John C. Wright's Journal

Here is the natural part: first, over a period of two years my hatred toward Christianity eroded due to my philosophical inquiries.

Rest assured, I take the logical process of philosophy very seriously, and I am impatient with anyone who is not a rigorous and trained thinker. Reason is the toolmen use to determine if their statements about reality are valid: there is no other. Those who do not or cannot reason are little better than slaves, because their lives are controlled by the ideas of other men, ideas they have not examined.

To my surprise and alarm, I found that, step by step, logic drove me to conclusions no modern philosophy shared, but only this ancient and (as I saw it then) corrupt and superstitious foolery called the Church. Each time I followed the argument fearlessly where it lead, it kept leading me, one remorseless rational step at a time, to a position the Church had been maintaining for more than a thousand years. That haunted me.

Second, I began to notice how shallow, either simply optimistic or simply pessimistic, other philosophies and views of life were.

The public conduct of my fellow atheists was so lacking in sobriety and gravity that I began to wonder why, if we atheists had a hammerlock on truth, so much of what we said was pointless or naive. I remember listening to a fellow atheist telling me how wonderful the world would be once religion was swept into the dustbin of history, and I realized the chap knew nothing about history. If atheism and atheism alone solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.

I would listen to my fellow atheists, and they would sound as innocent of any notion of what real human life was like as the Man from Mars who has never met human beings or even heard clear rumors of them. Then I would read something written by Christian men of letters, Tolkien, Lewis, or G.K. Chesterton, and see a solid understanding of the joys and woes of human life. They were mature men.

I would look at the rigorous logic of St. Thomas Aquinas, the complexity and thoroughness of his reasoning, and compare that to the scattered and mentally incoherent sentimentality of some poseur like Nietzsche or Sartre. I can tell the difference between a rigorous argument and shrill psychological flatulence. I can see the difference between a dwarf and a giant.

My wife is a Christian and is extraordinary patient, logical, and philosophical. For years I would challenge and condemn her beliefs, battering the structure of her conclusions with every argument, analogy, and evidence I could bring to bear. I am a very argumentative man, and I am as fell and subtle as a serpent in debate. All my arts failed against her. At last I was forced to conclude that, like non-Euclidian geometry, her world-view logically followed from its axioms (although the axioms were radically mystical, and I rejected them with contempt). Her persistence compared favorably to the behavior of my fellow atheists, most of whom cannot utter any argument more mentally alert than a silly ad Hominem attack. Once again, I saw that I was confronting a mature and serious world-view, not merely a tissue of fables and superstitions.

Third, a friend of mine asked me what evidence, if any, would be sufficient to convince me that the supernatural existed. This question stumped me. My philosophy at the time excluded the contemplation of the supernatural axiomatically: by definition (my definition) even the word “super-natural” was a contradiction in terms. Logic then said that, if my conclusions were definitional, they were circular. I was assuming the conclusion of the subject matter in dispute.

Now, my philosophy at the time was as rigorous and exact as 35 years of study could make it (I started philosophy when I was seven). This meant there was no point for reasonable doubt in the foundational structure of my axioms, definitions, and common notions. This meant that, logically, even if God existed, and manifested Himself to me, my philosophy would force me to reject the evidence of my senses, and dismiss any manifestations as a coincidence, hallucination, or dream. Under this hypothetical, my philosophy would force me to an exactly wrong conclusion due to structural errors of assumption.

A philosopher (and I mean a serious and manly philosopher, not a sophomoric boy) does not use philosophy to flinch away from truth or hide from it. A philosophy composed of structural false-to-facts assumptions is insupportable.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads, and has no patience with mere emotion.

But it was impossible, logically impossible, that I should ever believe in such nonsense as to believe in the supernatural. It would be a miracle to get me to believe in miracles.

So I prayed. “Dear God, I know (because I can prove it with the certainty that a geometer can prove opposite angles are equal) that you do not exist. Nonetheless, as a scholar, I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case. If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you, or that you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me. The former argues you not beneficent, the latter not omnipotent: in either case unworthy of worship. If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter, John Wright.”

I had a heart attack two days later. God obviously has a sense of humor as well as a sense of timing.

Now for the supernatural part.

My wife called someone from her Church, which is a denomination that practices healing through prayer. My wife read a passage from their writings, and the pain vanished. If this was a coincidence, then, by God, I could use more coincidences like that in my life.

Feeling fit, I nonetheless went to the hospital, so find out what had happened to me. The diagnosis was grave, and a quintuple bypass heart surgery was ordered. So I was in the hospital for a few days.

