I received a thoughtful e-mail the other day from a reader, which I share here with his permission. It's long, and I've edited it where I thought I could do so without taking away from the fullness of his expression. Read on, this is good:
I have been thinking a lot about this post that I somehow came across recently, even though you originally posted it in 2006 (maybe it was cross-linked in a more recent entry). You wrote about the experience of David Jeffrey teaching at Baylor University:[Jeffrey] expounded on how many students in North American universities are blithely ignorant about the Bible, a complacency he says threatens Christianity and, as a result, Western civilization itself. In one of Mr. Jeffrey's classes before moving to Baylor, only three of 30 students knew about Noah and the flood, and none was really sure what the story meant. They weren't even embarrassed to admit it.Obviously, this post speaks to the continuing topics of rootlessness, discontinuity with the past, and especially a disconnection to our faith traditions that appear with such frequency in your blog.
The thing that strikes me so much about the post above (and the seeming incredulousness with which Jeffrey recounts it) is that it perfectly describes me. My parents fell away from the church when I was still quite young such that I have little memory of attending at all (I had to look up the words Vespers and Pascha on the Internet after reading them on your blog and I am 40 years old).
My wife and I are both born to parents who were raised Catholic, yet neither my wife nor I attends any church now and neither do any of our 7 other siblings. We are the unrooted, postmodern children of Baby Boomers (but at least not MTD disciples).
Yet, I enjoy reading your blog because we have a lot of intellectual interests in common: philosophy, sociology, politics, current events, etc. However, we could hardly be more different in our personal philosophies. You: socially traditionalist, religiously devout, and increasingly economically populist (if I read you correctly as of late). Me: socially liberal, religiously ignorant, and economically libertarian.
But this is what makes reading you interesting to me. You link to articles and comment on topics that often are of natural interest to me, but your take on them is so radically different from my own that I am forced to actually think, which for nerds like me is actually a form of enjoyment :)
But, my question to you, should you choose to address it, is how do you envision the threat that people like myself pose (as Jeffrey implies) materially manifesting itself? I can appreciate the sense of loss for the souls of others that the religiously devout may feel for the unchurched, but it seems as though traditionalist concerns extend to impacts on our earthly existence together.
[snip]
[Many of your] posts explore the contention that the lack of a generally accepted societal-wide religious faith may be a precursor to some form of explosive violence or societal chaos. Obviously, I don't desire any such outcome, would fight against it and don't see myself as contributing to such an event in either an active or passive capacity. But is my very existence (note I am not a liberal or secular activist in any sense of the word) another crack in the dike of societal breakdown? Or to circle back to Jeffrey's comments in the first post above, what exactly is so terrible about the fact that I know very little about the Bible other than that it represents a passive rebuke in some sense to his own philosophy?
I can't help but wonder how much of the decline-and-fall concerns are valid hypothetical intellectual speculation about societal change versus an emotional reaction to the challenge implicit (yet not overtly intended) by people such as myself who simply live differently than Jeffrey and yourself (and who like it that way).
Interestingly, a friend e-mailed last week to ask why people like me were so worried about European Muslims, most of whom he believes will become secularized; I've been thinking about how to answer him, and I have come to believe that part of it is the conviction that once Europe becomes Islamized, even in a relatively benign secular form, it really does mean that the homelands of Western Christianity are likely lost forever to the Christian faith; as long as there's cultural memory of Christianity, there's the possibility that the faith will return -- but a population whose cultural memories are Islamic makes that already remote possibility even more unlikely. I suspect a similar dynamic is at work with marriage traditionalists.Or stated differently, is the hysteria found in the writings of the Mark Steyn's of the world about the coming collapse of Western Civilization in some measure a form of knee-jerk intellectual denial of a potential social outcome that is emotionally difficult to contemplate? Namely the possibility that Europe (or Western Civilization more broadly) may lose a distinctively overt Christian patina and that catastrophe will NOT ensue?
In other words, would such an outcome not be an implicit threat to any Christian worldview that presumes the sole authority to define the Good and the proper ordering of the relationships of mankind? Thus, would any principally secular societal arrangement not have to lead a priori to violent collapse when viewed from this perspective?
How much of these necessarily speculative judgments about the future trajectory of our society is simply baked into the cake if one adopts a Christian traditionalist viewpoint?
