"...The open society offers a vista of limitless progress. In this respect it has an affinity with the scientific method. But science has at its disposal objective criteria — namely the facts by which the process may be judged. Unfortunately, in human affairs the facts do not provide reliable criteria of truth, yet we need some generally agreed-upon standards by which the process of trial and error can be judged. All cultures and religions offer such standards; the open society cannot do without them. The innovation in an open society is that whereas most cultures and religions regard their own values as absolute, an open society, which is aware of many cultures and religions, must regard its own shared values as a matter of debate and choice.
As C.S. Lewis observed in "The Abolition of Man", the human mind can no more invent a new value than create a new primary color. Underneath the Mr Soros' subterfuge of replacing "absolute values" with "debate and choice" lies the contradiction that that "debate and choice" are just a different set of "absolute values", which just so happen to be so much more conveniently malleable to the ambitions of self-annointed moral 'innovators' like Mr. Soros for the propagation of the society of his choice.
Cordially,
I take your point about the contradiction that "debate and choice" would constitute just a different set of "absolute values." As mentioned earlier, all Soros has done in this article is to propound a new "dogma," or "doctrine" which, as such, must necessarily stand as a new "absolute value." Dogma, doctrine always deals with "absolutes" and imposes them wherever possible.
Plus not only "debate and choice," but also the "scientific" standard of "true and false" ascertained by "trial and error" are fundamental to Soros' argument. Both methods are evasions unless they can show the objective ground or standard of truthful judgment by which they are rationally to be assessed — which ground both seek to show is irrelevant to human purposes in the first place. So — where does that leave us? Where does/can reason, ratio, figure into this style of thinking?
C.S. Lewis judged matters exactly right when he said that the human mind can no more invent a new value than create a new primary color. The universe did not begin on the day we were born. It has an actual history; and that history testifies to the fact that although human beings are creative actors in nature, they did not create nature, but are creatures within nature. Nature itself gives every evidence of being a constituted single order which is lawful in its behavior. It was presumably such before we now-living human individuals got here, and will presumably continue to be such when we are no longer here.
People like Soros are trying to persuade us that reality is not actually what it plainly is, but that it should be re-conceived according to Soros' preferences. He can try that all day long. Maybe he will even enjoy some success in persuading ignorant people to agree with him. Still, all that follows from such an enterprise would be, not the successful re-creation of Reality, but a severe reminder that human beings do not re-make reality by having "innovative" opinions about it. No matter what they do, as finite, contingent creatures who are parts and participants of Reality, they're stuck with it, no matter what. There is no way to "rise above it" in a god-like way....
Or as the great poet T.S. Eliot so eloquently put it, "Only the fool, fixed in his folly, thinks he turns the wheel on which he himself turns."
Well, just some thoughts, dear brother in Christ! It is such a delight to hear from you! You and your dear ones are always in my prayers....