accountable. We tried the Nazis in our own name and on our own authority, which is exactly what they would have done had the positions been reversed. They would have appealed to the same law—a law that is pretty malleable, as it turns out, depending on whoever won the war.

This was a deception and pretense that could be made to seem plausible in the aftermath of a huge victory, and so for a time, it stuck. A lot was obscured in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. But what was compelling in the immediate aftermath of that War is no longer compelling today. Our posturing at Nuremberg looks exactly like posturing now, and we can see that the moral reasoning there was the work of Nuremberg cringelords. We condemned men to death by a form of moral reasoning that was suspended from a giant Kantian sky hook, which was bolted to the mesosphere with four bolts—hubris, conceit, grand intentions, and superior firepower.

We were told that the Allies had saved the world from the devil while we were in the process of becoming that very same devil. Hitler has slain his six million, democratic America has now slain its sixty million.

We overthrew Sauron all right, but like Isildur, we kept the ring.

Speaking of the Devil

Our intellectual elites were hellbent—and yes, that is the word for it—on detaching our public policy from any transcendent definition of the good. We were in the process of becoming civic atheists. This is of course insolent nonsense—mankind needs a definition of good that comes from outside the world, a definition that is not susceptible to manipulative jiggering from any parliaments, popes, or presidents. But the secular project was going to banish all that kind of thinking, and so they set their jaw as they confronted the easy-if-you-try task of imagining there was no heaven.

But they remained rulers of massive populations, and so they still needed an operational moral center. I say operational because they could not have any absolute center, as they very well knew, but they still needed something that sounded like morality to the general populace. If relativistic rulers start to sound relativistic to the people, then the crime rate goes way up to unmanageable levels. What they needed, therefore, was something that would keep the people in line, but which would not bind them too much. Moral standards for thee, and not for me, that kind of thing.

Since they were in the process of banishing God, they needed something, and that something was the devil—this time in the guise of Hitler. Hitler was “clearly and plainly” the apex of all evil, categorized as such on the basis of residual Christian sentiment, as a good bit of that was still laying about, and so Hitler could provide us with a walking definition of an incarnate evil. He was dead, of course, but in the glow of that self-deception, we could hold trials of his minions on the basis of something as shimmery and ephemeral as “crimes against humanity.” And in that particular moment . . . almost no one noticed, except for the dissenters, who didn’t count.

And so here is the heart of the post-war consensus. We don’t know what good is anymore, but we did defeat Hitler, and he was evil. Therefore we must be the good guys. Stands to reason. The side that overthrows the devil has to be the righteous side.

This helps provide us with a good working definition of the post-war consensus. A word like consensus needs to point to something. Consensus surrounding what exactly? Is it part of the post-war consensus to believe that the battle of Midway happened before the battle of Guadalcanal? That FDR died before the war was over? That Hitler killed a lot of Jews? No. The post-war consensus had to do with the triumph of the secular democracies as secular democracies. Secular democracy was the god-like apparition that had delivered us from the devil.

Like the Sadducees, our ruling elites did not believe in angels, but we were nevertheless on the side of the angels because we overthrew the devil. And that is the poisonous assumption that has rotted out our institutions. That is why the post-war consensus has been such a twisted, evil thing.

As I put it in the monologue of the Man Rampant episode where I interviewed Rusty Reno about the “return of the strong gods” and the collapse of this post-war consensus . . .

“The liberal order in the aftermath of the Second World War was a pleasant little Shire, very much out of touch with reality. As year followed year, the hobbits just kept getting fatter.”

A Consensus With No Binding Agent

But maintaining moral order through belief in a particular devil won’t cut it. Because there is no transcendental grounding for any definition of righteousness, and the older Christian consensus continued to erode under these conditions, questions started to arise about the standard we were using when we reject anyone as “a devil.” Relativism is a corrosive that eats out any container you try to keep it in. The evil that Hitler represented only makes sense as evil in a Christian world, or in a world that is still operating with the residue of Christian assumptions.

This is just another way of saying that being a little bit relativistic is like being a little bit pregnant. Like it or not, the baby of relativism has a due date, and when it is finally born it is one misshapen little monkey, and people then start to wonder who mom had been sleeping with.

And so, what should have been a surprise to absolutely no one, Hitler is rapidly becoming a neglected scarecrow in an abandoned field—not scary anymore. If there are no absolutes, then anything goes, including the worst forms of absolutism. The logic is followed out. If there are no angels, then there are no devils either. And this is when the strong gods make their return. And this is why we are now seeing an online resurgence of the kind of people who are willing to say that the “Holocaust didn’t happen, but it should have.”

And so here we are. Seemingly from nowhere, online discussions are suddenly crawling with trolls, FBI bots, crusaders with laser-eyes, angry cranks, antisemites, Jewish provocateurs, and morons. Behold the bastard children of the post-war consensus. The market now appears to be hungry for a prophet who will speak for one of the strong gods, preferably the strongest one, and so various contenders are jostling with each other, vying to attract the kind of traffic that would make them true spiritual voices . . . you know, kind of like Andrew Tate.

There is a stark difference between the genuine Christian alternative to the post-war consensus—what I call mere Christendom—and the debris field of the post-war consensus.

Last Thing. Crimes Against Humanity?

I have backhanded “crimes against humanity” in this piece a few times now, and some readers may have bridled at that. Why do I not think it is possible to sin against everyone in an inhumane way?

Of course it is . . . if there is a God. Of course it is . . . if this God has revealed His will to us. In Schaeffer’s words, if He is there, and if He is not silent, then there is such a category. Otherwise, not.

If there is no God, and all of us are just the foam on a turbulent sea of evolutionary randomness, then there is no such thing as “humanity,” no such thing as “crime,” and no such thing as “against.” To conjure up a system of morality from the likes of us is to talk piffle and nonsense. Since Lennon wants us to imagine, try this. Imagine a murderer approaching his victim, knife in hand, and he hums a few bars as he comes. “Imagine there’s no heaven . . .”

Unless we bear the image of God, as Genesis tells us we do, any talk about “humanity” is just so much blather, coming from beings who are themselves just so much blather. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, put out by the UN, is just a bit more blather, coming from the Solons of Blather, in solemn congress assembled.

To postulate crimes against humanity in a world without reference to God does attempt to make humanity the victim of whatever it was the criminal did. But it also wants to make humanity the foundation and source of the standard by which we try the criminal who did it. However, if humanity is the source of the standard, then we can change it around however we want. And we must still have a judge who presides over the trial. That judge will be appointed by whoever won the war, and he will wield his arbitrary determinations from behind the bench in the name of, you guessed it, Humanity. All rise. And might makes right.

So at the end of the day, it is just one collection of meat, bones and protoplasm deciding what to do with other collections of displeasing meat, bones, and protoplasm, and two hundred years from now, no one will care.

This is why I never tire of saying that it is Christ or chaos. It is Christ or more of the post-war consensus.

For Your Viewing Pleasure