The upside-down conscience

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, July 16th.

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Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: finding sanity in an age of confusion.

University of Texas professor J. Budziszewski has spent decades writing about ethics, conscience, and natural law. He’s a former atheist who converted to Catholicism two decades ago, and he's authored more than twenty books. Most recently: The Pandemic of Lunacy.

WORLD’s Lindsay Mast spoke with Professor Budziszewski recently. Here’s their conversation.

MAST: You go through this book and you lay out thirty myths and then deconstruct them. I'm curious, as you were writing this book, what would you say that the thirty myths share in terms of characteristics?

J. BUDZISZEWSKI: Okay. At the bottom of most of them is a desire that God not be God and that we be God. You know, it's the primary needle temptation, the one that faced our first parents in the garden. For instance, that we can make up our own right and wrong, or that we can invent marriage to suit ourselves, or that reality is whatever I say it is, things of that sort.

MAST: So I know you grapple with the question of what's going on and why are we descending into lunacy. How does that foundational characteristic then play into those questions and the answers to them?

BUDZISZEWSKI: Well, that's a temptation that's present in every culture. That for a variety of reasons and nobody understands them all. All of the different factors which promote it coming out in the open seem to have come together and coalesced at about the same time in our culture. This is historically new. Let me give you an example. There have been many times in history when people have been sunk into immorality of one sort or another. But even in those ages, most of the time they admitted that what they were doing was vice and they just didn't care. Today vice has the moral high ground. It says, it says you guys are evil for calling that vice. It's a very strange sort of situation.

MAST: You know, this book is not an evangelism book per se. I think you call it pre-apologetics or sanity apologetics. But I'm curious how can clearer thinking lead towards God? I think you were getting there with the philosophy question about common sense, but what is the path from clearer thinking toward the divine?

BUDZISZEWSKI: Well, we have certain recognitions. Philosophers sometimes call them pre-philosophical, like that effects must have a cause. If an effect is something that didn't have to be, if it's what's called a contingent effect, it had to have a cause. Well, if that cause was contingent, it had to have a cause. If that cause was contingent, it had to have a cause. This is sort of basic common sense. People recognize this, it's been elaborated into a philosophical argument called the argument to the first cause. And you just have to stay in touch with that and think, well, what's wrong with that?

Now, some, most atheists criticize arguments like that, but they don't even understand them. They say, well, then then what created the creator? The whole point of this is that there can't be an infinite regress. So there has to be a first cause which is not itself caused.

One of the things that is common sense is that we are messed up. There is a moral law, we violate it, and we need a solution to that. Now that gives you a very good reason to ask, is there a solution? And to be at least interested in the gospel of Jesus Christ, even if you're skeptical. But if you're not thinking clearly, you're not even going to get to the point of raising the question.

MAST: What did you find was the hardest chapter of this book to write?

BUDZISZEWSKI: The hardest was the introduction. The conclusion was also a little bit difficult, too, to write because after talking about all of this lunacy and trying to model sound thinking, I was left with the situation that people are often in despair. People tell them, “You're on the wrong side of history.” “Your way of life is gone.” “You can't do anything about this. Your children are all gonna abandon what you taught them,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's not true. I think we can have hope. We can encourage each other. We can encourage our children and our families. And even if our children go crazy—as I did—we can teach them well enough so that when they are ready to come back, they will know how.

MAST: Last question. You just mentioned things that perhaps are good indicators that we can come out of this pandemic. What else gives you hope right now that there we may be able to turn a corner and head back towards sanity?

BUDZISZEWSKI: Well, one of the great indicators is that more and more people are recognizing the insanity. They may be involved in the insanity. They may have infected some of the… Some become infected with some of the delusions, but they know something is wrong.

I had a student once in class. The subject of sexuality had come up sort of accidentally. And I didn't want to seem to be pointing fingers. I said to them, you know, my generation invented the sexual revolution. And I have a lot of compassion for yours because it seems to me that yours is paying most of the price. A young man said to me, “I know what you mean.” He said, “More than anything, I want to meet a woman and marry her and be faithful to her forever.” And my heart soared. And then he said, “But I don't think it's possible.” See, in a perverse sort of way, he wanted to follow the commandment, honor your father and mother, and they'd gotten divorced, and so he figured there was no chance of anybody having a faithful marriage. Because if they couldn't do it—and he admired his parents—how could he? Now, he knew the problem. He had the right aspiration. He didn't have hope.

So one of the purposes for this book was also to encourage people to believe hope is possible. It's a theological virtue. It's not just something you can whip up in yourself. It's not the same as optimism, and it requires the grace of God.

MAST: J. Budziszewski is a University of Texas professor and the author of Pandemic of Lunacy. Thank you so much for your time.

BUDZISZEWSKI: Thank you very much for having me on.

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