When faith is displaced, men do not necessarily surrender their passions to stern reason . As we have seen, when the fruits of reason are unsatisfying, men may much more easily return to racial, national, ethnic, or tribal loyalties, or turn to other forms of irrationality. Conceivably, this thin volume could be read with optimism. It could be argued that the vanguard of the American left has succumbed to the final madness, denying the existence of objective reality. Daily there are attacks on standards of every variety, be they standardized admissions scores and hiring criteria, or standards of journalism and the practice of politics.
Nothing really shocks the conscience today.
Everything is relative. There are no First Principles. The television flickers relentlessly and monotonously with universal empathy for the most freakish tales of decadence. And in the White House sits a man who cheerfully exalts the emotive over cognit ive, and whose aides delight in the manipulation of the truth. Rather than a fresh report of outrages from the avant-garde, Beyond All Reason may more properly read not as a sign of hope but of loss.