The Crime Of Descartes

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com So far as our own, modern, progress is concerned, we have maintained a tenuous equilibrium -- our religion separated from our science, our minds separated from our bodies, as it were -- but using common sense to keep a balance between the “rational” and “spiritual” sides of our one nature. “Post-modernism” can be defined as the discarding of this tenuous balance; The crime of Descartes, was to subtly twist the plainer meanings of scholastic terms, so that the entire edifice of reason could weigh on only one side of our nature, and find no purchase on the other. That, at least, is what I have come to dimly understand, in trying to account for the strangely capsized views I find everywhere today, on questions as various as Darwinian evolution, “global warming,” the welfare state, “political correctness,” the accommodation of Islam, war and peace in the Middle East. In every case I encounter so-called “liberal” minds, willing to consider only one side of an equation.