Those were the happiest days of my life. A sense of peace and confidence, a peace that passes all understanding, like a field of energy entered my body. I grew aware of a spiritual dimension of reality of which I had hitherto been unaware. It was like a man born blind suddenly receiving sight.

The Truth to which my lifetime as a philosopher had been devoted turned out to be a living thing. It turned and looked at me. Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me. This was not a case of defense and prosecution laying out evidence for my reason to pick through: I was altered down to the root of my being.

It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast.

Naturally, I was overjoyed. First, I discovered that the death sentence under which all life suffers no longer applied to me. The governor, so to speak, had phoned. Second, imagine how puffed up with pride you’d be to find out you were the son of Caesar, and all the empire would be yours. How much more, then, to find out you were the child of God?

I was also able to perform, for the first time in my life, the act which I had studied philosophy all my life to perform, which is, to put aside all fear of death. The Roman Stoics, whom I so admire, speak volumes about this philosophical fortitude. But their lessons could not teach me this virtue. The blessing of the Holy Spirit could and did impart it to me, as a gift. So the thing I’ve been seeking my whole life was now mine.

Then, just to make sure I was flooded with evidence, I received three visions like Scrooge being visited by three ghosts. I was not drugged or semiconscious, I was perfectly alert and in my right wits.

It was not a dream. I have had dreams every night ofmy life. I know what a dream is. It was not a hallucination. I know someone who suffers from hallucinations, and I know the signs. Those signs were not present here.

Then, just to make even more sure that I was flooded with overwhelming evidence, I had a religious experience. This is separate from the visions, and took place several days after my release from the hospital, when my health was moderately well. I was not taking any pain-killers, by the way, because I found that prayer could banish pain in moments.

During this experience, I became aware of the origin of all thought, the underlying oneness of the universe, the nature of time: the paradox of determinism and free will was resolved for me. I saw and experienced part of the workings of a mind infinitely superior to mine, a mind able to count every atom in the universe, filled with paternal love and jovial good humor. The cosmos created by the thought of this mind was as intricate as a symphony, with themes and reflections repeating themselves forward and backward through time: prophecy is the awareness that a current theme is the foreshadowing of the same theme destined to emerge with greater clarity later. A prophet is one who is in tune, so to speak, with the music of the cosmos.

The illusionary nature of pain, and the logical impossibility of death, were part of the things I was shown.

Now, as far as these experiences go, they are not unique. They are not even unusual. More people have had religious experiences than have seen the far side of the moon. Dogmas disagree, but mystics are strangely (I am tempted to say mystically) in agreement.

The things I was shown have echoes both in pagan and Christian tradition, both Eastern and Western (although, with apologies to my pagan friends, I see that Christianity is the clearest expression of these themes, and also has a logical and ethical character other religious expressions lack).

Further, the world view implied by taking this vision seriously (1) gives supernatural sanction to conclusions only painfully reached by logic (2) supports and justifies a mature rather than simplistic world-view (3) fits in with the majority traditions not merely of the West, but also, in a limited way, with the East.

As a side issue, the solution of various philosophical conundrums, like the problem of the one and the many, mind-body duality, determinism and indeterminism, and so on, is an added benefit. If you are familiar with such things, I follow the panentheist idealism of Bishop Berkeley; and, no, Mr. Johnson does not refute him merely by kicking a stone.

From that time to this, I have had prayers answered and seen miracles: each individually could be explained away as a coincidence by a skeptic, but not taken as a whole. From that time to this, I continue to be aware of the Holy Spirit within me, like feeling a heartbeat. It is a primary impression coming not through the medium of the senses: an intuitive axiom, like the knowledge of one’s own self-being.

This, then, is the final answer to the question of why I should not doubt it: it would not be rational for me to doubt something of which I am aware on a primary and fundamental level.

Occam’s razor cuts out hallucination or dream as a likely explanation for my experiences. In order to fit these experiences into an atheist framework, I would have to resort to endless ad hoc explanations: this lacks the elegance of geometers and parsimony of philosophers.

I would also have to assume all the great thinkers of history were fools. While I was perfectly content to support this belief back in my atheist days, this is a flattering conceit difficult to maintain seriously.

On a pragmatic level, I am somewhat more useful to my fellow man than before, and certainly more charitable. If it is a daydream, why wake me up? My neighbors will not thank you if I stop believing in the mystical brotherhood of man.

Besides, the atheist non-god is not going to send me to non-hell for my lapse of non-faith if it should turn out that I am mistaken.

