Civilization and Morals

NOW IT SEEMS CLEAR that it is impossible to have a purely "practical" morality divorced from an interpretation of Reality. Such a morality would be mere social custom and essentially unprogressive. Progress springs very largely from the attempt to bring actual conditions and social habits into harmony with what are conceived as the laws or conditions of real life. The very conception of morality involves a duality or opposition between what "is" and what "ought to be." Moreover from the very earliest conditions of primitive savagery up to the highest degree of intellectual culture, the ethical standard can be shown to be closely connected with some kind of world-view or conception of reality, whether that is embodied in a mythology, or a philosophy, or is vaguely implicit in the customs and beliefs of the society.

Now the great obstacle to the attainment of a purely rational system of ethics is simply our lack of knowledge of Reality. If we can accept some metaphysics of Absolute Being, then we shall quickly possess an absolute morality, as the Platonists did. But if we limit ourselves to positive and scientific knowledge of Reality, it is at once evident that we are limited to a little island of light in the middle of an ocean of darkness. Unfortunately, Herbert Spencer's attitude toward the Unknowable will not help us here, for the machina mundi is a dynamic unity, and the part of it we know shares in the movement of the unknown whole. Most philosophies and religions have supposed that there is some kind of meaning or reason in the world process; though there are thinkers like Lucretius (and perhaps Bertrand Russell) who deny this, and yet try to fashion a kind of "island" morality for reasonable humanity shipwrecked amidst the chaos of an irrational universe. Nevertheless the great majority of modern thinkers, in fact modern men, believe profoundly in the existence of progress, and not merely a progress of succession but a progress of improvement. "Life moves on to ever higher and richer forms. Here is an adequate goal for moral effort! Here is justification of moral values! Here is a true foundation for a modern system of ethics!"

But from a purely rational point of view what does all this amount to? So far from explaining the problems of human existence, it adds fresh difficulties.

~Christopher H. Dawson: Dynamics of World History I, I, 4.

"Substitutes for religion"

"THREE forms of activity─the consecration of place, the consecration of work, and the consecration of the social bond itself─are the main channels through which religion finds social expression and acquires a sociological form. . . . But our own culture . . . has been growing progressively more secular. . . . The three main substitutes for religion in the modern age, Democracy, Socialism, and Nationalism, which are typical of the age of transition from a religious to a secular society, are each of them based one one of these fundamental errors. Democracy bases it's appeal on the sacredness of the People─the consecration of Folk; socialism on the sacredness of Labour─the consecration of Work; and nationalism on the sacredness of the Fatherland─the consecration of Place. These concepts still arouse a genuinely religious emotion, though the emotion has no basis in transcendent religious values or sanctions. It is religious emotion divorced from religious belief. Social activities are no longer consecrated by being brought into relation with the transcendent realities and values which are the proper objects of religion. They are, as it were, 

consecrated to themselves and elevated into substitutes for the ends to which they were formerly subjected."

~Christopher H. Dawson: "Prevision in Religion." (1934)

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