I thank the reader for his excellent letter. My response follows, below the jump.
The reader makes an important point in asking whether or not declinists like me secretly fear that Christianity will disappear from the West, and everything will continue to muddle along without event. In other words, would it be worse for us all if the West abandoned its historic faith, and ... nothing happened? After all, the faith is all but dead in Western Europe, but Europe is a paradise compared to the rest of the world. I think any serious conservative thinker must at least consider to what extent he is emotionally invested in the idea of civilization's collapse absent traditional religion. It is impossible to say, but the thought itself should work as a caution on declinist projections.
That said, I want to honor this generous letter with a serious attempt -- not a long one, I hope -- to make a case for why I believe the death of Christianity would mean, in time, a civilizational catastrophe for the West. It's not a purely Christian case, either, but rather a case built on the idea that the Enlightenment is a radical break from the classical and Christian roots of Western civilization, one that I cannot see ending in anything but trouble.
The best and clearest thing I've read recently about this is the first chapter in Dutch law professor and philosopher Andreas Kinneging's "The Geography of Good and Evil," recently published in English translation by ISI Books. Kinneging, in whose company I had the pleasure of spending an hour or two a few years back on a trip to the Netherlands, is a serious philosophical conservative living and working in a thoroughly secular country that is, in almost every respect, the perfect realization of Enlightenment ideals. He can see perhaps more clearly than many American or British conservatives what the Enlightenment project means for the West. And he's brilliant. When Kinneging speaks about such things, we ought to listen.
Kinneging points out that modern conservatism rose in response to the Enlightenment and its premiere fruit, the French Revolution. A chief philosophical dispute between conservatism and Enlightenment liberalism is over man's capacity for reason. Liberals have far more faith in the capacity for reason to improve man's estate than do conservatives, who are more skeptical. Writes Kinneging, "Conservatism regards Enlightenment thinking as a form of hubris."
More importantly, says Kinneging, is the way liberalism and conservatism view human nature and will. Conservatives, in general, believe that human nature is inclined toward evil, is ineradicably flawed, though the effects of this tendency towards disorder, disharmony and vice can be ameliorated. We can know good and evil, and we all have an obligation to resist evil, and to conquer the inner passions that work against goodness. If we cannot conquer those inner passions, and conform our individual and collective lives toward the Good, we cannot hope to live in a free, just and prosperous society.
Liberals, in contrast, view human nature as essentially good, or at least neutral, corrupted only by society. It's not that liberals don't recognize evil; obviously many do, and have heroically battled against the evils of our time (even when, as in the Jim Crow South, conservatives stood on the wrong side). It's that liberalism has abandoned any authoritative metaphysical grounding in which to root its views of good and evil. Liberals, in other words, believe that we can be good without God. Most conservatives (though not all) would say that given what human beings are, this is difficult for most of us, over time, to pull off. Kinneging observes that for conservatives, moral conscience is the key to our humanity, and thus to civilization, but the individual conscience can never be the sole source of moral authority. It can lose its edge, and its force, over time, "if it does not receive regular reinforcement from external sources" (e.g., religion, the law).
Kinneging points out that many of these conservative insights into human nature and morality are embodied in Christianity, but they can also be found among most philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who share with Christians "the conviction of the innate evil in man and the necessity of, and the call to, a change of heart." Conservatism is, in Kinneging's view, a conscious defense of the classical and Christian legacies against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and the liberal and socialist philosophies descending from them.
Liberals tend to believe that man's desires do not have to conform to any sort of binding metaphysical standard of right and wrong, but that individuals and communities have the right to choose their own standards, within broad limits. Liberals, according to Kinneging, believe that reason primarily functions to allow individuals to realize their desires. He writes:
To both the Enlightenment thinkers and the tradition, evil manifests itself in the tension between man's desires and the world. But while the tradition interpreted this tension as commanding the will to conform man's desires to to the world, the enlightenment thinkers -- in a radical redefinition of the human condition -- saw it as commanding the will to bring the world more in line with man's desires.How can the tension between man's desires and the world be eliminated? Both the Enlightenment and the tradition see reason as the primary instrument for this purpose. But each finds a different role for reason. To the Christian and classical tradition, the function of reason is to order and temper the desires, to keep them within the bounds of reason, while the Enlightenment sees its task as recreating the world according to our desires.
