Modern Man has "Educated Himself into Imbecility"
Monday, March 17, 2008 | Labels: Culture | || This week is going to drive through insights from Malcolm Muggeridge, who at his time was a well known British journalist born in 1903. Later in his life Muggeridge wrote this piece drawing one of the most important conclusions which is embraced heavily by my generation today. He warns us of the devastating condition of the modern man. |
"...it has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself. Having wearied of the struggle to be himself, he has created his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own strength; himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, in a process of auto-genocide, convincing himself that he is too numerous, and labouring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to be an easier prey for his enemies; until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus and becomes extinct.”
- Malcolm Muggeridge, Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith (p. 16)
"having educated himself into imbecility...". My generation has embraced a world of intellectual elitism. The "uneducated" are no longer in a position to determine that which is right and wrong. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," a principle espoused by our founding fathers and written in the United States Declaration of Independence can no longer exist, intellectual evidence now reigns supreme.
If a man argues the principles of God in the world of academia they are cut with the two words that will bring my very generation to its knees. "Prove it." Man can no longer get his principles from God alone, it must be backed by science or psychology. Only those with a thorough understanding of these subjects can determine that which is best for society. In short, my generation has become lawyers of truth and the defendant is God.
The irony in all of this is that while demanding that the man who defends the principles of God must use psychology and science to defend itself, those who demand it cannot defend their own principles using science and psychology. When questioned of their own ethic, their only response can be that each person can possess their own perception of right and wrong, otherwise they would have to justify their moral doctrine by the very criteria they demand be made of those who argue God. They are, in effect, rendered impotent of creating a moral society by their own argumentation.
Let me implore, nay, warn the reader to understand the importance of this to its most intrinsic level. There was a time in history when a society eventually embraced completely not the laws of God, but the idea that the elite few with a complete understanding of science and academia could drive man towards a Utopian society. The most sobering realization to my generation ought to be that the holocaust was not driven by madmen, not encouraged by the unintelligent, not espoused by those without an understanding of philosophy but by men who were rational, some of the most highly educated and by those who possessed some of the greatest understanding of the philosophies of their time.
The difference was only that which drove their rationale, intellect and philosophy. These men were living without God, and if something does not change in western civilization, we may see a different picture all too late.
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."
- C.S. Lewis, 'mere' Christianity, 1943
Craig Chamberlin
Related Articles: