Faith and Knowledge

 Most people are of the opinion that the truths that we accept by faith are less certain than those that we consider to be knowledge.   This is reflected in the way they use the verbs “believe” and “know” and their equivalents in other languages.   When someone says “I believe X” and “I know Y” it is usually safe to infer from this that he is more sure of Y than he is of X.   Most people, although perhaps not quite as many, infer from this that faith is inferior to knowledge.

 

 

Those of us who are Christians ought not to think this way.  

 

 

Consider how Bishop Pearson explained the distinction between belief and knowledge in his Exposition of the Creed. (1)   He began by defining belief (in general) as “an Assent to that which is credible, as credible” and by defining assent as “that act or habit of the understanding, by which it receiveth, acknowledgeth, and embraceth any thing as a truth”.  He then went on to explain that assent was more general than belief or faith, and to distinguish the latter from other forms of assent in terms of their objects.   The difference was in what makes “that which is credible” credible:

 

 

For he which sees an action done, knows it to be done, and therefore assents unto the truth of the performance of it because he sees it: but another person to whom he relates it, may assent unto the performance of the same action, not because himself sees it, but because the other relates it; in which case that which is credible is the object of Faith in one, of evident knowledge in the other.

 

 

Bishop Pearson expanded on this by providing several different ways in which the truth of something is apparent to us and thus our assent to it is properly knowledge rather than faith.   Something might be apparent to our senses (the examples he gives are the whiteness of snow and the heat of fire) or to our understanding (“the whole of anything is greater than any one part of the whole”).   Things which are apparent in these ways are more properly described as being evident than as being credible.   Then there are things which are not evident in these ways, but the truth of which we can establish through their “immediate and necessary connection with something formerly known”.   These things, he described as “scientifical”.   Note that this term as he uses it is not only an archaic form but also more comprehensive than our “scientific”.   He used mathematics as an example of a science, demonstrating thereby that his “scientifical” embraced the products of both methodologies in the Rationalism v. Empiricism debate which, at least in its Modern phase, was in its infancy at the time he preached these sermons.

 

 

He then said:

 

But when anything propounded to us is neither apparent to our sense, nor evident to our understanding, in and of itself, neither certainly to be collected from any clear and necessary connection with the cause from which it proceedeth, or the effects which it naturally produceth, nor is taken up upon any real arguments, or reference to other acknowledged truths, and yet not withstanding appeareth to us true, not by a manifestation but attestation of the truth, and so moveth us to assent not of itself, but by virtue of the testimony given to it: this is said properly to be credible; and an Assent unto this, upon such credibility, is in the proper notion Faith or Belief.

 

 

After distinguishing between faith and knowledge, Bishop Pearson then went on to distinguish between different kinds of faith based upon the different kinds of authority of those whose testimony makes that which is believed credible.   The authority of those offering testimony, he said, rests upon both their ability and integrity.   Someone lacking the former might be deceived himself and so deceive others with his testimony unintentionally.   Someone lacking the latter might deliberately deceive others.   The authority of human testifiers greatly varies and may be deficient in one or both of these foundations, but God, Whose testimony may be immediate, as it was to Noah, Moses, the Prophets, and the Apostles, or mediate, as passed on through these human messengers, is perfect in both ability and integrity and so can neither be deceived Himself nor deliberately deceive others.   Faith based upon Divine Testimony, therefore, is the truest of faiths, and so, with regards to the “I believe” that begins the Creed, Bishop Pearson said that it is:

 

 

[T]o assent to the whole and every part of it, as to a certain and infallible truth revealed by God (who by reason of his infinite knowledge cannot be deceived, and by reason of his transcendent holiness cannot deceive) and delivered unto us in the writings of the blessed Apostles and Prophets, immediately inspired, moved, and acted by God, out of whose writings this brief sum of necessary points of Faith was first collected.

 

 

Now, for the very same reasons why faith in God’s Word is more certain than faith in human testimony, that is to say, that God Himself is by contrast with human authorities a sure and infallible testifier, faith in God’s Word is more certain than human knowledge.   Just as human authorities can fail us through ignorance or the intent to deceive, so the senses and understanding by which we perceive what is apparent and evident and comprehend what must necessarily follow fall short of the infallibility of the witness of God.

 

 

Dr. Edward F. Hills wrote:

 

 

He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.  (Heb. 11:6b)   If I truly believe in God, then God is more real to man than anything else I know, more real even than my faith in Him.   For if anything else is more real to me than God Himself, then I am not believing but doubting.   I am real, my experiences are real, my faith is real, but God is more real.   Otherwise I am not believing but doubting.   I cast myself on that which is most real, namely, God Himself.    I take God and Jesus Christ His Son as the starting point of all my thinking. (2)

 

 

If by God, we mean the God that orthodox Christianity has always proclaimed, taught, and confessed belief in, then that which Dr. Hills has affirmed must necessarily follow.   The God of orthodox Christianity is the God of the Old Testament as well as the New.  The very first verse of the Bible declares that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.   When Moses asked Him for His name He declared “I AM”.   This God is the Creator of everything else that exists, Whose Being is eternal and in Himself in a way that cannot be said of anything created.   Whereas the classical philosophers distinguished between things which exist in themselves, and things which exist only in other things, apple as an example of the former, redness as an example of the latter, even things which exist in themselves in this sense, are in other senses dependent upon other things for their existence.   The apple you eat today, would not have existed had the tree on which it grew not existed first.   That tree would not have existed, had it not been planted from a previous example – and so on, all the way back to the first apple tree, which was created directly by God, the uncreated Source of all being.   If everything else depends upon God for its existence, and God as the Source of all being exists eternally in Himself independent of anything else, then God must necessarily be more real than anything else.   Faith in God, therefore, must be the starting point of our thinking, for such faith is more certain, not only than faith in the testimony of human authorities, but that which we presume to call our “knowledge”.

 

 

In connection with all of this, an important observation can be made about the Scriptural account of the Fall of man.   Man, the book of Genesis tells us, was created in the image of God and placed in a Garden, which God had prepared for him in the land of Eden, in which “out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Gen. 2:9).   Two specific trees are identified, “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” and God, after putting man into the Garden, gave him the following commandment:   “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).     While the exact nature of the “knowledge of good and evil” is something that Jewish and Christian theologians have debated for millennia, (3) the account makes it clear that in the prohibition on eating the fruit of the tree, it was this specific kind of knowledge that was forbidden to man.

