The Noble Lie: The Illusion of Leftist ‘Morality’

The advent of a “novel” coronavirus presented fertile ground for a narcissistic noble lie.

“Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Psalm to Life.

There is a desperate longing in the human heart for purpose beyond the passing hours of a senseless shuffle to the grave.

The Judeo-Christian worldview upon which our Republic was founded assumes that life carries divinely gifted worth, meaning, and purpose. Our Founders reflected this belief when they wrote that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” They embraced “self-evident” truths because they recognized a higher moral authority manifested in Natural Law and Natural Rights. They believed purpose is a birthright, and happiness is attainable in this life. The American “new birth of freedom” descended from centuries of English Common Law development, nurtured by a unique commitment to personal autonomy.

The Left, in denying the existence of a higher power—and thereby self-evident truth—experiences a lack of purpose that makes life a meaningless absurdity.

Daniel Hannan wrote in Inventing Freedom, “More than a thousand years ago, in England, the precedent had been set that a ruler might be judged before a representative assembly. The law…was a set of inherited rights that belonged to every freeman in the kingdom. The rules did not emanate from the government, but stood above it…if the sovereign himself is required to keep that law, it must have a higher source of legitimacy.”

Yet the Left, in denying the existence of a higher power—and thereby self-evident truth—experiences a lack of purpose that makes life a meaningless absurdity. As French philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

“Postmodernism,” writes Matthew Lohmeier in Irresistible Revolution, “challenges the possibility of obtaining objective knowledge of the world—of knowing truth. Reason and truth are meaningless; they are mere abstractions. Objectivity is a myth.”

The atheistic worldview is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. Confronted with this dilemma, modern man flounders pathetically for some means of escape. 

Without purpose, life is intolerable. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Thoreau. Mankind becomes “the absurd hero,” as Camus put it. His “whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing,” like the archetypal Sisyphus endlessly rolling a stone up a hill, only to watch it roll back again—a sort of Greek Groundhog Day.

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig describes this “dilemma of modern man” as “truly terrible. The atheistic worldview is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. Confronted with this dilemma, modern man flounders pathetically for some means of escape.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, 20th-Century French philosopher, offered a coping mechanism: “In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.”

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