and worn away. She writes:
The dignity of man as an incomparable and irreplaceable being is a postulate of faith and not a given of science. The course of history demonstrates its fragility. The collapse of just one portion of the immense architecture of which it is the heart is enough for its defence to be severely weakened. Personal dignity requires the existence of the person; it requires a conscious and responsible subject, witness of its own acts; it presupposes the moral unity of mankind and an awareness of the specificity of the human as over against the animal. It rests on an inherited cultural world, and it was in annihilating that heritage that Nazism and Communism pulverized it.18
As a philosopher without any explicit Jewish or Christian faith, Delsol is able to affirm the vital importance of the creation texts in the book of Genesis for the upholding of the postulates of human unity and dignity.19 For all its reasonableness and demonstrability, such an affirmation by a philosopher in the West is unusual today, since the refusal and hatred among the majority of the intellectual classes of anything biblical has reached such irrational proportions that thoughtful reflection on a scriptural theme—on the supposition that this ancient fount of Western wisdom and civilization might have some truth to teach us—is ruled out as a matter of course without even a look-in. Peter Sloterdijk, for example, an important contemporary German thinker, assumes, with Nietzsche, that God is dead and with him the entire edifice of Judeo-Christian culture, so that we live henceforth in a world without limits, where anything is possible, and where the only constant is endless experimentation and self-creation.20 He admits, whether ruefully or not it is hard to tell, that this “experimental” mode of living, involving what he calls a “self-intensification,”21 is driven at least as much by a thrust toward self-annihilation as by a hopeful quest for new personal and social structures. But any recourse to biblical paradigms as a way of exploring this thesis or of orienting creative thought at a time of social crisis, appears to be unthinkable to him.
What we have here, it seems to me, is evidence that the memory of the biblical God among opinion-formers and indeed among the masses of Western society under forty years old, is, on the whole, totally lost today, and the traces of it willfully despised, especially by a substantial proportion of the elite in Western universities and media. The resultant existential angst and moral confusion, and the huge burden of guilt, cynicism, and self-hatred underlying them and covered over by constant hammering on the theme of human rights and by ever-new technological gadgetry (offering constantly new forms of distraction) and an ever-growing GNP, are themselves being turned into a new ideology. This ideology is basically self-destructive in content but masquerades under the banner of the absolute freedom of the individual to create/invent (read destroy) his or her self. Destruction is creation, and vice versa. Suicide is experience and being truly alive. Negation is positive. Commitment to any kind of transcendental value or belief that would originate from outside the self is mocked as naïve folly, while skepticism at every level is lauded.
Absolute relativism has become, for the majority of people in Europe and North America, an uncriticized cultural presupposition, postmodernism’s seminal idolatry. Logically, we may say, denial of God as the Source of life requires that whatever is truly vital be equally suppressed and opposed, in favor of those counterfeits of true vitality, the meretricious, the ephemeral, and the flashy. This, of course, will comprise most of what we call the “Western tradition,” and will include not only the bathwater of that tradition, its many failures and perversions, but also the baby, consisting in the conjunction of human dignity, reason, freedom, and order. Death, then, on such a reading, is actually the operative principle behind the ever more vertiginous straining toward new “frontiers of experience,” new “extremes” of every kind, new “paroxysms” and “orgasms.”22
Technological innovation, with its appearance of unlimited power, potential, and possibility, is the fuel for this boundless propulsion. But underneath the propulsion, which gives people the feeling of being authentic and passionate because they are living in a pastless and futureless instant, there is boredom and a blasé sentiment that everything, at bottom, is pointless. In the place of meaning, there is either exhaustive scientific or pseudoscientific description—an infinite piling up of words and signs and numbers (data) in a quest for total control—or what might be called irrational self-detonation of one kind or another. Outside of the self’s will to experiment (which, at another level, is being coopted increasingly by unbridled commercialism—the word “totalitarian” would not be out of place here—and becoming simply the self’s will to make money), the propulsion does not seem to have any ultimate aim whatsoever, either in the sense of an objective and determining reality or reference over against the “self-subject,” or in the sense of a finality/end.
I hear in all this an ironic echo, in the new guise of individualism in the context of technological utopianism, of earlier totalitarian proclamations of the new man, proclamations that the actual new men in the West today, those “neutronized autonomous individuals,”23 would, at least in principle, most heatedly oppose. And what is striking is that, just like its communist and nationalist-racist predecessors, this new ideology is a counterfeit of biblical revelation. (We shall look at this matter more specifically in our later discussion of the doctrine of the imago Dei.) Ideologies are modern names for cultural idolatries, for human—and therefore finite and fallible—conceptions that become invested with ultimacy.
It is no accident, therefore, that, wearing the lineaments of divinity in the sense of ultimacy, they should invariably turn out to be secular imitations of divinely revealed truth. Revolution, progress, science, such and such racist myth, communist man, the classless society, capitalist man, history, the new man/creation (whether he/she/it be the product of political, economic, or genetic manipulation), the autonomous individual, self-reinvention, sexual liberation, technology-as-salvation, transhumanist man—all these and others, as ideologies or as varieties of utopia aiming at human freedom, are, in the final analysis, biblical counterfeits or distortions, arising in the framework of a Judeo-Christian civilization that has willed and continues to will, for a host of reasons, to destroy its own foundations and then finds itself left with the impossible and dispiriting task of shoring up the tottering edifice while striving to build new foundations using the wreckage of the old. Obviously, despair, cynicism, consumerist materialism, and the thousand escapes through sensory intoxication must tempt many today, and the more so now as it begins to dawn on thoughtful people that technology is, as a matter of fact, no magic wand or panacea, and cannot possibly, masquerading as a man-made version of God’s creative Word in the book of Genesis, produce a new Eden to replace the old.
IV
The Ultimate Danger that the Skeptical Doctrine of Perspectival Relativism Poses for Human Rights
The priestly account in Genesis of the creation of man reads as follows: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man [humankind] in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female, he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”24
Counterfeits are full of pretense. They are proud. They pretend to be something they are not. Like evil of any sort, they can only arise in correlation with a prior reality, a prior good, of which they are a perverse imitation and distortion. The world that has been emerging in the West in the last centuries, with analytical science as its root and technological innovation as its trunk, branches, and foliage, is at once a logical and proper development from the creation story and man’s place in it as set forth in Genesis 1 and 2, and a counterfeit of that story. Its excellences and accomplishments, its political, scientific, and economic achievements, its productive transformations of the matter of the world, its medical wizardry, its improvement of the quality of life for millions of people around the world, are in keeping with what a close examination of the creation story might lead one to expect. Man (man