 

 

In the third chapter of Genesis the serpent, whom the Book of Revelation in the New Testament identifies with Satan, deceives Eve into eating the forbidden fruit.   She in turn gives the fruit to Adam, who also eats.   Their sin is discovered and they incur a number of curses in judgement, the most important of which was that they were driven out of the Garden, barred from the tree of life, and thus assigned to the hard life of human mortality.   In the midst of the judgement, the first promise of the Redemption that God would eventually give to mankind in His Incarnate Son Jesus Christ is made (Gen. 3:15).   The observation that is important for our purposes here pertains to the deception that brought about the Fall.   When the serpent deceived Eve, he began with a question “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Gen. 3:1) which, after Eve had answered, he followed up by directly contradicting God “Ye shall not surely die” (Gen 3:4) and tempting Eve with the forbidden knowledge by making it appear desirable in a way that stoked pride and vanity “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).    Note how each part of this deception was designed to progressively undermine faith in God’s word.   The initial question subtly introduced an element of doubt, the contradiction invited outright disbelief, and implicit in the temptation was the suggestion that by withholding the forbidden knowledge from man God was acting against man’s interests out of selfishness, an aspersion on God’s character that led to mistrust.   Therefore, in this temptation the serpent was presenting the kind of knowledge that had been forbidden to man as being preferable to faith.   This then is the source of that common notion that we have been rebutting in this essay that knowledge is superior to faith.   

 

 

It would be a mistake to conclude from this that all knowledge of every type is treated as being opposed to God and faith in Scripture.   The majority of Scriptural references to knowing and knowledge are positive.   God’s own knowledge, obviously, is always good.   Indeed, whatever the “knowledge of good and evil” was, it was appropriate and good in God (Gen. 3:22).   God’s knowledge, as discussed above, is foundational to faith in God.   God is all-knowing (1 Kings 8:39, Job 37:16, Psalm 139:4, Matthew 6:8, 1 John 3:20 to give but a handful of the references which speak of God’s omniscience using forms of the word “know”, themselves but a fraction of the Scriptural testimony to God’s omniscience as there are even more references which express the concept using other terms, such as speaking of God as “seeing” and “understanding” all things).    This is why the element of His credibility that Bishop Pearson called “ability” is absolute.   He cannot be deceived.      Most Scriptural references to human knowledge are also positive, however.   Knowledge is spoken of as a gift of God, as, for example, in the cases of the workmen appointed to make the Tabernacle and its furnishings in the book of Exodus.   King Solomon is commended by God for asking for “wisdom and knowledge” in the first chapter of II Chronicles.   Job and his counsellors are rebuked for speaking “without knowledge”, when God speaks at the end of the book of Job.    The Psalmist describes God as He who “teacheth man knowledge” (Psalm 94:10).    The book of Proverbs says that knowledge is to be desired above material wealth (Prov. 8:10).   These are but a few examples.   The Scriptures also repeatedly speak of the “knowledge of God”, in the sense of man’s knowing God, as something to be desired and sought after.   In His prayer, at the end of His discourse en route to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus Christ said “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”. (Jn. 17:3).  Since the Gospel in which this is recorded repeatedly stresses that eternal life is a gift from God that we receive by believing in Jesus Christ – the Fourth Evangelist states this or quotes somebody else saying it in one way or another about one hundred times – the Lord was either equating faith with knowledge in this verse, or speaking of a knowledge that is received by faith.

 

 

Most often when the Scriptures speak of knowing and knowledge negatively, it is either a false knowledge, that is to say, someone thinks he has knowledge but does not, or knowledge that has been overvalued.   To place too high of a value on something that is good in itself, by, for example, valuing the good over the better, or the better over the best, is to commit an error that is comparable to literal idolatry (placing the creature in the place of the Creator) and which can have similar consequences.    When the devil tempted Eve to choose forbidden knowledge over faith this was an example of overvaluing true knowledge.  Very early in Christian history, heretical sects arose which challenged the teachings of the orthodox leaders of the Church and the Christian faith, in the name of a special kind of “knowledge”.    When this happened, the “knowledge” so valued over orthodox faith in God, was false knowledge.

 

 

History knows the heretics in question by the name “Gnostics.”   The way historians use this term it is not the designation of any one specific sect, but is rather a categorical label applying to a broad class of heretical groups.     The early Church Fathers who contended for the orthodox faith against the Gnostics usually referred to them as heretics, or by the name of their specific heresy which was typically the name of its first or chief proponent.   St. John the Apostle writing in canonical Scripture called them by a stronger name - "antichrists".   St. John's account of them was that they were schismatics who had broken away from the Apostolic Church and apostates who had departed from the orthodox faith by denying the Incarnation.   According to such early Church Fathers as St. Justin Martyr, (4) St. Irenaeus of Lyons, (5) and St. Hippolytus of Rome, (6) the first of these sects was the Simonians, founded by Simon Magus - the Samaritan magician who heard St. Philip preach the Gospel in the eighth chapter of Acts and was baptized but who came under St. Peter's curse when he offered money in exchange for the power of the Apostolic ministry of conveying the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands.    Nevertheless, the label Gnostic suits our purposes here because it points to the very element of their thinking that is relevant.  When the members of these sects referred to themselves as γνωστικοί (gnostikoi) it was with the literal sense of “those with γνῶσῐς”.    The Greek word γνῶσῐς (gnosis), like its Latin equivalent scientia and its English equivalent, was a noun formed from the verb meaning “I know” - γιγνώσκω (gignosko) in Greek, scio in Latin (7) – and it was the basic Greek word for “knowledge”.   The way the Gnostics used it, however it did not mean knowledge in general, but a special kind of “knowledge” that they regarded as their unique and elite possession.   It is likely this to which St. Paul referred when he warned St. Timothy to “keep that which is committed to thy trust”, i.e., the Christian faith, against “the oppositions of science falsely so-called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20-21).    The Greek words rendered “science falsely so called” in the Authorized Bible, using the older, more general meaning of “science” are ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως, the first of which is recognizably the source of our “pseudonym”, the second of which is the genitive singular form of γνῶσῐς.

