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Religion is an extra-rational condition for the possibility of rationality

April 21, 2018

G.K. Chesterton happily understood in advance what the Frankfurt School theorists only observed with great horror after the fact. Namely, that without an authority such as the Catholic Church, placed above the orbit of merely rational calculation and willing to enforce ethical standards over its head, human reason will not last very long. This is because the freedom of human beings to think is itself extra-rational; if you want to install and protect the capacity for humans to think freely and rationally, you cannot avoid taking recourse to extra-rational measures, or dark defences.

The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all — the authority of a man to think. (Orthodoxy)

At times, Chesterton sounds exacty like the Frankfurt School, e.g. “There is a thought that stops thought.” But unlike secular critiques of capitalist culture, Chesterton is willing to make the ethical inference that we are rationally compelled to endorse extra-rational measures in order to forestall the collapse of the world.

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. (Orthodoxy)

Of course, nearly all secular social justice activists believe in the necessity of dark defences, which explains why there is so much motivated reasoning and bad faith alongside so much public moralizing. The various forms of subtle dishonesty intrinsic to modern social justice discourses are merely the paltry, diluted, late-stage Protestant version of Catholic authority: the right to enforce extra-rational measures, in the service of some greater good. What postmodern political culture teaches us, today, is that true non-religious secular culture is essentially impossible. The choice is only between varieties of disingenuous Protestantism — implicitly dissimulated, various, and competing — or one true Church, true only in the tautological sense that it is invested with the authority to define what is True beneath and beyond all that is true.