The new scientific method, programmatically expressed by Bacon and exemplified by newton, was considered the paradigmatic use of reason by the Enlightenment thinkers. ... Scientific research would bring light in the darkness, would allow man to finally master his fate. Thanks to science, the world would eventually be brought into conformity with man's desires, and evil would thus be overcome. Out with those old books, full of meaningless words and dubious metaphysics. We must free ourselves from our old preconceptions and begin anew by investigating "the book of nature" scientifically. Those who are familiar with the laws of nature are no longer at the mercy of that nature but can harness it to their cart.
The scientific approach of natural sciences could and should be applied to man and society, the Enlightenment thinkers believed, because they saw no fundamental differences between body and mind, man and matter, culture and nature.
This is a good place to mention that I believe the most important events in the West in the 20th century were World War I and the Holocaust. The war utterly demolished the idea of progress. And the Holocaust showed us that the most culturally and technologically advanced people on the planet are perfectly capable of deploying all their knowledge to rationally murdering six million human beings. I do not see how it is possible to have faith in humankind's innate goodness and reasonability after the 20th century. Science has obviously produced incalculable goods for us all; no sane person can possibly deny it. But science is an amoral enterprise, one unavoidably subject to the direction and manipulation of the societies in which it is carried out. In Cambridge this summer, Dame Gillian Beer discussed with our Templeton fellows group how Darwin's discoveries were taken up by the Victorians. In some cases, imperialists used Darwin's science to justify subjugating weaker nations. Darwin's kinsman and rough contemporary Francis Galton used his cousin's revolutionary discoveries to establish a new form of science he christened "eugenics."
Eugenics became enormously popular throughout the West, and was championed by the most enlightened and progressive scientists, politicians, industrialists and cultural leaders. Had the Germans not taken eugenic concepts to their natural conclusions -- the gas chamber -- one shudders to think what would have become of us all. As Christine Rosen has documented, in the US in the early 20th century, only (most) Catholics and Christian fundamentalists -- both of whom were marginal to political power at the time -- stood against eugenics, and did so because they believed eugenics to be fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. But the more liberal churches embraced eugenics. As Kevin Shapiro noted in Commentary:
In many ways Darwin's work had prepared the ground. Confronted with the scientific "fact" of evolution, many clergymen felt an acute sense of status anxiety over their role as purveyors of spiritual truth. Traditionalists and conservatives among them took refuge in the reaffirmation of biblical infallibility; for liberal religious leaders, however, the challenge was to embrace the new sciences and embark on a program of social reform--or else face irrelevance.
The point to be taken here is not that traditional religionists were on solid intellectual ground in affirming the literal truth of the Bible. They weren't, and aren't today. The lesson here is one of epistemic humility -- that is, we humans can know far less than we think we can. Fundamentalists were absolutely correct to condemn the eugenicists -- though insofar as they did so by appealing to the literal scientific truth of Holy Writ, they err. But scientists and progressive religionists who believed they had to conform faith and morals to the scientific Zeitgeist were also terribly wrong.
Yet today, we seem incapable of learning from this relatively recent history, and establishing a more realistic relationship between scientific knowledge and religious wisdom, neither of which can produce on its own an adequate account of reality, and each of which would be tyrannical if allowed to dominate. I am a conservative in large part because I distrust human nature, and what will become of humankind once we cast off the fetters of traditional morality, and presume to remake the world in our own image. This is the world we now have, though; the Enlightenment has routed the conservatives. Even the party that calls itself conservative in our country is in fact a liberal party, certainly when it comes to how it views economics and the market. The West is in thrall to the same Enlightenment hubris.
Now, my correspondent says that he and his wife grew up ignorant of the Western religious tradition, and asks (implicitly) why it is that people like me find this to be such a troubling secular issue. He can understand why a religious believer would worry about the fate of his soul, but he asks why we religious folks are so concerned about the fate of our civilization absent its traditional religion. It's a perfectly reasonable question. We'll start answering it with Kinneging:
[The] virtual disappearance [of the classical and Christian traditions] from the popular imagination is a relatively recent development. World War I was the prelude, but the cultural revolution of the 1960s dealt the deathblow to the tradition. The result is that entire generations have now grown up in complete ignorance of both the classical and the Christian traditions, generations forced to maek do merely with the Enlightenment -- and its even more radical spiritual child, Romanticism.In the eyes of conservatives, this ignorance constitutes the greatest threat now facing civilization. Enlightenment thinking freed man from the inner moral censor that earlier generations considered necessary for keeping him on the right path and for making civilization, humanity and freedom possible. On the other hand, the Enlightenment provided him with an array of technical tools unequaled in history. In other words, Enlightenment thinking turned man into a barbarian armed with an unprecedented array of weapons, a creature that controls everything except himself.