 

 

The so-called “knowledge” of Gnosticism stands in sharp contrast to orthodox Christian faith.    In the orthodox Christian faith, the God Whom Jesus Christ called Father is identical to the God Who created the heavens and the earth in the Old Testament.   This is clearly stated in the first Article of both Creeds (8) and is also obviously the plain teaching of Jesus Christ and the New Testament.  This God is Creator of everything other than God Himself that exists, spiritual and physical, or, in the words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed “all things visible and invisible”.   The corruption of sin and evil, in the orthodox Christian faith, has infected all of Creation, and began in the unseen or spiritual part of Creation, before the Fall of man, with the rebellion of Satan and the angels who followed him.    The salvation that God sent His Only-Begotten Son Jesus Christ to accomplish, extends to all parts of Creation affected by the corruption of sin and so will ultimately include the corporeal resurrection of the redeemed (1 Cor. 15:12-58) and the redemption of all of physical Creation (Rom. 8:19-23).   Although the redeemed are sometimes spoken of as God’s “elect” (chosen), salvation is freely offered to all through a message, the Gospel, that is to be preached to “every creature” (Mk. 16:15).   Everyone is invited to believe that Gospel and by believing receive the saving grace of God.  

 

 

Gnosticism taught the exact opposite with regards to each of these points.   The Gnostics taught that spirit was pure and incorruptible and matter was irredeemably corrupt therefore both could not have come from the same God.   They taught a supreme deity they called “The One”, from whom lesser divinities they called aeons emanated.   These divinities, they taught, dwelt in a realm of light called the pleroma.   The aeons were grouped in male-female pairs, which in turn would emanate other lower aeons.  One of the lowest pair of aeons, in their teaching, was Sophia (this is the Greek word for “wisdom), which left the pleroma and gave birth to the Demiurge.   This name, the Gnostics borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus.  Like the title character of Plato’s dialogue, they taught that the Demiurge created the material or physical world.    Unlike Plato’s Timaeus they taught that he was evil and so was his creation.   Gnostics who made reference to the Old Testament identified the God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge.   Assisting the Demiurge in creating the physical world and ruling it, in Gnostic theology, were lesser evil divinities called archons, whose total number varied from Gnostic sect to Gnostic sect, although usually there were seven chief ones whom the Gnostics identified with various heavenly bodies. The Demiurge and his archons, according to Gnosticism, imprisoned sparks of divinity from the pleroma within physical bodies, creating human beings.   Salvation, in Gnostic theology, was a release of these divine sparks from the imprisonment of the physical back into the pure spiritual world of the pleroma.   Salvation was attained, the Gnostics claimed, through enlightenment, the achieving of “knowledge” (gnosis).   This “knowledge” did not come in a message that was to be generally preached to all, but was something revealed to individuals through personal experience with the divine of which only an elite few had the capacity.

 

 

Clearly, the core teachings of orthodox Christianity and those of heretical Gnosticism were antithetical to each other.    Just as clear is the fact that this total antithesis grew out of the fact that whereas orthodox Christianity identified itself as a faith - a set of truths  which when proclaimed to the world as a kerygma are called the Gospel ("Good News") and when spoken as a personal and communal confession are called the Creed, both of which terms point to the fact that these truths are accepted by faith,  that is to say, believed on the authority of God's Word, Gnosticism  embraced what it regarded as a special, elite, esoteric "knowledge" rather than the orthodox faith.

 

 

Unlike the knowledge that Satan tempted Eve to abandon faith for, the gnosis of the Gnostics was a false knowledge, and quite likely, as stated previously, explicitly called such by the Apostle Paul in Scripture.   In the Modern Age, what was formerly Christendom or Christian civilization, was transformed into what is now called by the secular name of Western Civilization through its permeation by a philosophical spirit that can for lack of a better term be called “liberalism” although it needs to be understood that by this a more general, underlying, attitude is meant rather than the specific philosophical and political formulations that have borne name.    This liberalism places no value whatsoever in the testimony of God, reduces faith in God to personal experience and opinion, and places its own supreme confidence in the rational faculties of mankind.   One of the fruits of this liberalism, has been the exaltation of something that bears the name of “knowledge” – this time the Latin term, Anglicized into “science” – to the level of the highest truth.   What is this thing that Modern name calls by the name of knowledge and prizes so highly?

 

 

At its most basic level it is merely man’s attempts to explain the phenomena of the physical world strictly by means of other phenomena within the same.   As such it is ancient, going back at least as far as Thales of Miletus in the seventh to sixth centuries BC.   At a somewhat higher level it is the methodology devised for these attempts involving observation, hypothesizing, and experimentation.   Depending upon how you look at it there have been either several such methodologies or several major revisions of the same methodology.    Aristotle’s method was the most influential in the pre-Modern world.   Sir Francis Bacon’s was one of the earliest of the Modern versions.   His most important treatise setting forth that method was a direct attack on Aristotle as is evident in the title: Novum Organum - Ὄργανον (Organon) was the title given by Aristotle’s students to the published collection of his books on logic.   Aristotle’s methodology had stressed deductive reasoning, Bacon’s emphasized inductive reasoning.   It was in his unfinished novella New Atlantis, however, that Bacon provided us with the key to understanding why Modern man has come to so value “science”.   The end or goal of “science” or “natural philosophy” as he called it – a much better and more accurate name – he placed in the words of the mission statement of his fictional Salomon’s House foundation: “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things: and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”   Modern “science” has been exponentially more efficient at achieving this end than any prior “science” which translates into its having more effectively produced results.    This establishes its utilitarian value which Modern man, increasingly incapable of distinguishing between utility and truth, confuses with its epistemic value.   To any sane mind, however, it must be regarded as a mixed blessing at best.   The same “science” that gave us life-saving penicillin, also gave us life-threatening nuclear weapons.   Even before the invention of the atomic bomb, wise minds as disparate as Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and German historian and prophet of doom Oswald Spengler perceived Modern “science” as a Faustian bargain after Faust who exchanged his soul for knowledge.   Spengler described Modern Western “scientific” culture as Faustian.   Tennyson allowed his readers to infer the same from his poem Ulysses, in which he places the spirit of Modern Western “scientific” adventurism in the words of his title character’s determination to “follow knowledge like a falling star/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” and against all forces arrayed against him to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, spoken as that character sets out on that final voyage that landed him in the eighth circle of Hell where he is depicted recounting it to Dante in Inferno, Canto XXVI.

