Pitirim Sorokin and the Benedict Option

I have been meaning for some time to read from the work of Pitirim Sorokin (d. 1968), the great Russian emigre intellectual who was the first head of Harvard's sociology department, and eventually became the leading sociologist in the country. He was professionally very close to his Harvard departmental colleague Carle C. Zimmerman, whose recently reissued work "Family and Civilization" I've blogged about recently. I ran across Sorokin's name last week, and decided to order his 1941 book "The Crisis of Our Age" from the wondrous used-books seller Alibris.com. I've just finished the book. My preliminary judgment is that it's breathtaking, but I'm going to have to read it again and think through Sorokin's conclusions before I reach a more definitive conclusion. Nevertheless, as you'll see in this lengthy post, Sorokin's ideas are absolutely key to the idea that traditionalist conservatives, religious and otherwise, would be wise to take the "Benedict Option": to consciously withdraw to some extent from a dying cultural order and, in seeking out a way to live faith and virtue out in community, lay the groundwork for what may succeed the current order.

(Note well: if any of this Sorokin business appeals to you, I encourage you to order today "The Crisis of Our Age," which is very readable; Alibris only has a very limited supply, and Amazon.com is selling them for $61 each -- three times what I paid via Alibris!)

Now, on to the book.

"The Crisis of Our Age" proclaimed Sorokin's view that the West was in a terminal crisis, but that its resolution, however shocking and traumatic, would not mean the End, as is often thought, but only the transition to a new and very different phase of that civilization. "Crisis" is a summation of Sorokin's cyclical theory of social development. He believed that civilizations cycle through three basic states, based on the dominant view of the nature of truth within that civilization:

1. The ideational, in which a culture is built around God, or some other transcendental source of truth. Material concerns are secondary to spiritual ones.

2. The idealistic, which synthesizes spiritual and material values through reason.

3. The sensate, in which a culture is built around material concerns, and de-emphasizes the spiritual as the foundation upon which the culture is built.

Sorokin held that both the ideational and sensate were only partial truths, and that true human flourishing would be out of balance if civilization focused too heavily on one over the other. Yet both provide for authentic human needs; as such, neither ideational nor sensate cultures can go on forever, without suffering a correction -- possibly traumatic -- marking the transition from one state to another. The idealistic model is, well, ideal, but it is also the most unstable, and rarest.

The story of the West since the fall of Rome illustrates his theory. The sensate culture of ancient Rome decayed so much that Roman civilization could neither perpetuate nor protect itself. So the Western empire fell. Out of the chaos emerged the ideational culture of Christianity, propagated chiefly by monks. Christian faith and Christian moral teaching spoke to the needs of post-Roman Europe, which oriented itself around ascetic Christian ideals, and began rebuilding civilization.

As order developed and wealth began to spread, the ideational culture of the early Middle Ages, gave way to the idealistic culture of the High Middle Ages, perfected intellectually in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. But then, in the 14th century, the Scholastics lost the great medieval debate to the Nominalists, who taught that the only truths we can know for sure are those revealed to us through our senses. That was the critical moment, the first cause of the transition between idealistic and sensate culture. Richard Weaver, in "Ideas Have Consequences," writes:

It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.

It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that worldview is the most important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably -- though ways are found to hedge on this -- the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of "man the measure of all things. " The witches [on the heath in "Macbeth" -- RD] spoke with the habitual equivocation of oracles when they told man that by this easy choice he might realize himself more fully, for they were actually initiating a course which cuts one off from reality. Thus began the "abomination of desolation" appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth.

Sorokin's analysis agrees with this. But as Sorokin makes clear, this was by no means an unambiguously bad thing. Sensate culture brought about the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, astonishing scientific discoveries and technological developments, democracy, capitalism -- in short, the modern world. The entire history of the West since the 14th century has been about the progressive liberation of the individual from all constraint. No one can deny that this has brought about enormous benefits. Certainly Sorokin doesn't deny this.

But there's a hitch, and it's a fatal one. Here's Sorokin:

From "The Crisis of Our Age":

A further consequence of such a system of truth [sensate] is the development of a temporalistic, relativistic, and nihilistic mentality. The sensory world is in a state of incessant flux and becoming. There is nothing unchangeable in it -- not even an eternal Supreme Being. Mind dominated by the truth of the senses simply cannot perceive any permanency, but apprehends all values in terms of shift and transformation Sensate mentality views everything from the standpoint of evolution and progress. This leads to an increasing neglect of the eternal values, which come to be replaced by temporary, or short-time, considerations. Sensate society lives in, and appreciates mainly, the present. Since the past is irretrievable and no longer exists, while the future is not yet here and is uncertain, only the present moment is real and desirable.

