Mad Intelligence:
The Secularist Response to Islam
Nine years as chaplain of an 800 bed state mental hospital taught me that one can be mentally ill and highly intelligent. Talking with the patients often was more interesting than talking with their psychiatrists. Mad men are not mindless. They just do not distinguish between delusion and fact. Chesterton summed this up by aphorism: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” This explains why it is often hard to distinguish university faculties from mental wards, save for the latter being kept under lock and key. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and their paladin in malice Chairman Mao, were intelligent men who vandalized the attics of culture because they absorbed some vestige of that culture and thought it was rational to hate it.
Thus it is to a lesser degree with those who now advertise themselves as the cultural elite. That can be a noxious conceit, made worse by the perfume of popularity. At a recent conference, I was introduced as a “public thinker.” It was meant as a compliment, but I demurred, replying that the term is vague and, from my own experience, the only “public thinkers” I know are those poor souls I frequently see on the New York City subway talking to themselves. Public thinkers such as politicians and members of the media who comment on them are the first generation of our society to have been badly schooled without being aware of the fact. I do not deny that many of them may be intelligent but their mental acuity was disserved in the post-World War II generation by an ignorance of history. Napoleon had the same problem, which is why Talleyrand lamented that a man so highly intelligent had been so poorly educated.
Public thinkers have been usurped by practical atheists who are politely styled “secularists.” Essentially, the secularist is not without religion: rather, he has made a religion of politics and wealth, and rejects any religion that worships anything else. Now, to be secular is unavoidable for anyone who resides on this planet, except for astronauts and even they have to come back down to earth. But secularism distorts secularity, just as racism makes a cult of race. The secularist makes a religion of irreligion, and is different from the saints who are “in this world but not of it” because the secularist is of the world but not rationally in it. This explains why the secularist’s solutions to the world’s ills are so destructive. The secularist is isolated from what is unworldly and thus lacks the perspective that adequately measures things of this world. In contrast, Saint Paul was a most worldly wise man and, not least of all because he knew of a “third heaven” where a man, possibly himself, “heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Cor. 12:4).
The contemporary attacks on Christianity, moral and political, are redolent of the Decian persecutions, and yet an instinct of much of the secularist media is reluctance to report, let alone condemn beyond formulaic protocols, the beheading of Christian infants, the crucifixion of Christian teenagers, the practical genocide of Christian communities almost as old as Pentecost, and the destruction to date of 168 churches in the Middle East. Very simply, this rhetorical paralysis betrays a disdain for Judaeo-Christian civilization and its exaltation of man in the image of God with the moral demands which accrue to that. Their operative philosophy, characteristic of those who are empirically bright but morally dim, is that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” There is, for instance, the alliance of the inimical Pharisees and Herodians to entrap Jesus (Matt. 22:15-16). That is the logic of the asylum where very smart people are also very mad. For Christ the Living Truth, it is worse than clinical insanity: it is, using his dread word, hypocrisy.
Many European sophisticates, such as the “Cliveden Set,” promoted the Nazis. Even some prominent Jewish voters and other minorities supported them, until the Nuremburg Racial Laws of 1935.
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