After post-modernism, faith

Roger Scruton on the humanities, Farewell to Judgment

People of my generation were taught to believe that there are human universals, which remain constant from age to age. We were taught to study literature in order to sympathize with life in all its forms. It doesn't matter, we were told, if Shakespeare's political assumptions do not coincide with ours. His plays do not aim to indoctrinate; they aim to present believable characters in believable situations, and to do so in heightened language that would set our imaginations and our sympathies on fire. Of course, Shakespeare invites judgment, as do all writers of fiction. But it is not political judgment that is relevant. We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty. And that is how you justify the study of English, as a training in this other kind of judgment, which leaves politics behind.
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Conservatives often complain about the politicization of the universities, and about the fact that only liberal views are propagated or even tolerated on campus. But they fail to see the true cause of this, which is the internal collapse of the humanities. When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

Deconstructionism and Post-modernism reigns in today's universities, yet no one is happy or could be happy with the poverty of spirit on offer.

Scruton in an interview
The rhetoric of deconstruction is not so widely adverted to today as it once was. But that is not because its tenets are no longer embraced but rather because they have become so familiar that they no longer seem shocking. The nihilistic assumptions of deconstruction have not been jettisoned, they have been internalized: more and more they are simply taken for granted as part of the accepted and expected intellectual furniture of the time.

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The most flagrant example is the university, an institution that was entrusted with the task of preserving and transmitting what Matthew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said" but that since the 1960s has become a refuge for radical political activism
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Dostoyevsky once claimed that if God does not exist then everything is permitted. Considerable ingenuity has gone into proving Dostoyevsky wrong. To date, though, the record would seem to support him.

It just so happens that a British biographer, novelist and man of letters, A.N.Wilson who had made it his business to skewer faith as irrational has recently converted.

A.N. Wilson explains himself in Why I believe again

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist “explanations” for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual level.
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When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love....Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.
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My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again.

From Look who's a believer now.

Those who later recanted their atheism went on from this common start to begin to doubt their doubts. They gradually decided that their rationalistic method was too narrow: It could pick holes not only in Christianity but in any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong or to articulate the meaning of life. They came to realize that they could only tear down and thus were left intellectually with no habitable place to live. John Henry Gordon, who held the only full-time, salaried secularist lecturer position in England, came to believe that secularism was a creed of "mere negations."

Having realized that their method was flawed, they then began to reconsider faith. Christianity, they discovered, spoke to the deepest realities of human experience.

Even the left-wing German philosopher Jürgen Habermas stunned his followers lately with this statement:
“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”