Author’s note: This is Part Two of a series of conversations with J. Budziszewski, a Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture and author most recently of Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy. See Part One here, and my review of the book here.
Questions and Answers
You write in the introduction to your most recent book, Pandemic of Lunacy, that we swallow crackpot ideas because we choose to be persuaded by them. How is that?
Philosophers use the phrase “motivated irrationality.” We human beings have rational minds. We can make errors in logic, of course, but most of our big errors are not just because the problems are hard. Most are either because we’re being lazy, or because we don’t really want to know the truth.
Let’s say I’ve treated my friend very badly. That may be easy to recognize. But I don’t want to hear that from my conscience. So instead of listening to it, I’ll pull the wool over my own eyes. Or I’ll try to placate my conscience by telling myself he deserved it.
And then other things kick in. If I’ve convinced myself that he deserved it, I now have every motive to continue to treat him badly in other ways — because surely, such a bad fellow deserves that too. And so that first injustice, rationalized instead of repented, leads to another. This whole process is irrational, but it’s motivated. Motivated irrationality can include refusing to follow premises to their conclusions, or adopting absurd premises so that they will lead to the conclusions we want, or finding the conclusion but trying to pretend to ourselves that we don’t know it.
As you write in your book, deception is progressive.
Yes. It ramifies. It’s fertile and fissiparous, and it metastasizes. It’s very hard to make myself believe in only one lunacy, because they’re connected with each other. They’re connected both logically and by various psychological mechanisms.
You also say self-deception is exhausting labor.
In the movie Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara says, about unpleasant things, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” But in fact, that isn’t easy. The classical philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, for instance, distinguish between what is called habitual knowledge and actual knowledge. Actual knowledge is when I’m thinking about it. Habitual knowledge is when it’s back there but I’m not thinking about it right now; my mind is merely in a state of readiness to be aware of it.
Teachers make use of that. We all really know that a thing can’t both be and not be in the same sense at the same time. But until you’ve pointed that out to a 20-something student, he’s probably never thought of it before. Yet because it was habitual knowledge, he then thinks to himself, “Somehow or other, I knew that all along, but I didn’t notice that I knew it until now.”
What’s in our habitual knowledge wants to rise to the surface; it wants to come out. That’s especially true with the testimony of conscience. It does things to get our attention, and so it is hard to not think of it. You have to put enormous labor into distracting yourself with other thoughts, or with constant noise, or with a whirl of activities or things that engross your senses, or by surrounding yourself with people who say the opposite thing, or if you simply can’t help but think about it, distracting yourself in a different way by thinking up elaborate rationalizations for why it was really okay after all.
So, it’s tiring. Conscience tries to get our attention. Everyone has had the experience of doing something wrong and feeling bad about it. That’s remorse, but remorse is the weakest of the furies that pursue us. Sometimes it goes away. The other witnesses, the other dynamisms in the conscience, are much, much harder to ignore.
There is an urge to atone, to pay a price. In crisis pregnancy counseling, it is not at all unusual for a young woman to say, “I had to have an abortion, because otherwise my boyfriend would break up with me.” And then she has the abortion, but to punish herself for it, she breaks up with the boyfriend herself. Things like this are so common.
There’s also a reconciliatory urge. You’ve broken bonds with God and man, so you have to form substitute bonds. Criminal gangs know this, so they try to get new recruits involved as quickly as possible in things that shock even their own conscience so that the recruit has to bond with the gang as a substitute.
There’s also the confessional urge. Back in the early 1960s, radical feminists used to take out half-page advertisements in magazines saying things like, “We, the undersigned, have had abortions.” It’s a strange mode of advocacy, isn’t it? It’s a thwarted confessional urge. What I ought to do is confess that I did wrong. But instead, I confess everything about my deed except that it was wrong and try to placate my conscience that way.
All this is powerful, and it twists our minds in a thousand directions.
An Indestructible Longing
Speaking about things that are inherent to being human, you’ve also written that “the longing for truth, for purity, for lightness is indestructible,” but that at the same time, “the fear of truth, of purity, and of lightness is also very strong.” How do you see this play out in your observations of human interactions?
