In the famous story about Procrustes’ bed, a cruel tyrant tortures his victims by stretching their legs if they are too short to fit the bed he has constructed, or he cuts off the long legs of his captives to fit the size of the bed. The legs must adjust to the bed; the bed is not made to accommodate the length of the legs. Man does not have to respect or conform to nature; nature must be distorted to fit man’s pre-constructed bed. This tale illuminates the difference between wisdom and ideology—men forming beds or ideas that respect self-evident truths or building beds or theories that deny reality.
Whereas wisdom accepts the “giveneness” of things as long or short and formulates the truth based on the nature of the real, ideology tortures, twists, exaggerates, or diminishes the truth to accommodate a pre-fabricated ideology invented by man’s mind. The fullness of truth in all the richness of being must be reduced to the narrowness of a small mind. Reality, human nature, and moral law must be changed to adapt to an untested man-made concept not based on past experience, the accumulated wisdom of the human race, or venerable traditions. Rather than surrender or accept the obvious truths that inhere in “the nature of things” as they are, have been, and always will be, ideology deconstructs traditional norms, ancient truths, and moral ideals. It reinvents truth in the form of a self-serving theory with some political agenda.
Feminist ideology, for example, rejects the intrinsic nature of manhood and womanhood as God-given and complementary. A male nature and a female nature are called arbitrary “artificial constructs,” the by-products of prejudice or ignorance. The words “mother” and “father” are interchangeable and equal and carry no fixed meaning. The meaning of a family is subject to redefinition by the United Nations, for it states that a family assumes “a plurality of forms.”A child can have two mothers or two fathers because there is no unchanging “nature” that deserves recognition. Ideology, then, refuses to acknowledge that all created things—planets, water, dogs, God, man, or woman–possess an inborn nature or bent that inclines them to move or act in a particular way for a specific purpose. Just as fire rises up and water flows down and planets have orbits, man and woman also have natural movements that direct them to an end that is God-given. The nature of something orients its direction and orders its motion for some intelligible purpose that serves a wise design.
Communist ideology reduces man to a physical being who possesses a body but no soul. The utopia of a classless society replaces the heavenly afterlife, and man’s material happiness on earth supplants the blessedness of the Beatific Vision as the final end of human destiny. Man is expected to live by bread alone, and the natural hierarchy of upper, middle, and lower classes must be leveled to one uniform social class with no disparities in income, housing, or benefits. Instead of acknowledging the diversity of natural and God-given talents distributed throughout human nature, ideology robs man of the natural freedom of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and makes man the slave or “creature” of the state. Instead of government serving man, man becomes an instrument of the state and exists only as a worker or producer. In this ideology, men have no inborn “inalienable” rights that transcend the dictates of the state.
Racism is another narrow-minded ideology that ignores the nature of things and the truth about man. Man invents lunatic ideas about “superior” and “inferior” races, classifies human beings as “fit” or “unfit” to live, dehumanizes unborn children or the elderly with terminal illness, or demonizes members of other religions as “infidels.” Again, the largeness of truth is shrunk into a small concept that has no foundation in reason, nature, or experience. The Latin word humanitas acknowledges the humanity of all tribes and races as belonging to the same family of man. The Biblical view of creation in Genesis explains that all men and women are created in the image of God (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”). The Christian faith teaches that Christ died both for men and women, Jews and Gentiles, masters and servants. Catholic teaching always affirms the dignity of all human beings and the inestimable worth of each person.
Ideology, then, destroys some great, universal, eternal truth that carries the weight of authority, tradition, religion, and the experience of the entire human race in order to advance some political or personal agenda governed by self-interest. Ideology attempts to rationalize or excuse evil under the mantle of some respectable, fashionable idea endorsed by the intellectual elite who assume that educated man is a god who brings enlightenment to a dark, bigoted world. God’s word and commandments, Mother Nature’s laws, and the wisdom of the past do not matter. Ideology presumes to recreate the world, reinvent morality, redefine the family, deconstruct the meaning of male and female, and build a brave new world of human utopia to dispel the fantasy of heaven and eternal life.
However, God, Being, Nature, and Truth do not fit small boxes. God who names Himself “I am Who am” does not reduce Himself to man-made concepts or categories. Being in its fullness—described by Jacques Maritain as “an intelligible mystery”– encompasses all the infinite variety of human and divine life and does not fit narrow-minded theories. In Hamlet’s famous words, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Mother Nature, “ever ancient and ever new” like the truth, never ceases to surprise in its fertility and abundance: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mother Nature is not a man-made clock or machine but a book of wonder. Truth, personified as a woman in the Book of Proverbs (“Be busy to seek her”) and known as Lady Philosophy in Boethius, does not reveal its secrets to prideful thinkers for whom knowledge is power. Ideology, then, is one man’s opinion, one political party’s view, or one age’s bias that rebels against the perennial wisdom of the ages of ages. The culture of death and legalized abortion are the products of man-made ideologies twisting and torturing ancient truths to fit man-made boxes subverting common sense, natural law, and divine revelation.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
