Do you believe that moral clarity is required for truly intellectual efforts? I do.
C.S. Lewis brilliantly zeroed in on this with his wonderful essay of 1943, The Abolition of Man: Reflections on Education. First Principles (including First Principles of morality) are First Principles he points out, such that you cannot tear them down by definition. To try to do so leaves you with nothing upon which to stand, nothing upon which to build, nothing upon which to reason.
You are left with further foolishness because your starting point has been foolishness. You make “men without chests”, as Lewis puts it, those whose work is to try to debunk everything - including the First Principles of Truth on which the truth rests. Such men’s “heads may appear large because their chests are so shrunken”, Lewis says - because they have no heart; no acceptance of virtue and morality as unassailable.
And where does moral clarity come from? It comes from God’s Word, the Bible. The failure to uphold and defend the truth of the Bible has had serious consequences in our culture – a culture that’s become increasingly paganized. The subversive, the dishonest, the treasonous, the prurient, the blasphemous, the criminal, the pornographic, the decadent, the irrational, the illogical, even the abominable are increasingly paraded for their shock effect – to confound traditional morality and leave us without moral clarity. No wonder the Bible says about those who deny the truth of a Holy God and Creator, “Professing to be wise they became fools ... for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie …” (Romans 1: 22, 25).
A strategy of “de-moralizing” has actually been part of an admitted Marxist/Communist strategy of subverting America. Ideologues (true believers) will use all methods, including immoral ones to subvert the traditional morals of a culture in order to tear it down and bring forth their materialist utopian remake. This is arguably what’s been happening in America and in much of Western Civilization over the last 70 years or so. It has been part of an admitted Marxist/Communist strategy of “de-moralizing” a society so that the people are unable to discern truth beyond their de-moralized emotions, and a superficial level of sloganeering.
In a “Handbook” for Americans commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 1956 entitled The Communist Party of America: What It Is and How It Works, a quotation is made from the Soviet Short Philosophical Dictionary, defining the point about de-moralizing: “‘Moral’ is only that which facilitates the destruction of the old world”.1 And the Handbook goes on to quote Vladimir Lenin saying to communist youth, “Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle.”
As exemplified with these quotes, applied Marxism uses the maxim that “the end justifies the means” – the “end” being a destruction of the current order to build a Marxist totalitarian utopia they envision. “The End Justifies the Means” is indeed a subheading in the above referenced Handbook about the communist party.
Research has repeatedly shown that the vast majority of college campuses are communities of “shared sacred values” that are culturally and politically “progressive” (the preferred term for cultural-Marxism) – often, radically progressive. How have we let these academic institutions become so taken over by the radical left – in spite of the fact that twice as many Americans identify themselves as “conservative” rather than “liberal”?
The fact of the matter is that there has been a determined effort to do so. After the Bolshevik revolution which created the Soviet Union in the early 20th Century, a young Italian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci began to write of a “quiet” socialist revolution. This one would transform a culture from within by changing the worldview of the academies and of each and every institution in society. He cautioned that this would be what later came to be called “a long march through the institutions”, and he specifically targeted Christianity as the greatest philosophical adversary along the way.
Gramsci’s “quiet” socialist revolution has, indeed, been very successful. But at one time Americans were more alert to what these “Cultural-Marxists” were trying to do. In January of 1963 a listing of forty-five declared communist goals, gathered from various Cold War related information was read into the Congressional Record. 2 Many of these goals of the Communists have arguably been fulfilled.
They were originally compiled by FBI agent Cleon Skousen in his 1958 book, “The Naked Communist” 3, based on information from Congressional hearings and reports, books by ex-communists and decades of research. Consider just the following nine of the goals…
- #15 – Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
- #16 – Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
- #17 – Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations.
- #24 – Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
- #25 – Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
- #26 – Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
- #27 – Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”
- #28 – Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
- #38 – Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders.
- #40 – Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
- #44 – Internationalize the Panama Canal.
The U.S. Senate-commissioned “Handbook for Americans” of 1956 mentioned above, has a lot to say about the subversive methods and motives of Marxism. It opens with the following: “Founded in September 1919, the Communist Party of the United States of America is an organization unique in American history. It is not a true political party and differs fundamentally from all political parties in this country. It is in fact a Russian-inspired, Moscow-dominated anti-American, quasi-military conspiracy against our Government, our ideals, and our freedom.”
In the Foreword, the document cautions how the party uses “ways and means calculated to have the greatest effect in poisoning the channels of American public opinion”. And it mentions how it will discuss “Communist activity in the labor movement, among Negroes, women, youth, foreign language groups, and in front organizations”. The Document has a sub-heading early in its pages, “Deception as a Method”. Under this sub-heading it begins by saying, “Fully aware that if it appeared openly in its true guise as a bridgehead of a hostile, foreign dictatorship, the Communist Party USA would attract little support, its methods are based primarily upon deception”. And it points out that this is a purposed strategy of the communists, quoting Vladimir Lenin as saying, “It is necessary to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even if need be to resort to all sorts of devices, maneuvers, and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuge”.4
This certainly sounds like the methodology of Satan as the Bible teaches it, openly stated by one of the founders of applied Marxism. It is not the way of truth, but of anti-truth; it is not pretty, but ugly; it is not good, but evil; it is the way of “the father of lies”… “from the beginning, who abode not in truth”; he “who deceives the whole world” (John 8:44; Revelation 12:9).
As I’ve noted before, one of the great tools of the cultural-Marxists dominating the institutions has been evolutionism. Indeed, Friedrich Engels, who with Karl Marx was one of the founders of communism, wrote that Darwin’s theory bolstered the foundations of their materialistic philosophy. Engels famously eulogized Marx by saying, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.”
The evils of Marxism, cultural, progressive, or communist, have roots in the subversion of biblical truth. As such they continue to be a grave danger to America, founded as it is on biblical principles depending on the responsibility of citizens who are free to operate with or without moral clarity and the First Principles thereof. Let us pray and work toward keeping front and center the moral clarity that the Bible brings.
- United States Senate, The Communist Party of America: What It Is and How It Works - A Handbook for Americans, United States Government Printing Office, 1956. www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-00915R000400390002-3.pdf
- United States Congressional Record, January, 1963.
- Skousen, W.C., The Naked Communist, Izzard Ink Publishing, 1958.
Image: Chemnitz Karl Marx monument, Velvet, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons, changes made.
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