 

 

So is this “science” a true knowledge like the “knowledge of good and evil” with which Eve was tempted, or a false “knowledge” like the gnosis of the Simonians, Valentians, Sethians, et al.?

 

 

“Science” obviously contains much true knowledge.   This is to be found in the raw materials of “science”, the facts or data drawn from observation, which are knowledge in the sense that Bishop Pearson used the term when distinguishing it from “belief” or “faith”.   The hypotheses, theories, and laws by which these facts are interpreted and explained are another story.   While the liberal spirit of the Modern world ascribes truth to every proclamation of “science”, “science” makes no such claim for itself.   If it did, it would never have accomplished anything.   To give but one example, if Max Planck and Albert Einstein had taken the same attitude towards the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, that those who tell us to “follow the science’ with regards to climate change or the bat flu take, they never would have developed quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity.   In the twentieth century, Sir Karl Popper made a compelling case for falsifiability as the litmus test of whether a theory is genuinely “scientific”, rather than the “verifiability” of logical positivism.   To be falsifiable and therefore “scientific”, a theory had to be susceptible to being disproven under examination.   A theory that cannot be so falsified, whatever else it might be, is not “scientific”.   Something that is susceptible to falsification, however, cannot be said to be true, or at the very least, it cannot be said to be known to be true.   At the explanatory level, therefore, “science” is neither truth nor true knowledge, heresy though this undoubtedly be to the ears of the liberal “follow the science” crowd.

 

 

The “knowledge” that Modern man values highly over faith is, therefore, a mixture of true knowledge and false knowledge.   Moreover the true knowledge within it, is clearly of a lesser order of knowledge.   Consider the example of nuclear weapons from the previous paragraph.   While the observable facts that are the true knowledge in science were the raw material from which the physicists devised the theories that enabled them to build the atomic bomb these same facts clearly did not provide them with the knowledge that they ought not to have done anything of the sort.   Whether they had that knowledge from other sources and chose willingly to ignore it or whether they did not have it at all is beside the point.   Such knowledge could not have come from the facts of the science of physics themselves.  The knowledge that one ought not to create weapons that can wipe out entire cities with a single blow and threaten all life on earth is a higher and more important kind of knowledge than the lesser and lower knowledge that gives scientists the ability to invent such things.    The knowledge within Modern medical science has enabled doctors to perform organ transplants, blood transfusions, and other life-saving surgeries.   It has not, however, provided them with the knowledge that civil liberties should not be put on hold, police states established, social isolation imposed upon everybody, businesses, livelihoods and savings destroyed to stop a respiratory disease from spreading too fast and overwhelming their hospitals.    Nor has it provided them with the knowledge that first-of-their-kind vaccines that have not completed their clinical trials should not be imposed upon people by threatening them with exclusion from society, loss of employment, and the like until they “consent” to taking the vaccines.   Since, until quite recently, this knowledge was widespread, informing international agreements and laws, it would seem that Modern medical science has had the effect of driving this higher, more important, knowledge out.    

 

Modern man, therefore, has clearly placed far too high a value on scientific knowledge.    In doing so, he has embraced the same kind of error that produced Gnosticism and the same kind of error that brought about the Fall of man.   The testimony of God is the highest possible Truth, and faith in that testimony is the highest path to Truth available to man, superior to all forms of genuine knowledge attainable by human effort, and especially to spurious types of knowledge, or lower kinds of genuine knowledge such as those found in science.

 

 

(1)   John Pearson (1613-1686) was consecrated Bishop of Chester in 1672.   The work referred to was first published in 1659 and was compiled from sermons he had given at St. Clement’s, Eastscheap in London after he had been appointed preacher there five years previously.   It is an explanatory commentary on the Apostles’ Creed that is very thorough, going through the Creed Article by Article, and indeed, clause by clause – sometimes word by word – within the Articles.   Quotations here are taken from the first volume of the 1843 Oxford University Press edition, edited by the Reverend Doctor E. Burton, Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church.   They all come from the exposition of the words “I believe” which begin the first Article, which exposition starts on page 2 and continues to page 22.

(2)   Edward Freer Hills, Believing Bible Study, 3^rd edition, Christian Research Press Ltd., Des Moines, Iowa, 1967, 1991.    Several sections of this book are near identical to ones found in the same author’s The King James Version Defended.   The paragraph quoted is one such paragraph.   Whereas it is the fourth paragraph of the first chapter of Believing Bible Study it is also the second last paragraph of the second chapter of The King James Version Defended.

(3)  One interpretation is that the “knowledge of good and evil” meant to experience both good and evil in man’s own existence, a problem with which interpretation is that God, within Whom there is no evil, affirms that He possesses this knowledge.   Another interpretation is that by expressing the opposite poles of “good” and “evil” this was meant to comprehend everything in between and thus “knowledge of everything” or omniscience was meant.   While this is consistent with God’s describing the knowledge as being like His Own, mankind obviously did not become omniscient in the Fall.

(4)   Apologia Prima, xxvi.

(5)   Adversus Haereses, I.xxiii, IV, VI.xxxiii.

(6)  Refutatio Omnium Haeresium,IV.li and especially VI.ii, iv-xv.

(7)  There is another Latin verb for “know” which is obviously cognate with the Greek word.   This is gnosco, gnoscere, which was frequently used in compounds with many, ahem, recognizable English derivatives, including the one just highlighted, and the one used in the first sentence of this note.  Nevertheless, the functional equivalent of γιγνώσκω was scio.   Both were the primary verbs for knowing in their respective languages.

(8)“Creed” comes from the Latin credo – “I believe”.  The Latin texts of both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds begin with this word, although the plural credimus (“we believe”) is sometimes used.   There is another ancient statement of faith that is commonly called a Creed, the Athanasian.   It does not begin with this word but with “Quicumque vult” (“Whosoever will”).   Its form, therefore, is more properly that of a kerygma – the faith proclaimed as a message for others – than a Creed – the faith expressed as a confession of personal/communal belief.   It is obviously, however, a more precise – in the case of the doctrine of Trinity extremely precise – expansion of the Apostles’ Creed, which is where its common title presumably comes from. 