If we were Romans, the American Eagle would be as feared as the eagle of Rome, because these places would be our dominions now. If we were even as imperial as Victorian Great Britain, we would have no qualms about placing Viceroys over conquered lands in  the Middle East or even Europe. Do you really think West Germany could defeat a nuclear-armed American military if we were determined to fly Old Glory in every place the German flag flies, or the Red Sun of Japan? But America does not crave dominion, we crave partners in trade: we don’t want slaves, we want customers and vendors. We want equals.

As with most things in the human condition, it is the cynical and clear-eyed Hobbes who explains why the American soldier is currently held in such dishonor by those who have the most cause to honor him, namely, the craven, weak, and weak-minded Leftists of Europe and America, the ‘useful diots’ who would have been summarily killed by any of the various tyrants they dote on, Castro, Stalin, Mao, or Saddam.

Hobbes says:

To have received from one, to whom we think ourselves equal, greater benefits than there is hope to requite, disposeth to counterfeit love, but really secret hatred, and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor that, in declining the sight of his creditor, tacitly wishes him there where he might never see him more. For benefits oblige; and obligation is thraldom; and unrequitable obligation, perpetual thraldom; which is to one’s equal, hateful. But to have received benefits from one whom we acknowledge for superior inclines to love; because the obligation is no new depression: and cheerful acceptation (which men call gratitude) is such an honour done to the obliger as is taken generally for retribution. Also to receive benefits, though from an equal, or inferior, as long as there is hope of requital, disposeth to love: for in the intention of the receiver, the obligation is of aid and service mutual…

Search high and low, and the one theme never seen in modern philosophy, Marx and Nietzsche and their epigones, is the theme of gratitude paid to any human or divine person. The Leftist never says, with the humility of Newton, that they stand on the backs of giants, for they dare not admit any debt owed their ancestors, lest it be admitted that some generation before the present one be seen as wise.

But Socrates was motivated by the same sense of honor as motivates John Galt in the climax of ATLAS SHRUGGED to brave torment and death for his true love. Galt pauses to argue that it is not self-sacrifice because he values his lover more than he values life itself: an argument I find laugh-out-loud absurd. (By that reasoning, Christ on the cross, the very image and example of self-sacrifice, is being selfish, because He loves mankind more than his own safety.) Ayn Rand wrote nobler characters than her philosophy allowed.

What Rand’s inability to address the question of honor and self-sacrifice leads her to, is a dead end. Her heroine, and she herself, are childless adulteresses. Her system is correct when applied to the free market, and when applied to the question of how to deal with peaceful strangers. It says nothing about how to deal with family and friends: putting friendship on a quid-pro-quo basis is unfriendly. Putting family on such a basis is impossible: children cannot make contracts, and you cannot choose your parents. Ayn Rand’s moral system only deals with those duties that are contractual, mutually beneficial, and voluntary. She scoffs at the idea of an involuntary duty.

I find that remarkably naïve in a woman of such intellect. If I am a Samaritan and I pass a robbed Jew lying half-dead in the gutter, is it not a violation of an involuntary duty for me to walk on by? If I am Howard Rourke, and I have wild, passionate sex with Dominique, is it not a violation of an involuntary duty for me not to marry her when she tells me she is pregnant with my child? If I am Hank Reardon, is it not a violation of an involuntary duty to honor my father and my mother to throw my mother out in the street when she offends me, or nags, or becomes wearisome to me?

But here is the crux of my disagreement with Ayn Rand: the kind of man who cheats on his wife, dishonors his mother, has mad sexual flings out of wedlock, or walks past robbery-victims lying in gutters is lacking that same spirit, that sense of honor, which makes a man willing and able to trust his neighbors, customers, and employers, to pay his rent on time and serve in the armed forces when called upon.

There is a scene in Akira Kurosawa’s THE SEVEN SAMURAI, where the samurai have determined where to build the line of defense for the peasant village. The three houses on the far side of the parameter must be burned, in order to deny the enemy shelter and supply: the physical position simply makes in imprudent to defend the three houses.

In a chilling scene, the owners of the three houses break ranks, fling down their weapons, and announce they will defend their isolated three houses without the help of the other villagers: an act of mere madness, considering that there is a band of 40 brigands on the way. The samurai leader, Kambei Shimada, draws his sword and prepares to kill the owners of the three houses if they refuse to cooperate with the village in the coordinated defense: the owners are cowed and return to their ranks.

