New York Times' Sunday Book Review reviewed Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, a subtle sequel to her previous Evil in Modern Thought.

Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at University of Cambridge, the reviewer of Neiman's book, notes that Neiman's ideal for "moral clarity" is the ability to "see life in ways infused with these categories: to cherish happiness, to respect reason, to revere dignity and to hope for a better future."

She appropriates Kant's philosophy of freedom as "a refusal to accept that what is the case limits" using Abraham's inquiries to God about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah if there were any innocents in those cities as a heroic example.

Most curious to me in Blackburn's review of her book is his observation that Neiman does not mindlessly buy into the postmodernism of today, but takes a few steps back toward the birth of modernism in the age of the Enlightenment, yet rejects its idealistic picture of the perfection of humanity. Blackburn writes,

Neiman...boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best.

...Neiman’s Enlightenment is not the hyperbolic ideology detected by some critics. It is not the unthinking worship of science, the materialistic, technological ideology that upset the Romantics and continues to upset their followers. It is not an unthinking confidence in the human capacity for knowledge, and still less in human perfectibility and unending progress. On the other hand, neither is it merely an expression of liberty, a resistance to unearned authority and the discovery of tolerance, which, she argues, provides too pallid an ideology to tempt people away from the superstitions and fundamentalisms that promise them more. It is rather an attitude encapsulated in four virtues: happiness, reason, reverence and hope. The moral clarity of her title is therefore not the ability to calculate answers to the practical conundrums that life sets us. It is rather the ability to see life in ways infused with these categories: to cherish happiness, to respect reason, to revere dignity and to hope for a better future.

Neiman's book reveals what I believe is inevitably bound to happen: the discovery that postmodern thought just doesn't work. In fact, it's a hopeless tailspin into meaningless. If freedom truly is doing whatever I want then my existence ceases to have any meaning at all, for the moment you add meaning to any entity, that meaning must be defined, and definitions have boundaries, and boundaries then defeat the postmodern definition of freedom.

But if you and I were "meant" for something, made for a reason, put on this planet for a purpose higher than evolving into a higher species, then to fulfill that meaningful purpose, there are certain things we should do and certain we should not do. Doing the wrong thing will damage our "meantness" and doing the right thing will help us to discover and experience it.

Neiman refuses to see ethics as "the distinct preserve of the faithful. Instead, she writes, 'religion is rather a way of trying to give shape and structure to the moral concepts that are embedded in our lives.'" Neiman rightly touches the heart of worldviews. Who embedded these "moral concepts"? Where do they come from? In a sense, her statement is correct: religion tries to answer the bigger question of our existence, where our morals come from, and what structure was created in which we operate. Without using the word, she recognizes the universal element of conscience.

No wonder she reveres religious traditions and writings and dismisses brash atheism that sees no good in them. Obviously she and Richard Dawkins would not get along.

But if Neiman's idea for moral clarity resides in one's ability to see life in ways infused with four categories: to cherish happiness, to respect reason, to revere dignity, and to hope for a better future, there still remains a bigger question to answer: where do these four categories come from? General consensus? But if most people agree with these four principles, we must ask why do most people agree with them? How did the majority of population acquire these "universals"? And if they weren't acquired but rather people were born with them, how did that happen?

It's impossible to consider these questions and escape the inevitable answer that makes sense of our sense of morals: God! God created the idea of happiness, reason, dignity, and hope. These are outflows of His perfect character passed on to humankind made in His image.

Every time someone takes a stance for a philosophy, worldview, or univeral ethic, we must always ask: what makes that universal right? Where does it come from? And again, the only reasonable answer is God Himself. Perhaps it would not be an overstatement to side with philosophers Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen that the greatest evidence for Christianity is the impossibility of the contrary.