Don't Trust the Experts

 

Until a short time ago the word "misinformation" referred to statements purporting to be factual which fell short in some way, whether in letter or spirit, of the ancient and ageless transcendental landmark known as truth.   "Disinformation" meant the same, but with the additional connotation that the erroneous information was being spread in mala fide by those with a deliberate intent to deceive.   Both words have been in the soi-disant news far more frequently in recent days than has been the norm in the past.   Indeed, it would almost seem that other words have dropped out of the vocabularies of our regular commentators on passing events, because they have been using these multiple times per day.   It would appear, however, that the words have undergone a change in meaning.   They now seem to mean anything which differs or disagrees with whatever the media's approved experts happen to be saying at any given moment even if it conforms with what they had been saying in the moment immediately prior to that one.

 

 

This is indicative of just how far we have apostatized from the wisdom of the ancients who sought the illumination of the eternal beacons of Goodness, Beauty and Truth to light their path.   To the extent that the media, the information machine which has far too much influence over how we perceive and think of the world, acknowledges truth today, it is truth in the old leftist sense of whatever advances the cause of the revolution.   This, of course, is not truth at all in the proper and older sense of that permanent standard, recognized as a basic aspect of being itself, which we strive to attain by conforming our indicative or descriptive speech to reality, i.e., things as they are in themselves.

 

 

Ultimately what we are seeing is the result of centuries of assault on the foundations laid for Western thought, at least in its Classical and Christian phases, by the Attic philosophers, specifically the Socratic school and especially Socrates himself.   I addressed this matter earlier this year in an essay about how Western academe has betrayed the very foundation of its venerable tradition, the first of a series that scrutinized the corruption of the various branches of the universities.   It is worth revisiting now as the media is once again telling us to blindly trust the experts as they impose all sorts of invasive restrictions on us in total disregard of our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights and basic freedoms in the name of keeping us safe.

 

 

If the message of the Socrates who has come down to us primarily through the writings of Plato could be summarized in one sentence, which, of course, it cannot, that sentence would be "don't trust the experts".   For Socrates' career as a philosopher basically consisted of going around and pestering experts, those who claimed to have authoritative knowledge about courage, justice, piety and the like, with questions that demonstrated that the experts didn't really know what they were talking about and didn't possess the kind of knowledge they professed.   He was, in other words, someone who spent his entire life doing the exact opposite of what those who say "shut up and listen to the science" tell us to do when we question the climatologists' prophecies of doom by pointing out holes in the theory of anthropogenic climate change or question the epidemiologists' insistence that we must sacrifice all of our freedoms and necessary social interaction and put ourselves in house arrest for weeks and months at a time to prevent the spread of the Chinese bat flu.   

 

 

"Isn't it true that human beings have historically thrived better in warmer periods than colder periods?"

 

 

"Isn't it true that climate has been constantly changing through history and that this has affected how people live rather than the other way around?"

 

 

"What about that Danish study from this summer in which masks were found not to reduce the spread of the virus?"

 

 

"What about all the deaths that lockdowns cause?"

 

 

"Why should we believe that the same health authorities who support abortion and euthanasia are taking our freedoms away because they want to save lives?"

 

 

"Why all this hype about a virus that is non-lethal for well over 99 percent of people under 65 and in good health,  most of whom will experience only mild symptoms or none at all?"

 

 

The answer we hear to these questions and countless others like them is always "Shut up, listen to the science, and trust the experts".

 

 

Some might raise the objection to my point that today's experts differ from the ones to whom Socrates was, in his own words as recorded by Plato in the Apologia, a "gadfly", in that they have science to back up their claims to authoritative knowledge.

 

 

Let us consider that argument and see whether it can bear up under scrutiny.

 

 

Science, although it bears the Latin word for knowledge as its name, is not synonymous with knowledge but is rather a specific type of knowledge.   The admirers of Modern science see the history of its development as one of unprecedented and exponential expansion of human knowledge to the benefit of the species.   This is not, however, the only way to look at it.   From a different perspective Modern science can be seen as a contraction rather than an expansion of knowledge.   Furthermore, it is rather difficult to deny that science has done harm to the species as well as good.

 

 

Whether science is an expansion or contraction of knowledge depends on what measuring stick you are using.   Allow me to illustrate.  Imagine two men with studies in their home in which their personal libraries are kept.   The one man keeps all of his books in a single bookcase.   The shelves are crammed full and overflowing.   The other man has several bookcases around the room, but none of them is full and there is plenty of space for other books.    Which of the two has the larger library?

 

 

The answer depends upon how you are determining library size.   If the measurement is in bookcases the second man obviously has the larger library.   If, however, we are measuring in number of books, the first man might have the larger library.   Indeed, for the sake of making the point of the illustration let us stipulate that he does have more books in his one bookcase than the other in his many.  Therefore the answer to the question of which has the larger library is different when size is measured by bookcases than by books.

 

 

Now here is how that illustration applies to science: pre-modern science was integrated into philosophy which concerned itself with the whole of reality.   Pre-modern science like Modern science, involved specialized knowledge of different aspects of reality, but, being integrated into philosophy as it was, it recognized the general knowledge of the whole that philosophy sought after to be the higher and greater knowledge, and therefore did not exclude any part of that whole as an area of interest for its more concentrated study.   The science that emerged from the transition into the Modern Age, by contrast, was far less integrated into philosophy, which itself was undergoing a radical transformation, and not, in my opinion, for the better.   Neither Modern science nor Modern philosophy shared the pre-modern hierarchical ranking of general knowledge of the whole as higher and superior to specialized knowledge of the parts.   Furthermore, Modern science narrowed the areas in which it was interested, excluding several parts or aspects of the whole of reality that pre-modern science had not so excluded.

 

 

In other words, when it comes to the parts of the whole of reality that science concerns itself with, Modern science is actually interested in less than pre-modern science.   This is often overlooked since Modern science has subdivided those fewer parts of reality that have retained its interest into multiple fields to facilitate its scrutiny of each.   Think of it as being like a food store that originally sold all different kinds of food – meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy, grains, etc. – then limited itself to fruit, but multiplied the kinds of fruit it offered, now including all the exotic varieties alongside every available type of the staple apples, oranges, pears, peaches and bananas.   Although it has actually narrowed what it has to offer, someone who only ever entered the store to buy fruit might miss this because for him the variety has increased.   The point is that when measured by the criteria of the portion of reality that Modern science takes an interest in compared with pre-modern science, the development of Modern science is clearly a contraction of knowledge rather than an expansion.

