“The order marked for destruction can be summed up in one word: Europe—the intellectual and spiritual synthesis of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. The new totalitarianism proceeds by negating every form of transcendence, especially the religious truth and universal reason which Del Noce calls “Platonism.” It reconceives reality as “a system of forces, not of values.” Being and nature are dissolved into the flux of history. And truth is reduced to social and psychological “situations” to be administered by social scientists.

This totalitarianism is total because it does away with the idea of truth and universal reason, reducing the one to pragmatic function and the other to empirical analysis. This scientism ushers in what Del Noce, following Michele Federico Sciacca, calls “the reign of stupidity.” Argument becomes impossible because truth claims are attacked as expressions of class interest, bigotry, or psychosis. Ultimate questions can no longer be posed in a public way, much less answered. “Only what is subject to empirical observation and can be empirically represented . . . ‘is,’” and so thinking itself is reduced to the refinement of technique and the multiplication of means. After the negation of transcendence, politics itself becomes the transcendental horizon, and ethics, like truth, is subsumed under the form of war. — Michael Hanby, What Del Noce Saw, First Things

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“Although scientism claims to be morally neutral, it actually “includes as essential a form of morality… (the pure increase of vitality — eroticism) which is ‘absolutely contradictory’ with traditional ethics.” In the religious domain, theological liberalism is an attempt to mimic the “horizontalism” of science, by shifting the focus of Christianity to “worldly realities…”

Del Noce’s assessment of the culture of the affluent society is sharply negative: it is a form of “absolute relativism,” it rejects every tradition, it reduces the human person to a “social atom,” its final outcome is “systematically organized mendacity” and “universal reification.” It is important to realize that Del Noce is no laudator temporis acti. In fact, he criticizes the new progressive mindset for being an essentially conservative attitude, whose goal is to “absorb and neutralize completely the idea of revolution through progressivism,” thus reaching “the highest degree of bourgeois mystification.”

The reason is that “scientism, in this extremely expanded form that claims jurisdiction over all human realities, represents the climax of conservatism because it professes a complete relativism about values. Therefore, it leads to a static society, in spite of the constant advancements of technology, ruled by an “aristocracy of industrialists, bankers, scientists, and technicians” whose task is essentially the indefinite preservation of the economic/bureaucratic status quo ante.

The Crisis of Modernity,  Augusto Del Noce, Carlo Lancellotti – (McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Book 64)

Del Noce and the Lefts Dead End. The American Conservative

“… Contra the “Catholic Left,” which tended to regard Marx’s atheism as accidental, and tried to rescue his socio-political analysis from his religious views, Del Noce concluded that what Marx proposed was not just a new theory of history or a new program of political economy, but a new anthropology, one completely different from the Christian tradition. (Louis Dupré had made a similar argument in the pages of Commonweal; see “Marx and Religion: An Impossible Marriage,” April 26, 1968.) Marx viewed humans as “social beings” entirely determined by historical and material circumstances rather than by their relationship with God. He viewed human reason as purely instrumental—a tool of production and social organization rather than the capacity to contemplate the truth and participate in the divine wisdom.

Finally, Marx viewed liberation as the fruit of political action, not as a personal process of conversion aided by grace. Marxist politics was not guided by fixed and absolute ethical principles, because ethics, along with philosophy, was absorbed into politics. Del Noce concluded that there was no way to rescue Marx’s politics from his atheism, which had as much to do with his view of man as with his view of God…” —  Rod Dreher

“Science cannot give us a philosophy, nor can it give us an ethics; it cannot give us a philosophy, because it immerses man in nature and avoids the important subject of his destiny. It cannot give us an ethics because science by itself is amoral. Morality comes from its ends, and science is indifferent to ends.”  — Archbishop Fulton J Sheen, 1948