"A creature that controls everything except himself" -- killer phrase, that. If the Enlightenment's convictions were true, why did the 20th century -- the most perfectly Enlightened epoch since the dawn broke on the hunched backs of benighted European in the 17th century -- prove to be the bloodiest and most savage in human history?
I don't have a fully satisfying answer. But the question has to be asked. As philosopher John Gray (himself an atheist/agnostic) likes to say, those atheists who blame religion for violence, religion and all sorts of nasty things have an obligation to examine the way atheists in power have behaved. What they'll find is that there is something wrong with us as a species -- and that the Enlightenment view of human nature is radically insufficient. That is not evidence for God's existence, mind you, but it ought to compel us to rethink the optimism produced by the Enlightenment. And while no reasonable religious person would claim that a religiously-informed society would create paradise on earth, or ever had (in fact, one could easily argue from history that the more of a theocracy any given society is, the more hellish it becomes), I think we are terribly naive if we believe that we in the West can maintain our liberties and our civilization if we are cut off from its roots in the classical and Christian understanding of human nature. We have been free-riding on the Western tradition and its virtues for a very long time, and we cannot coast forever. It requires something like World War I and the Holocaust to show us the skull beneath the thin skin of civilization. I believe it can happen again, and that the further away we pull from our religious roots in Judaism, Christianity and the classical tradition, and the more we come to trust in technology, reason and our own inherent goodness, the closer we get to that kind of civilizational catastrophe.
Of course I hope and pray that I'm wrong. But I wouldn't bet money on it, and I can't help but despair over what I believe is the unwarranted, even dangerous, optimism of our time, and the effective disdain elites (and more than a few of the rest of us) have for the role of religion in our technological era -- that is, to serve not as a source of knowledge, challenge and warning, but rather as a source of therapeutic comfort. Here's Paul Fussell, the scholar best known for "The Great War and Modern Memory," his cultural history of World War I:
The last twenty years of the 19th Century, say 1880 to 1900; those years were characterized by an immense optimism. It was thought that the telegraph, the telephone, ultimately the wireless and the radio were going to civilize human life in a way that it had never been civilized before.
One literally could not have imagined what was to come in just a few short decades. You know what they say about those that can't remember the past.
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Your name, I've dealt with suicide attempts and people left in the aftermath, so do please take this with my sympathy: Your experience with therapy is just not enough to decide that it is all a waste of time. No one, let alone the professionals, is suggesting anything but that therapy is one way to come back from the abyss, not the only way and not a substitute for other ways that are proven capable of the same result.
Consider, please, the difference you point out in the wilderness experience. On person found it on a mountain, you found it on a rocky shore. One location does not debunk the other.
By the way I am the "Your name" that has answered Geoff G twice above. Not trying to hide my identity-- just issues with capricious CAPTCHA.
"David Hume" (Razib Khan) discusses this post over at Secular Right:
http://secularright.org/wordpress/?p=2596
Jon:
For a very large chunk of human history religious charity was unknown. You can search the annals of ancient Greece and find almost no examples of charity, and certainly not of charity based on religious motives or practiced by religious institutions. The Roman state had a public grain dole for wholly practical reasons, to keep the poor from rebelling; no one pretended the gods ordered it or were pleased with it.
Empanda and her temple (which offered asylum and charitable gifts of food to the poor) speaks against your contention. IMO, she sounds like a native Roman goddess who probably functioned in exactly the way I described, a kind of religious-based charitable insurance program against crop failure.
I also found this lovely article (PDF) from the February 8, 1858(!) edition of the New York Times, which discusses quite a bit of pagan Roman charity.
Religion isn't necessary for anyone except those who are suited to it. Atheists preach that they can be good citizens. If they are correct it won't be the end of civilization as we know it.
D J Wray
http://www.atotalawareness.com
"Evolution creates primitive creatures with an ability to host visitors with language skills"
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