 

When it comes to the areas in which Modern science has retained an interest, it has, undeniably, expanded one type of knowledge about those areas, and that exponentially.   That type of knowledge is the kind that answers such questions as “How does this work?” and “What is this made of?”    That providing highly detailed answers to such questions in no way answers such questions as “what is this thing in itself?” and “what is the good of such things?” was beautifully illustrated by C. S. Lewis in the exchange on the nature of a star between Ramandu and Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and explained more prosaically in a number of his non-fictional writings.

 

 

The reason Modern science can answer the one type of question well and in great depth but is hopeless at answering the other type of question is the same reason why it is interested in some parts of the whole that is reality and not others.   Finding the answers to the first type of questions with regards to the areas in which it is interested serves the end of Modern science.   Finding the answers to the second type of questions does not serve that end.   Nor is there anything in the areas of reality which Modern science has excluded from its interest that would serve that end.

 

 

This is because the end of Modern science, that for which it seeks and strives, is not truth at all, but power and control.   As C. S. Lewis opened his lecture on “The Abolition of Man”, the third of the lectures transcribed and published together under the same title in 1943, “’Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science”.   Lewis’ entire lecture is well worth reading to understand the implications, positive and negative of this, as is the entire book in which it can be found and, for that matter, his treatment of the same subject in That Hideous Strength, the third and longest of his “Space Trilogy” in which theological and philosophical discussion is presented in the form of science fiction.   That this is the goal of Modern science, however, rests not merely on the assertion of one of its more distinguished critics.   We also have the word of one of its earliest advocates.   Sir Francis Bacon famously expressed the end of Modern science as the mission statement of his fictional Salomon’s House in his unfinished novel The New Atlantis (1626), “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

 

 

It is because this is its purpose that Modern science is interested only in those parts of reality which it can bend to serve the human will and only in the kind of knowledge that serves that purpose, such as what those things it wishes to bend and harness into service are made of and how they work.   Answers to the questions of what things are in themselves, what their good is, how they fit in to the larger whole of reality, and how they contribute to the good of that whole, are entirely irrelevant to that purpose, as indispensable as they are to Truth.   Indeed, true knowledge of the good of things in themselves and the part they play in the order of reality as a whole, would in many cases run counter to the goal of Modern science for it would identify a good for all things which is not imposed upon them by the will of man, and to which man is obligated to bend his will.

 

The history of Modern science itself demonstrates that truth is entirely irrelevant to it at the theoretical level.   Theory is the essential link between scientific fact gathering – observation and recording – and scientific application – the use of those facts to bend the nature of things into the service of the will of man.   It begins as hypothesis – an interpretive explanation of what has been observed – which, if it survives testing by experimentation, becomes theory, that is to say, an explanation that is accepted and taken to be true for the purpose of devising further hypotheses and developing practical applications.   This is the means whereby science has obtained its great success at manipulating the nature of things to serve man’s will.   This success, however, has never required that the theories underlying human invention actually be true.    Indeed, most if not all of what are considered to be Modern science’s greatest successes, are the culmination of a series of advancements, each based upon a theory that has subsequently been shown to be false.    Success for Modern science is measured by whether it works, not by whether it is true.   The philosophy of science took a major step towards acknowledging this in the twentieth century, when Sir Karl Popper successfully replaced “verifiability” with “falsifiability” as the litmus test of whether a theory is truly scientific or not.   To be scientific, Popper argued, a theory must be falsifiable, that is, susceptible to being shown to be false.   Logic, of course, would tell us that if a theory is capable of being shown to be false, it is, therefore false, and, indeed, Gordon H. Clark argued convincingly that all scientific theories are false, by the standards of logic, for they all involve the fallacy of asserting the consequent.

 

 

Now perhaps you are wondering whether any of this matters or not.   Since science presumably aims at using the mastery over nature it seeks to benefit mankind is not the question of whether it works all that really matters?  This objection would have more validity if everything science had accomplished had been beneficial.   Some things science has given us – the ability to preserve food longer for example – are unquestionably beneficial.   Other things science has given us – nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction – are decidedly not so beneficial, quite the opposite as a matter of fact.

 

 

This is directly related to everything we have seen about how Modern science has divorced its inquiries from an appreciation of things as they are in themselves, contemplation of the whole, and Truth as it was classically and traditionally understood.   A science that seeks only such knowledge as can be used to bend nature to man’s will is a science that recognizes no limits on man’s will.   Such a science is incapable of distinguishing between a good use of its mastery of nature and a bad use.   Goodness like Truth, from which it can be distinguished but never separated, is a transcendental, an element of the permanent order of reality that cannot be bent to serve human will but which requires man to bend his will instead to his own peril if he refuses.  Since Modern science is based upon an assertion of the will in rejection of these limitations it dooms itself to using its power in an evil way, as in the example given in the previous paragraph.

  

I offer the above as grounds for continuing the Socratic tradition of not trusting the experts.   Modern science, for the reasons given, is cause for regarding today’s experts as being less reliable than those of Socrates’ day, not more.  

 

Someone may, however, object that this does not apply to the medical experts we are being told to trust today because their science is devoted to the end of saving people’s lives and health and that this ensures that medical science cannot serve evil ends like the science that went into creating the nuclear bomb.   The response that jumps to mind is to point to all the harm and destruction done – small businesses going bankrupt, massive job losses, mental health breakdowns, alcohol, opioid and other addictions, suicides, the erosion of social capital, distrust of family, friends, neighbours, the development of a snitch culture, the trampling of basic freedom and constitutional rights, the cruel locking away of people in the last days of their lives from their loved ones, the brainwashing people into regarding such things as a friendly handshake or a warm hug as sources of contagion, the cancelling of weddings, birthday parties, holidays, and all the joys of life, forcing people to merely exist rather than truly live, etc. – by the lockdowns that so many of these medical experts have been demanding and imposing for the sake of preventing the spread of a disease that most often produces only mild symptoms, has over a 99 percent survival rate for those under 65-70 and in good health, and which poses a threat mostly to the very old and very sick.   Medical experts who would recommend such a thing demonstrate thereby that they are completely unworthy of our trust.

