New Ideas and Old Mistakes

I believe that every college freshman should, upon arriving at the orientation of his campus, hear the following sentence: “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.” Actually, it would not be a bad idea to post this short sentence over the door to every office in the philosophy department–to say nothing of theology or religious studies–as it would help to avoid much mischief. Chesterton’s wit in this case might, if taken to heart, be worth more than a semester’s worth of any freshman orientation classes, or most any other introductory classes for that matter. Indeed, it is advice for more than freshmen, more even than students, but for the professors and professionals as well.

Supposedly new ideas run rampant on college campuses, and not merely in the liberal arts. It is an unfortunate fact of life at most research-driven institutions–which now include not only the large state universities but also the smaller “liberal arts” colleges–that the faculty will be largely possessed by any number of new “philosophical fads,” many of which are quite old in their origins. Moreover, any idea no matter how old is new to us when we first encounter it: and college is nothing if not a time during which we first encounter many ideas–to say nothing of ideologies–for the first time.

Many of these supposedly new ideas are even ideas which we have heard before, but in a different context, or with a different spin. They are perhaps articulated in a new and more eloquent manner than we have previously heard. It may even be an old idea with which we are somewhat familiar, but repackaged with  a new name to sound more palatable.

What, for example, do we make of the supposedly “new” idea that civilization in general, and Catholic civilization in particular, has a corrupting influence? Men are all naturally good, and it is the influence of the Church, or of religion in general, which makes good men do bad things; we need only throw off the shackles of religion and tradition to create a paradise of our own on earth. Of course, this is at odds with the doctrine of Original Sin, but the main hypothesis might be repackaged, for example as Professor Stephen Weinberg has done in saying that bad men will do bad things, and good men will do good things, but only religion can make good men do bad things.

Therefore, we need only to put aside religion, tradition, and perhaps those people who or classes which supposedly prop these things us, and we will have a better world. Perhaps this is the Marxist paradise ruled by “the proletariat,” or perhaps the Nietzschean paradise ruled by the best, the overman; more likely it is the paradise of “reason,” in which reason (or science) will finally rule supreme. We have a theoretical formula for creating heaven here and now, and we don’t need to wait on God to do it. Have another apple.

These theories became especially prevalent among the intelligentsia during the latter half of the nineteenth century, though heir origins are much, much earlier. We saw attempts to implement them, especially in the twentieth century, but also in earlier times. Such ideas of a Godless heaven on earth, when actually implemented, have ushered in the hell of the concentration camp, the gulag, and (in earlier times) the guillotine.

The idea that we don’t need God, that our reason will suffice in some way or other to create a better world, is what led to the loss of the original paradise. Since that time, man has always yearned to reclaim paradise, be it by building a tower to heaven or by attempting to remake man on earth. It simply won’t work, we are barred from paradise not only by angelic powers, but also demonic ones; and even by our own fallen nature. No amount of technical skill, no amount of socio-economic or political re-arranging, nor any amount of education will ever allow us to create our own paradise. We are, after all, not the Creator but rather co-creators, dependent on God the Creator in this world, and on His grace to enter the real paradise in the next. We cannot, in the words of Eric Voegelin, immanentize the eschalon, cannot bring that other worldly paradise to this world through human efforts.

“Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas,” writes G.K. Chesterton,

“are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact the guide to the maze. It has been compiled form knowledge which, even considered as a human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel. There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years.”

 

Nicene Guy

Nicene Guy

JC is a cradle Catholic, and somewhat of a traditionalist conservative. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2014. He is currently a tenure-track assistant professor of physics at a university in the deep south. He is a lay member of the Order of Preachers. JC has been happily married since June of 2010. He and his lovely wife have had two children born into their family, one daughter and one son; they hope to have a few more. He has at times questioned – and more often still been questioned about – his Faith, but he has never wandered far from the Church, nor from our Lord. “To whom else would I go?”

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