{R.R. Reno (who is known, I am told, as ‘Rusty’ to his friends) is a former Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He has been the editor of ‘First Things’ for the past decade; he drew attention in 2020 for a series of articles and tweets in which he said that people wearing masks to protect themselves from COVID were ‘cowards.’ He added that our society was obsessed with human longevity and had an unnatural aversion to death. I should add that Mr. Reno, like everyone associated with ‘First Things,’ is fiercely ‘pro-life.’}
R.R. Reno (from Return of the Strong Gods):
Social convulsions and mass mobilizations dominated the lives of those born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. World War I mustered millions of young men into armies of unprecedented size and marched them into inconclusive battles producing casualties on a shocking scale. No European country emerged from the conflict unchanged.
[In the years that followed], the streets rang with declarations: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Triumph of the Will, Blood and Soil. In those years, fierce gods trampled the benign managerial habits of commerce and the liberal norms of free consent and democratic deliberation. Strong and dark gods stormed through Europe, eventually setting aflame most of the world and bringing death to millions.
The years from 1914 through 1945 were dark with calamity. Almost all our intuitions about how to promote justice and serve the common good have been formed by this civilizational Shoah. We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the “postwar consensus.” Although there has been political contention between the left and the right, it has been a sibling rivalry. The postwar left fixed its attention on moral freedom and cultural deregulation, seeing them as natural extensions of the anti-authoritarian imperative, while the postwar right focused on economic freedom and market deregulation for similar anti-totalitarian reasons.
As the long twentieth century ends, this unified thrust is easier to discern, not least because the establishment Left and Right are closing ranks to denounce populism. The postwar consensus is more than political. Its powerful cultural influence is evident in the emphasis on openness and weakening in highly theorized literary criticism and cultural studies in universities, often under the flag of critique and deconstruction, and in popular calls for diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusivity, all of which entail a weakening of boundaries and opening of borders. Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms. It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life. Openness, weakening, and disenchantment are at play in postwar sociology, psychology, and even theology. In every instance, they rise to prominence because they are seen as necessary to prevent the return of the strong gods.
Anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism inspired a general theory of society. That theory has many forms, some explicit, others tacit. But it is characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong—strong loves and strong truths—leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths. In the shadow of Auschwitz, this general theory has encouraged the development of a variety of anti-metaphysical philosophies and critical therapies. The postwar era saw a shift in our metaphysical dreams to openness and a lightness of being in response to the decades of catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth century.
In pursuit of those dreams the postwar imagination seeks the ministry of weak gods, or better, the gods of weakening who open things up. Today, one of our leading imperatives is inclusion, a god who softens differences. Transgression is prized for breaking down boundaries—opening things up. Diversity and multiculturalism suggest no authoritative center. The free market promises spontaneous order, miraculously coordinating our free choices, also without an authoritative center. Denigrating populist challenges to the political establishment as spasms of a “tribal mind” is a reductive critique that disenchants.
We must stop acting as if it were 1945. The postwar consensus, however fitting in its earlier stages, is decadent. It is high time that we recognize our intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom from the traumas that so affected our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. We need to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, not the twentieth. This will not be easy. Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems. Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the ‘res’ in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.
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R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Skyhorse Publishing)
R.R. Reno: Self-Portrait
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