 

 

George Grant devoted his philosophical career to the contemplation of the significance of the transition from ancient to Modern thinking, focusing specifically on the shift from the view in which the permanent order of reality held us accountable to standards such as goodness, justice, and truth to the view in which the only “goodness”, “justice” and “truth” are values we impose on reality by bending it to our will.    He frequently quoted Robert Oppenheimer's statement "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it" as encapsulating the thinking behind Modern technological science and showing why such thinking precluded bending and submitting to the order of the universe.   He contrasted this unfavourably with the old adage a posse ad esse non valet consequentia as epitomizing the older and wiser way of thinking.  He spoke and wrote frequently about the troubling paradox of freedom, wherein the prevalent liberalism of the Modern Age made freedom its highest value, but understood freedom as the unshackling of the will from the constraints of the order recognized by ancient wisdom, and in developing the science and technology necessary to so “free” the will as to make every desire attainable, created the conditions for unprecedented levels of social control that were eliminating freedom in the older sense of protected civil liberties and rights and ironically, in the name of freedom, were moving us closer to tyranny.   That medical science was as much a part of this problem as any other he recognized when he wrote:

 

 

The proliferating power of the medical profession illustrates our drive to new technologies of human nature.  This expanding power has generally been developed by people concerned with human betterment.

 

Yet nevertheless, the profession has become a chief instrument for tightening social control in the western world, as is made evident by the unity of the profession’s purpose with those of political administration and law enforcement, the complex organization of dependent professions it has gathered around itself, its taking over of the cure of the ‘psyche’, and the increasing correlation of psychiatry with a behaviourally and physiologically oriented psychology. It becomes increasingly necessary to adjust the masses to behave appropriately amidst such technological crises as those of population and pollution and life in the cities. (“Thinking About Technology”, in Technology and Justice, 1986, pp 16-17.

 

Scrap the Social Sciences – Especially Sociology

Jeff Minick had an excellent suggestion last week at Intellectual Takeout, a cultural commentary website operated by the Charlemagne Institute. He proposed that instead of defunding the police, the universities which have been churning out these barbaric Maoist thugs who are trying to tear down Western Civilization should be defunded instead.

I can legitimately claim to have been ahead of the game on this one. Towards the end of May, while George Floyd, who is the pretext for all this crime, violence, and destruction, was still alive and kicking, I wrote not one, but two essays in response to the pissing and moaning from the University of Manitoba after they had their provincial operating grant slashed by five percent. I concluded the first one, “How the Universities Have Betrayed the Founding Principles of Academia”, by saying:

A five percent reduction of their funding? That's a start and it is only just considering that it is the experts they have been producing and telling us to listen to who have done so much unnecessary damage to the economy that supplies the government revenues that pay for their grants. It would be better to cut them off altogether until such time as they return to the principles of the Great Academic Tradition.

Indeed, I can even claim to gone a step further than Mr. Minick. He has excluded the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) departments from his proposal:

I don’t mean in all academic departments, of course. American universities still lead the world in scientific research. We still produce fine mathematicians and excellent engineers, though not enough of the latter. Our colleges and universities still graduate skilled nurses and doctors, business professionals, and computer scientists.

By contrast, these were the very departments I condemned in the essay referenced above, on the grounds that by dividing what was traditionally regarded as a unified whole – human knowledge – into isolated fields that had little to do with each other, they were producing the very sort of thing – “experts” who profess far more knowledge they actually possess, and masses who ignorantly take their every word as Gospel – that the Socratic school attacked at the beginning of the Western Academic Tradition. Of course, at the time I was thinking of the way the lockdown, suspending our basic freedoms, had been so widely accepted because the “experts” recommended it. Since then we have passed from Apocalypse 2020 Mach I: The Stand to Apocalypse 2020 Mach II: The Camp of the Saints and in the context of the latter, Mr. Minick is quite right to target the humanities as they are presently being taught in the universities, as I did in my second essay, “The Bonfire of the Humanities.”

There is a third major division of university departments which deserves “defunding” in the light of the present crisis, however. Indeed, most of the bad ideology which is now corrupting the humanities has bled into the liberal arts from this division. The division in question is that of the “social sciences” or as they are sometimes called the “soft sciences.”

The social sciences occupy a kind of middle territory in academia between the humanities and the STEM disciplines.” The social sciences purport to be “sciences” in the same sense as the “hard sciences” of physics, biology, and chemistry, all of which fall under the S in STEM. Human behaviour, especially the organized behaviour of groups such as communities and societies, is their subject matter. While this has been a major subject for organized human knowledge right from the beginning – the entirety of the Platonic canon can be said to be concerned with it in one way or another, as are the Ethical and Political writings of Aristotle – the social sciences are distinguished from previous studies of human behaviour by their claim to apply the methodology of Modern science. This is why some disciplines, such as history, can be classified as falling under both the humanities and the social sciences, depending upon the approach to the subject matter taken.

Conservative Christians have subjected the methodology of Modern science to sound criticism from a number of different angles. Gordon H. Clark, for example, the Calvinist theologian and apologist, who was for many years the chairman of the Philosophy Department at Butler University, argued that it was epistemologically worthless in his The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God (1964). Its value, Clark argued, is strictly utilitarian. It helps us to improve our standard of living, but it does not lead us towards the truth. Its laws and theories, for all of their usefulness to mankind, are always false. George Grant, the conservative Canadian Anglican philosopher who taught in the philosophy department of Dalhousie University and the religion department of McMaster, criticized Modern science and the technology with which it is inseparably intertwined, from an ethical standpoint. Modern science is Baconian science, and as such has as its end the subjecting of all it studies to the human will, or as Bacon himself put it “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” This, Grant argued was the goal of the Age of Progress, which in theological terms amounted to an eschatological view of history that substituted the “Kingdom of Man” for the “Kingdom of God.”

The social sciences are especially vulnerable to both of these critiques. Since human beings are themselves the subject of the social sciences it is that much more impossible for them to separate the output of the study from the input of the investigator. As for Grant’s criticism, if we agree with him, as I happen to do, that the project of bending nature to serve the will of man set mankind down a wrong path of trying to put himself in the place of God, then the further down the path we get, the deeper into error we sink, and surely the bending of our own nature to our own will is about as far down the path as is possible to get.