Thomas Aquinas said that we want to know the truth and to live in society that is patterned after that truth. We especially want to know the truth about God. This is strong. People sometimes say, “I’m trying to find myself.” Usually that means they’re trying to find the God in whose image they are made. They’re trying to find meaning in the universe and asking, “Who am I in this context against the backdrop of this universe?”
Freud talked about the suppression of libido — his term for the sexual drive — and all the crazy things that he thought happened to us when libido is suppressed. But I don’t think he knew the first thing about it. Because the driveI have in mind — this inclination to know the truth, especially the truth about God — may express itself in indirect or distorted ways when we suppress it. By suppressing it, I mean, for example:
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because I would have to change.
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because I would have to admit that I was wrong.
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because it puts me to shame.
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because he’s so good that it scares me. I don’t want him to be that good. I don’t want him to love me that much, more than I love myself.
We do suppress the desire for the truth, and the consequences of suppressing the desire for the truth are far more potent and powerful than the consequences of suppressing libido. They break out into all sorts of things: the urges of the Aztecs who sacrificed tens of thousands of prisoners, or of the Baal worshippers who sacrificed infants. It wasn’t that they didn’t have any interest in God or any longing to know God. They did. You can’t wipe that longing out of yourself, but you may end up honoring it in a perverted way. And we just twist ourselves into pretzels.
Atheists, too. Atheists don’t realize that they have this longing to know the truth. I read one atheist author who said he could satisfy what I call the longing to know the truth about God by scientific knowledge. Well, no. Because there’s something behind science — Why is science? Why should it even be possible to understand the universe? What kind of thing is the universe that it should be possible to understand it? Is it accessible to a mind because it was made by a mind? All that lies behind the interest in science and the possibility of science.
The case of that atheist illustrates that if you don’t worship God, the true God, there will be something else, some unconditional concern or commitment, to which everything in your personality bends the knee. In a certain sense, there isn’t even such a thing as an atheist. There are only people who worship false gods. Ultimately, false gods and idols demand blood.
That can be connected back to Romans 1.
I’ve given a lot of thought to Romans 1 and 2 over the years, largely because I was in such extreme self-denial as a young man. I realized afterward, after God brought me back into faith, that it wasn’t, as I had told myself, that I didn’t know that there was a God, or that I didn’t know that there was good and evil. Of course I knew. But I “suppressed the truth in unrighteousness,” to use St. Paul’s expression.
The Debate About Intelligent Design
How have you seen that longing for truth and fear of truth play out in the public debate over intelligent design?
Most of the critics’ arguments ignore the arguments for design, or they distort them. A critic will just fling out an objection, intelligent design thinkers will reply, and the reply is totally ignored. The objection is nonetheless repeated and intelligent design treated as if it’s been refuted.
Most of it really goes back to what Richard Lewontin, the famous Harvard population biologist wrote — that we “take the side of science,” by which he meant materialism, not because the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but because “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” In other words, it isn’t because the evidence leads us to the conclusion that there is no agency. It’s because we refuse to be led by the evidence to that conclusion. And any evidence that leads us there, we will ignore.
Materialism itself has become very interesting. People used to say materialism meant that nothing exists but particles of matter in motion. But if they’re in motion, then there must be space for them to be moving through in time over which they move. So you’ve already got something other than particles of matter in motion.
Materialists used to say that because nothing exists but particles of matter in motion, the only way the particles can communicate force to each other is by collision; there’s no action at a distance. We now know that there is action at a distance. There are fields of force — magnetic fields and so forth. So what materialistic physicists have done is just redefine their terms so that those count as material phenomena too.
It seems there’s nothing at all that materialists won’t eventually call material. Except God. Or except the soul. So it’s just nuts.
There’s so much that’s convoluted, and thinking through it is hard work.
It is hard work, although for many people who think through these things, there comes a kind of epiphany: “Wait a minute; that’s really crazy. I’m not crazy for thinking that it’s crazy. I had a lurking suspicion that it was, and I tried not to have that suspicion. But it really is crazy.”
Pandemic of Lunacy is an excellent resource for helping workaday thinking people realize that they aren’t crazy. It’s the convoluted world that is crazy. You can read the Table of Contents and Introduction here, and Creed & Culture is offering a 15 percent discount through the end of April. Use discount code PANDEMIC15.