In Ayn Rand’s moral universe, the samurai Kambei is wrong, and the owners of the three houses, no matter how imprudent, are within their rights. They did not choose to have houses in a position that made a defensive parameter unlikely: such things are determined by accidents of the battlefield, by the lay of the land and the disposition of the enemy.  They did not ask to be attacked by brigands; it is merely a situation in which they find themselves. Because she does not allow for involuntary duties, she does not allow that a man has a duty to fight and die for his village. She does not allow that a house must be burned so that a village can be saved.

Ayn Rand dismisses all considerations of what to do in emergencies with a quip that life is not a lifeboat.

My reading of history is far different: war is constant and eternal. War is the human condition. Peace is a holiday. We in the United States live in an unnatural island of peace, without threatening neighbors, separated by wide oceans from the strife of the Old World. We are indeed in a lifeboat, surrounded by bloodthirsty sharks, and the other powers of the world wrestle with us continually to throw us overboard, while factions at home lust for the wealth they have not earned, and seek eternally to erode the law, to disarm us, to rob us, despoil us, and enslave us. In such a world, only justice, law and order, offers hope of peace and progress, and justice, law and order rest on the honor in the hearts of brave men.

Any culture that does not teach its young men to love honor more than life, to admire bravery and despise cowardice, to seek self-command and eschew self-indulgence, simply does not have the backbone to defend itself.

We are seeing around us now the end result of a prosperous, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, hedonistic culture. America is a cringing Hercules, an unreliable ally, a timid crusader, and even the most ordinary precepts of life and liberty are eroding rapidly. America has lost her spirit, her sense of honor. Objectivism will not give that spirit back to us.

In other words, the reason why I am not an Objectivist, is that I think their analysis of life and morality is correct as far as it goes, I do not see that it goes far enough.

In times of peace, yes indeed, the free market is the rational and moral arrangement to deal with friendly strangers. Objectivism pays homage to Hermes, the god of trade, but ignores gods much more ancient and potent: Aphrodite, Hymen, Hestia, Ares. The pursuit of self-interest rightly understood corrupts love and turns it into harlotry; dismisses marriage as a contract, or dismisses marriage altogether; ignores the demands of childrearing, hearth and home; ignores the demands of war. Objectivism dismisses religion altogether.

In other words, my objection to Objectivism is that it does not deal with the main things of real life: love and war, which are the main drivers of human existence, and the main reason why a community that consists of nothing but self-interested alliances cannot survive an encounter with a community bound together by strongest bonds of love and self-sacrifice.

The free market can only be free if surrounded by policemen, and policemen can only police if surrounded by a living wall of soldiers, and soldiers are only soldiers if their virtues include self-sacrifice, duty, honor and glory. The places in America too crime ridden to allow for this continue to be free only because the other areas of the country, where this is not the case, support them.

The free market can only be free if a man can drop his wallet in the street, and know that his neighbors are honest enough to return it intact: the places in America too crime ridden to allow for this continue to be free only because the other areas of the country, where this is not the case, support them. That willingness to be moral even when no one is looking is a mystical thing, and cannot convincingly be tied into a self-interest rightly understood. A Houyhnhnm would just pocket the lost wallet and say “finders keepers”, for such an act is in keeping with his self-interest. 

Creatures of pure reason without passion, such as Houyhnhnms, were such fabulous creatures ever to exist, could not survive competition with Men, because we are creatures of honor, and we will do irrational things to defend our homes, our rights, our property. Leonidas of Sparta is one of us. Socrates of Athens is one of us. Objectivism cannot explain or justify the behavior of man like Socrates or Leonidas.

( Oddly enough, Objectivism cannot explain the behavior of a character like Ragnar Danneskjold, even though an old-fashioned writer and romantic like GK Chesterton could explain such behavior very well. Ironically, Ragnar Danneskjoldis a the very person he claims as his arch-foe. He is Robin Hood, the dashing thief who robs from the strong and gives to the weak, the justice that lives in the greenwood when no justice is found in the towns and castles of the powerful. Do not be fooled: the heroes in ATLAS SHRUGGED are despoiled just as wrongfully as any Saxon peasant. Merely because they have money does not make them “rich”: the money in their world is political power, not gold. Without the right philosophy to protect them, they are disarmed and helpless, and only Robin Hood, bold Loxley, can set the injustice right until the True King returns from exile — in Ayn Rand’s case, the missing Richard Lionheart role is filled by American Dream, by the Constitution, revised to include separation of economy and state. The story is an old one, and that is why it is a good one.)