The preceding criticism calls the value of the social sciences into question. The positive case for defunding them is that they do little other than indoctrinate gullible young people with left-wing ideology turning them into the sort of people who like to put on masks to intimidate lecturers they disagree with, stir up riots, and vandalize the memorials of the past. Not a dime of public money should ever go towards such indoctrination. The humanities are also guilty of this, but there is a significant difference between them and the social sciences in this regard. The humanities are the disciplines, mostly going back to ancient times, which formed the core educational curriculum up to the Renaissance. If they are churning out neo-Maoist cultural revolutionaries today, this is because they have been infiltrated and subverted from their original purpose. Taught properly, they would do no such thing. With most of the social sciences, however, the corruption goes back almost to the very beginning of the disciplines.

In the case of sociology, a convincing case can be made that is was built upon the shaky foundation of left-wing ideology right from the very beginning. Sociology has long been held in suspicion by those who view it as simply the dumping ground for all the spare parts left over from the other social sciences and not a real discipline in its own right. Conversely, its proponents have maintained that it is the unifying discipline of the social sciences, that ties anthropology, psychology and all of the others together.

Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote in his biography of Karl Marx (1937) that he was the “true father of modern sociology in so far as anyone can claim the title.” By this, he did not mean that Marx had thought up all the basic ideas of sociology and laid down its operating principles in its writings. He meant that Marx, as a critic, forced those who were doing this work, to clarify their ideas. That having ben said, Marx and Auguste Comte, who founded the discipline in the more formal sense, were both heavily influenced by Henri de Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon was born into a French aristocratic family and as a teenager took off to North America and fought in the American Revolution under George Washington. After his return to France he joined the Jacobin Club in the early stages of the French Revolution. It is important to remember, that while it is now commonplace to speak of the Left as “Marxist” as if it began with Marx, the subversive movement against Christian civilization is much older. It was first called the Left in the French Revolution, but even the Jacobins, who took Cromwell’s revolt of a century and a half earlier as their inspiration, were not the originals. The Left is older, therefore, than Saint-Simon, although it did not go by that name until he had joined it. He left his mark on what it would thereafter be, however, in that he was the first socialist. Marx and Engels classified him as a “utopian socialist”, but all of the different socialisms that sprang up in the nineteenth century, from Proudhon’s to that of Marx and Engels themselves which eventually became the dominant socialism, can be traced back in one way or another to Saint-Simon.

Comte was a student of Saint-Simon in the most literal sense. He served him as secretary for a period in the early 1800s, during which time he also studied under him. It was in this period that Comte’s first writings appeared under Saint-Simon’s patronage.

Given the influence of the French Revolutionary and first socialist Saint-Simon on sociology’s official father, Comte, and Marx’s influence on the development of the discipline as discussed by Berlin, it is hardly a huge leap of logic to saw that the overwhelming left-wing dominance of this field that is evident today, as it was throughout most of the last century, can be attributed to a left-wing slant having been built into it from the very beginning.

It should be noted that Robert Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition (1966) can be cited as giving evidence to the contrary. Nisbet was that rara avis, a conservative sociologist, which is all the more unusual in that he received his Ph.D from Berkeley, began his teaching career at that stronghold of left-liberalism, and ended it at Columbia University, the epicentre of the outbreak of the cultural revolutionary brand of leftism in North American academia. In The Sociological Tradition, he identified five “unit-ideas” of sociology – community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation – and traced the history of each in the thought of such nineteenth to early twentieth century sociological pioneers as Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies, and Simmel. With regards to each of these, he argued that the early sociologists had borrowed heavily and knowingly, from how these same concepts appear in the counter-revolutionary writings of Edmund Burke, Louis de Bonald, François-René de Chateaubriand and Joseph de Maistre. As the discipline was being established, he argued, the ideas of two polar opposite figures, Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx, struggled and strove to shape it. He argued that Tocqueville, who represented the thought drawn from the well of the aforementioned counter-revolutionaries, had triumphed over the revolutionary socialist Marx, before the nineteenth century was even over.

Nisbet’s history of sociology is not as contrary to the idea that it was built with a left-wing bias as it may appear. He was not arguing that sociology itself was traditionalist, conservative, or reactionary, much less that the average sociologist was any of those things. He merely maintained that the aforementioned unit-ideas had been borrowed by the early sociologists from the writings of the right-wing critics of the Enlightenment Project and the French Revolution. Unit-ideas are the basic concepts from which philosophies and theories are constructed, in the history of ideas as postulated by Arthur O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being (1936), from which Nisbet borrowed the term. Much like how the same kind of brick used to build a school can also be used to build a slaughterhouse, so can unit-ideas from one philosophical tradition, be borrowed in the construction of another that is radically different. In this case, the unit-ideas in question were used by the counter-revolutionaries to challenge the individualistic values of Enlightenment liberalism. These leading figures in sociology borrowed these concepts from the counter-revolutionaries because they also rejected these liberal values, but they put them to a radically different use.

If Nisbet maintained that Tocqueville was triumphant over Marx by the end of what he called the “Golden Age of sociology”, he was not so naïve to think that this was still the case. In the new “author’s introduction” to the 1993 re-issue of his book, he discusses the poor state of sociology in the United States when he was a student, and the renascence it underwent in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the forces that brought about that renascence was the influx of European scholars who had fled the Third Reich. While these scholars were not all Marxists, a great many were. These included both classical Marxists and the neo-Marxists whose re-interpretation of Marxist theory into cultural rather than economic terms produced the Critical Theory that is now being shoved down everyone’s throats, in academia and out, by the militant woke. While Nisbet makes no comment on this directly, it is interesting to note that toward the conclusion he states that “The pathetic truth is that what I have chosen to call the sociological tradition, the tradition emanating from Tocqueville in the first instance and continuing unmistakably in the writings of Weber and Durkheim and others, is in serious straits at the present time, as is sociology as a whole.” He then makes reference to an article by Irving Louis Horowitz entitled “The Decomposition of Sociology” which complained that sociology “has largely become a repository of discontent, a gathering of individuals who have special agendas, from gay and lesbian rights to liberation theology” and that this was driving all the real scientists out. Horowitz, whose own company Transaction Books put out this re-issue of Nisbet’s book, felt so strongly on the matter that he expanded that very article into a book, which Oxford published that same year, in which he stated “Sociology has become a series of demands for correct politics rather than a set of studies of social culture.”

The state of sociology that Horowitz and Nisbet decried twenty-seven years ago has certainly not improved since then. It has gotten much, much worse and is bearing a most toxic form of fruit.

It is time that it be cut off from the public purse entirely.