And, elsewhere:

We have seen that modern sensate culture emerged with a major belief that true reality and true value were mainly and exclusively sensory. Anything that was supersensory was either doubtful as a reality or fictitious as a value. It either did not exists or, being unperceivable by the senses, amounted to the nonexistent. Respectively, the organs of senses, with the secondary help of human reason, were made the main arbiter of the true and false, of the real and unreal, and of the valuable and valueless. Any charismatic-supersensory and superrational revelation, any mystic experience, ay truth of faith, began to be denied, as a valid experience, a valid truth, and a genuine value. The major premise of the sensory nature of the true reality and value is the root from which developed the tree of our sensate culture with its splendid as well as its poisonous fruit. Its first positive fruit is an unprecedented development of the natural sciences and technological inventions. The first poisonous fruit is a fatal narrowing of the realm of true [absolute] reality and true value.

One thinks of Philip Rieff's insight that our world today has become therapeutic, in the sense that we have relinquished the solidity and psychological comfort of God and all the concept of God entails, and devote our time to therapeutic means of coping with the pain of nihilism. Here's a bit from my first post on the reissued version of Rieff's "The Triumph of the Therapeutic":

In the introductory chapter of "Triumph," Rieff says that the overturning of Christian civilization has given rise to a civilization in which people wish to retain inherited morality without "the hard external crust of institutional discipline." But this isn't possible, according to Rieff, because any culture survives by the strength of its institutions, and their ability to "bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs" in ways that are "commonly and implicitly understood." When a culture stops to think about why we do things this way and not that way, and there are no institutions powerful enough to say, in effect, "Because that's the way we do it" -- then you have a culture in decline.

The impact collapse of Christianity as a binding civilizational force in the West cannot be overestimated. We now live in a world where any appeal to idealism is immediately suspect. Writes Rieff: "The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: 'Can civilized men believe?' Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?" That is, can people who do not believe in the existence of objective truth, and the possibility that it can be authoritatively expressed, ever form a durable civilization?

Sorokin says it cannot happen. The tragedy (in the classical sense) of the West is that the same idea, or ideas, that made the West's rise possible by releasing the creative energies of the individual contained within them the seeds of the West's decline through dissipation, disunity and fragmentation. This insight is echoed in Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue."

Sorokin says that "sensate thinkers" of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries understood the risk to social stability and cohesion from the abandonment of God and binding transcendental values, and tried to shore up the system by preaching a rational God in whom it was necessary to believe for the sake of social order. Sorokin:

Unfortunately, they appear to have forgotten that if religion and ideational norms were a mere artificial mythology invented as a useful adjunct to the policeman and the gallows, such an illusion could not last long without being exposed. With this fraud exposed, sensate values themselves could not help losing their "saltiness," and hence their prestige and controlling power.

There is a clear line of causation between William of Ockham and Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw far more clearly than most.

I don't have the time to go into much more detail about Sorokin's historical analysis here, but I found it fascinating how he showed from the historical record how wars, and the destructiveness of wars, spiked as cultures were transitioning from one system to another. Sorokin appears to believe that the wars were not so much catalysts for the destruction of the old and the coming of the new as they were symptoms of mass social restlessness, the externalization of internal disorder. Writing as he did in 1941, his prose is at times overheated, but he predicted that the 20th century would be by far the bloodiest in human history. This is before World War II played itself out, and before we knew anything of the Holocaust. The exposure of the full range of communism's mass murder lay in the future.

What of the future? Sorokin believed that we were living through the "twilight" of sensate culture, and that a transition either into a idealistic or ideational successor was inevitable -- though he did not predict how that was likely to come about (it seems that writing in 1941, he believed that a succession of cataclysmic wars were going to do it in; to the extent he believed that, he was wrong, obviously). Yet Sorokin did not believe that the Western population would disappear (though one wonders what he would have made of the West's depopulation today), nor did he believe that all our material wealth and knowledge would disappear (as it did when Rome fell). Instead, Sorokin said that of necessity people would, to use Nietzsche's phrase, undergo a "transvaluation of all values" (though Nietzsche, of course, sought the final overthrow of Christian values in favor of sensate ones). We are seeing and will continue to see a split in society:

Extreme hedonists and cynicists, on the one hand, and exreme ascetics and mystics on the other, whose kingdom is not of this world, will increasingly appear. The chasm between these will grow and society in its soul and members will be split more and more into these two extreme types, until the transition is over and the extreme hedonism of the Carpe diem dies out.

On a small or large scale such a split has uniformly occurred in small and great transitions; and especially in the period of the great transitions from one culture to another. Bocaccio's Decameron with its hedonistic company, and the medieval flagellants, mystics, and ascetics are the concrete examples of such a split in the transitions of the fourteenth century. Vulgar Roman Epicureans and Petroniuses on the one hand, and Stoics, ascetics, and Christians on the other, are another example of such a split in the transition of the first centuries of our era. A similar split is already appearing and will undoubtedly grow in the future in Western society.

