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Entry: A New Humanism in Europe Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/a_new_humanism_in_europe#6224 Post contents: <i>This article is just silly. There’s no better word for it. It is nothing but vile hatred of Europeans, Euro-Americans and Western Civilization. Sounds like something neocons at the National Review would publish.</i> As "fallacies on parade" continues, we now have name-calling, straw man, and a contradiction of sorts: "silly" vs "vile hatred". The article also say nothing of the sort. Indeed, and to return to the main article, I was at first surprised that the name “Michael Novak” the “American Enterprise Institute” were not greeted with screams of piercing pain from some of our hysterical and petrified paleoconservatives. Then I decided that these poor souls first fell on the floor in an epilectic fit of rage, and haven’t recovered. Now I think that Taki Top Drawer readers and writebackers – a least most of them – aren’t in any real disagreement with what Novak is actually quoted as saying. <i>The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism</i> (1982) and <i>The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</i> (1993) might not totally rhyme with Catholic Social Teaching. If memory serves me right, they are a Hamiltonian/Whig read of this Teaching. Still, conservatives know that the historical context is important. Novak had in his cross hairs the Latin American Marxist Liberation Theologians – the views of whom are utterly un-rhyme-able with Catholic Social Teaching. And though JPII and his sidekick Ratzinger anathemized this bunch, and though Boff might now be an aging hippie, still lay Liberation Theologians are now the power in Venezuela and Boliva, so Novak’s work might still be useful. And maybe Novak’s now changing his colors again, and again for the better. He changed once before. Turning to his reported remarks: <i>The starting point of his analysis was that 9/11 marked the collapse not only of the Twin Towers but also of secularism, to the extent that it represents a way to use reason as an autonomous instrument of knowledge without any reference to other perspectives. On the contrary, both individual existence and group life, that is politics and society, display a profound need for new foundations and answers, probably as ancient as the questions about human destiny. Arguing for a transformation of secular thinking, Novak predicts a coming end to secularism.</i>. This is tantamount to saying that the Enlightenment project is dead, and confessional parties are the order of the day. Most of the men of the Enlightenment were not atheists, but Newtonian Deists, arguing the metaphysical structure of the universe proved a creator. Find a watch, see how organized it is, and you realized (so it was assumed) that there must be a watchmaker. Kant’s first <i>Kritik</i> brought this argument into question, and Kant turned to a moral proof for God. That too fell apart in the course of the 19th Century. The Enlightenment and the subsequent age of “Progress” (Christopher Hitchens is so old fashioned) didn’t keep their promises. They promised enlightened, reasonable, and kind, gentle men once the shackles of “superstition” and “oppression” were gone. What we got was gas chambers and atomic bombs, followed by Hollow Men in the Lonely Crowd in the Waste Land of a botched civilization waiting for Godot while Amusing Themselves to Death. So, is Novak correct? Does 9/11 mean the end secularism, the autonomy of reason, the foundations and answer of the Enlightenment, just as mindless bloodshed of The 30 Year’s War and the English Civil War ended a religious based world? Exactly what kind of “transformation of secular thinking” needs to be done? Meanwhile, the latest books on atheism this year are so bad that we can assume atheists are getting desperate. I’ve said before, we haven’t had a religious war in the West since the Battle of the Boyne. Now were in one, and likely will remain so even if the Iraq war is abandoned. Our leadership, in and out of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom, and our intellectual elite just don’t know the man of religion, how he thinks and how he fights. They better learn. Newman said it best in “The Tamworth Reading Room”, and I’ll rescript: A man will live and die for his God, his king, his mother, and all three; but no one will be a martyr to the conclusion of a syllogism. Sent at: 2008 11 22