How could so slim a book bear so bold a title as The Idol of Our Age? In these times of overhype, when fatuous exaggerations are de rigueur, “revolution” is a mere marketing shtick, and “glib” is the new “groovy,” Daniel J. Mahoney's erudite essays may well be met with a skeptical shrug. How can anything count as the idol of our age—how to choose among the myriad social, socialist, and antisocial media icons, the colossal nymphs gracing the screens of Time Square, the deconstructionist demigods of the academy? Yet Mahoney, who holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College, is undaunted. As revealed in the book's subtitle, he proposes to explain nothing less than “How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity” and thus, implicitly, civilization itself.
As ambitious as its subject might sound, the book delivers.
The “Religion of Humanity” was the lofty name that French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) gave to his Positivist worldview, an anti-theological doctrine by which he intended to substitute “the love of Humanity for the love of God.” An avowed atheist, Comte despised all metaphysics—a term of derision that he hurled at what he considered futile, unanswerable, silly queries into the meaning and origin of life, the nature of thought, and other similarly unproductive speculations. Which did nothing to stop him from using such quintessentially Christian concepts as charity, spirituality, and faith (consistency was not his forte).
Having rejected traditional religion, Comte enthrones the twin deities of Progress and Social Feeling, which he treats as all the more sacred for being left conspicuously undefined. As the Positivists use science to usher in Progress, Social Feeling triumphs, and man inherits the earth. It is facile logic and wishful thinking masquerading as argument, but it definitely took hold, setting us on the path to modern science-worship in the name of a superficial humanism that champions mankind at the expense of real human beings. Mahoney cites approvingly the German American philosopher Eric Voegelin's (1901-1985) critique of Comte's utterly “naïve faith that believes history will simply leave evil behind in the new, positive age.”
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