‘Curse God and Die,’ They Said. ‘It Will Be Fun,’ They Said
This column is adapted from Jason Jones’ upcoming book The Great Campaign: Against the Great Reset, which will appear in early 2024.
Last time I ran through the top five fashionable delusions of our elites — the people who must know more than we do, since they’re giving TED talks to hedge fund billionaires in Davos. I explained how:
Victimism feigns Christian compassion for the vulnerable while actually serving the powerful, by brutalizing the truly weak in return for fame, wealth, power and prestige.
Gnosticism corrupts our intellect, makes us both lazy and paranoid, and pours our energy down ratholes.
Transhumanism trains us to rebel against our own nature, to abandon not just our neighbor but even our parents and children, trading their health, hope, and even their very lives for promises of longevity for ourselves.
Anti-Humanism preaches the ultimate dystopia: a planet where 90% or more of the current population is either sterilized or dead.
Climate Cultism hijacks concern for our environment to empower global oligarchs, and strip the world’s poorest of warm houses, hot food, and basic medicines.
We must fight each of these ideologies on its merits, locating what grains of truth they might contain, then showing how sloppy thinking, hunger for power, the herd instinct, and other ancient temptations have built up a pyramid of lies. And I do that, in detail, in the relevant chapters that follow.
Our Gurus Were Gambling Addicts, Bluffing with Our Birthright
But we must do more than run around putting out fires. There’s a reason that such grotesque caricatures were able to come to dominate among highly educated Westerners: they rushed in to fill a vacuum, which nature abhors. Since the self-styled “Enlightenment,” the Christian West has been living off its savings, going ever further out on a limb of the Tree of Knowledge, and sawing it off at the trunk.
It might have seemed safe to 19th century Brits like Charles Darwin and Austrians like Freud to hack away at the supports for human dignity, family life, morality and reason. Surrounded by the built-up riches of Christendom, they couldn’t imagine what bankruptcy their gambling habit would lead to.
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We can. We grew up in the poorhouse, the howling void of meaning, value, and beauty that was left when the last implications of an integral Christian worldview were finally swept away. And in that empty space the principalities and powers have offered us golden calves, primitive fetishes, elaborate phantasms — shiny objects that make loud noises to distract us from the fact of our desperation, and the need to turn back to Christ.
We now have a pope in Rome who scoffs at reverent liturgy, biblical sexual ethics, unborn life, and the organ harvesting of the Communist regime in China … in order to focus on: exploiting shell-shocked and bewildered refugees, battling “climate change,” and boosting Pfizer’s stock price. Countless lesser Christian leaders in various churches pursue the same inverted priorities, auditioning to serve as tame live-in chaplains to Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom.
The Instructions Manual Written on the Human Heart
We can do better. We must. In the face of these old errors and new delusions, we turn to what is timeless: the law God wrote on the human heart, which He first made clear to man in the Covenant of Noah. The Natural Law, enriched by the truths of divine Revelation, is our guide. Think of it as the instructions manual to the human race, which its Maker helpfully left us … but most of us are too proud to read.
In my last book, written ten eventful years ago, I distilled that Natural Law down to five core principles. The Race to Save Our Century doesn’t argue for these principles from some set of abstract definitions, of the kind philosophers argue about in journals few people read. No, it looked at the cavalcade of atrocities and horrors that began in 1914, which turned a “century of progress” into the great age of genocide, tyranny, and destruction. Then it asked which moral maxims could have prevented these massive abuses of human life and dignity. As it turned out, the five core “Whole Life” principles that would have saved the 20th century were also the pillars of Catholic social teaching.
The Five Whole Life Principles
Having watched the decade that followed, I can only say that the book was sadly prophetic. Our culture went even further in its rejection of Natural Law than even I’d thought possible, and these five principles are more urgently important than ever. In this book I’ll lay them out again, more briefly, and in each chapter shows how they need to be applied today, as emergency medicine:
The innate dignity of every human person, regardless of race, age, or handicap, as the image and likeness of God.
The existence of a transcendent moral order, by which we judge the justice of all laws and policies.
The need for a humane economy that embraces freedom in a context of social responsibility.
The crucial importance of decentralized, responsive government that preserves civil society and freedom.
The need for solidarity, for a sense of fellow feeling and common obligation toward each and every member of the human race.
These aren’t specifically Christian teachings, which people need the grace of Faith to comprehend and accept — although, since our reason is fallen, grace certainly helps. Fighting for these principles isn’t “religious,” much less “intolerant” or somehow (as the left likes to say) promoting a “theocracy.” In fact, as we can see by the degraded state of our culture in the absence of these principles, fighting for the Natural Law is the only truly human thing to do. And if we value the human race, we will order our lives to serve this struggle.
We might, like the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, be fighting “to save the Shire, but not for us.” It’s possible that our efforts will win us persecution and poverty, and only leave rewards to our children or grand-children. For centuries, men planted olive trees that only their descendants would live to eat from. At a time when too many people are gleefully eat the seed corn, we ought to act like hobbits, instead of orcs.
Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, author, activist and human rights worker.