Chestertonian Realism as the Cure for Modern Insanity
by Kennedy Hall, Crisis Magazine:
The Modernist denies fundamental truths of reality. To resist it we must embrace a Chestertonian realism.
Having written a book on Modernism—still in the editing process—I have, at this point, become something of an expert on the subject. I do not relish in this fact, as Modernism, being the “synthesis of all heresies,” is a web of insanity and confusion. Perhaps you have seen one of those police dramas or thriller shows with that classic trope of the detective who stays up all night piecing together evidence on a display board; in the morning, his colleagues come in to find him—hair disheveled, coffee cups everywhere, ashtrays filled with cigarettes—and he says, “I did it! I figured out who killed him!” The poor man has solved the case, but he has almost lost his mind in the process; it is very dangerous to enter into the mind of a killer in order to catch him.
I can relate to this man in the story because it has been quite an unnerving process to study deeply the mind of the Modernist, who is, in many ways, as or more deranged than the murderer. You see, a murderer is probably saner than the Modernist because the murderer is a realist. The murderer believes in life and death—thus, he kills his victim; the murderer usually believes in right and wrong—thus, he kills the victim because he believes he has been wronged by him; the murderer believes that justice is real—thus, he runs from the law; sometimes the murderer is even a moral man who believes in sin—thus, he confesses his crime to the police in order to alleviate his conscience.
Modernists believe—if we can say they believe anything—that reality has been bifurcated into a dualist Cartesian theater of the interior and exterior life that are independent of one another. Descartes said cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—and turned reality upside down, making himself the starting point for reality, thereby relativizing all exterior truth. The mad Modern philosopher who adopts Descartes’ dualism takes his cold, hard subjectivism as a cold, hard fact, not realizing the futility of adopting subjectivism objectively.
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