He doesn't elaborate on that point here, and I have to say I don't see many signs of it from the 1940s on. But I see the logic here, and I think that increased prosperity has masked and ameliorated many of the crises predicted by Sorokin. A permanent energy crisis, in which cheap oil ends but no replacement is found, would radically change our entire way of life, and expose our atomization and the values that led to it for the debilitating things they are.

Sorokin, (inadvertently) on the Whig Theory of History:

[T]he tragic character of the decline and of the transitional period, before the new phase is reached, does not permit our theory to share in any way the shallow optimism of the salesmen of "progress," of the philistine "boosters" of the commercialized "bigger and better." If the Cassandras crying "the death of civlization" are mistaken, they at least do not turn the great tragedy of this historical process into a musical comedy. As for the "salesmen of progress," be they "science managers," scholars, presidents of this or that, journalists, or chamber of commerce speakers, they are not only mistaken but they do not have even the virtue of the misguided Cassandras. They are so deaf that they can never distinguish a tragic "dies irae, dies illa" from something "fine and dandy." Whatever happens in the course of time they welcome as a later and therefore bigger and better manifestation of progress.

What to do? The first thing, says Sorokin, is for people to understand the nature of the crisis:

It is high time to realize that this is not one of the ordinary crises which happen almost every decade, but one of the greatest transitions in human history from one of its main forms of culture to another. An adequate realization of the immense magnitude of the change now upon us is a necessary condition for determining the adequacy of measures and means to alleviate the magnitude of the pending catastrophe.

Second, we have to recognize that sensate culture is "not the only great form of culture." Ideational and idealistic cultures are "in their own way as great."

Third, we must accept that in the course of time, each of these cultures exhausts itself creatively, necessitating a shift to another basic form if the people of that culture want to continue their "creative life."

Fourth, if we're convinced that the shift is necessary and inevitable, we should prepare for it through deeply understanding the main premises and values of sensate culture, and rejecting them because they are only a partial accounting of reality. (Sorokin believed the idealistic/integralist form was the highest, and most truthful, form). Though Sorokin doesn't say this outright, he cannot possibly mean anything other than a return to traditional religion, whether a revived Christianity of something else.

We will know that the transition is well underway, Sorokin says, when the most creative minds turn from engagement with the fields of endeavor that serve sensate ends, and are instead attracted to ideational/idealistic pursuits. We will know the transition is well underway when we see among us new St. Pauls, new St. Augustines -- and new St. Benedicts.

Fifth, there must be a "transformation of social relationships and forms of social organization" to correspond with ideational ideals -- which is to say, reality. This means that it is possible, for example, that the nation-state will disappear, as irreconcilable with absolute values that society needs. Being faithful to God may -- may -- require the withering away of certain forms of social organization.

Sixth, there must be an organic (that is, non-coerced, freely chosen) restoration of the traditional nuclear family, and the construction of social forms that favor its flourishing (versus the flourishing of the autonomous individual, or the state, or some other collective).

Sorokin did not believe that this transition could take place without real trauma. Man cannot seem to learn from history. He behaves

as if there were no causal relationships and consequences; as if there were no such thing as socio-cultural sickness, and hence no need to sacrifice momentary pleasures and other sensate utilities and values in order to avoid an infinitely greater catastrophe. In this field of experience he remains virtually unteachable.

Here are the final lines of the book:

The more unteachable we are, and the less freely and willingly we choose the sole course of salvation open to us, the more inexorable will be the coercion, the more pitiless the ordeal, the more terrible the dies irae of the transition. Let us hope that the grace of understanding may be vouchsafed us and that we may choose, before it is too late, the right road -- the road that leads not to death but to the further realization of man's unique creative mission on this planet! Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini!

"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" Or, you might read it as, "Benedict, who comes in the name of the Lord!" Compare this to MacIntyre's final lines in "After Virtue":

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict.

I'm not presenting Sorokin's analysis here as fact. Obviously I'm highly sympathetic to it, but it raises some difficult questions, as does any philosophy that requires historical determinism. As I often do, I share it here with you to help me think through it. And I'll ask here the same questions I posed recently in a post about Wendell Berry:

At what point to you conclude that the way we're living now is not going to be sustainable in the future that's rapidly coming upon us, and that it's time to make prudent, though perhaps somewhat radical, changes, given the consequences of failing to prepare for the economic end of the Modern era?

At what point do you -- do any of us -- accept that we can't keep living like we do, because the old order will not survive the shocks to come? And to really accept that, as opposed to endlessly contemplating it on blogs and in bar conversation, is to act on it. All of which is a roundabout way of asking the question: at what point do you yourself become a new, and doubtless very different, Benedictine?