The Post-Modern Mind

...she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.” Man’s first sin was the desire to be like God, to be autonomous. “Autonomous – not controlled by others or by outside forces; independent in mind or judgment; self-directed; free from external control and constraint.” 

Autonomy involves two things: the freedom to live how you want to live, and the freedom to live without accountability to anyone or anything. C.S. Lewis sums up fallen man’s love affair with autonomy and his aversion to accountability in this description of the major stumbling block to his conversion.

“No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word interference. And the Bible placed at the center what seemed to me a Transcendental Interferer.”

Because fallen men yearn for autonomy, they develop ideologies and worldviews from a desire to sin freely and without accountability. They do not develop ideologies and worldviews from an impartial search for truth.

In the book Degenerate Moderns, E. Michael Jones shows how some of the major determining leaders in modern thought and culture have rationalized their own immoral behavior and projected it onto a universal canvas. He discovered a remarkable similarity between the morals lives and the philosophical views of such moderns as Freud, Kinsey, Keynes, Mead, and Picasso. After becoming involved in sexual license early on, they invariably chose an ideology which subordinated reality to the demands of their sexual misbehavior.  He says,

“The thesis of this book is simple: modernity was rationalized sexual misbehavior. All the intellectual and cultural breakthroughs of modernity were in some way linked to the sexual desires their progenitors knew to be illicit but which they chose nonetheless. Their theories were ultimately rationalizations of the choices they knew to be wrong.”

The root cause of a wrong worldview then is a hardened heart and a darkened mind.

“No longer live just as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their mind, darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality, for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.”

Perhaps Aristotle said it best: “Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.”

There is nothing new under the sun.