In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving
increasingly irrationally. An astonishing number of people subscribe to
celebrity endorsed cults, Mayan armageddon prophecies, scientism, and
other varieties of new age, anti-enlightenment philosophies. Millions
more advance popular conspiracy theories: AIDS was created in a CIA
laboratory, Princess Diana was assassinated, and the 9/11 attacks were
an inside job.
In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains that the
basic cause of this explosion of irrationality is the slow but steady
marginalization of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are
incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the
Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason,
progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based.
Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass
derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor
are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are
hounded from their posts, Israel is demonized, and the US is vilified
over the war on terror--all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and
obscene propaganda.
Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves
the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real
challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational
Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity
and rationalism that it once brought into being.
