The Little Red Blog

Books Report

The Survival of Western Culture, by Ralph Tyler Flewelling (1943)

If ever there was a time when it made sense to worry about “the survival of Western culture,” it was 1943, when a global conflict launched by a lunatic German dictator and an expansionist Japanese empire was at its height. Ralph Tyler Flewelling wrote The Survival of Western Culture before Hiroshima and before the full truth about the Holocaust was widely known; World War II was still undecided, and there was good reason to fear it would be won by the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy).

Flewelling, a Methodist minister and a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, was responding specifically to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West; he was also addressing the growing existential fear that, regardless of which side won the war, Western civilization was in the process of being discredited.

Rejecting scientific materialism (but not science) and modern individualism (but not individual liberties), Flewelling spoke up on behalf of “spiritual achievements as yet embryonic and almost untried, and which may be distinguished from individualism under the higher term ‘personalism’.” Though skeptical of what he called “the myth of automatic progress,” he was nevertheless optimistic: “The democratic order may seem weak and even ephemeral to some,” he wrote, “but the spirit which seeks expression through it is vital and cannot perish.” Sounding distinctly Hegelian, he insisted that “To the very extent that the present world situation is disillusioning, to that extent is the demand for a better order destined to be realized. The age of material achievements, great as they are, cannot provide the permanent satisfactions of the living spirit of man.”

Flewelling’s conclusion—written, remember, in 1943—displays the utterly unjustified optimism of mid-century liberalism:

“For the first time now, we have a widespread conviction in the realm of religion that any goodness, purity, or love anywhere in the world is a manifestation of the Divine Spirit without respect to the special religious system under which it appears. Such recognition bespeaks a coming tolerance which will enable men of good will everywhere to join forces for the furtherance of world peace, of international amity, of a new impetus to the life of the spirit.”

At the same time as Flewelling was writing those words, trains packed with human beings were rolling toward Auschwitz and other extermination camps; smoke rose from the chimneys of death factories. People in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were going about their usual daily business. Flewelling cannot be blamed for not having known that the moral foundations of the modern West were crumbling beneath our feet. Eighty years later, we remain poised precariously atop a shaky new world order with which we have only begun to grapple.

Ralph Tyler Flewelling - Wikipedia

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The Neoconservative Mind, by Gary Dorrien (1993)

Neoconservatism would seem to be yesterday’s news; these days, right-wing Populism is all the rage (literally). But the two phenomena are not unrelated; if nothing else, their shared hatred for modern liberalism makes them kindred spirits.

Writing in 1993—a decade before George W. Bush put neoconservatives like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz in the saddle, egged on by the likes of Bill Kristol and John Bolton—liberal theologian Gary Dorrien undertook the daunting task of explaining The Neoconservative Mind. Dorrien, despite disagreeing with the substance of the neocons’ arguments, found much to admire: “Neoconservatives,” he wrote, “refuse to compromise or apologize for their beliefs, but rather proclaim the superiority of their convictions. Their arguments are advanced with distinctive power and energy. The in-your-face polemical style that they have perfected is less about promoting dialogue with opponents than with demolishing them. Neoconservatism,” Dorrien asserted, “faces up to modernity. It has the potential to become America’s first genuine conservative intellectual tradition.”

I suppose that, in 1993, one could afford to be generous towards an ideological movement that had not yet gained political power or launched, under false pretenses, a disastrous war; a movement that had not yet embraced torture and abandoned America’s support for the Geneva Conventions; a movement that had not yet committed this nation to endless war or to unprecedented domestic surveillance. Such generosity, in retrospect, was as undeserved as it was unreciprocated.

Dorrien’s book took seriously, and examined at some length, several of the leading neoconservative thinkers: Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Novak, and Peter Berger. He traced neoconservatism’s roots in the disastrous ideological wreckage of the 1930s “old Left” and in the subsequent turn by many on the Left to anti-communism in the Fifties. Neoconservatives may have been late to the party thrown by the likes of ex-Communists like James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Whittaker Chambers, Will Herberg, and John dos Passos, all of whom had gravitated from Left to Right in the Fifties; but when they finally arrived, they made up for lost time with renewed enthusiasm for the ideological fight.

Dorrien believed the neocons had much to offer, despite their bellicosity. He thought that, because of their previous history on the Left, they could provide the synthesis of conservatism and liberalism that America needed. For Dorrien, “a genuine American conservatism would preserve what was most valuable in the American experience. It would prefer Washington and Calhoun over Jefferson and Jackson, but it would not disassociate itself from the Jeffersonian tradition. It would be anticommunist but opposed to McCarthyism. It would promote capitalism while also supporting trade unionism; it would accept many of the economic reforms of the New Deal as a bulwark against socialism. It would blend Lockean liberalism and Burkean conservatism.”

It would also, one assumes, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan; it would be less filling, but it would also taste great. 

In the real world, while Dorrien was assessing neoconservatism through rose-colored glasses, Patrick Buchanan was busy announcing a jihad against modern liberalism, Ross Perot was busy establishing mindless Populism as a viable political alternative, and Newt Gingrich was busy enacting an American version of Carl Schmitt’s “politics as trench warfare”. The balanced, thoughtful, sensible conservatism that Dorrien sought, and even thought he had found, was nowhere in evidence outside the academy and (perhaps) the pages of Commentary magazine.

Dorrien claimed that, while neoconservatism was “not yet the reflective, deeply rooted, American conservatism” that the country needed, it was nonetheless “the most serious and still-promising effort of its kind that Americans are likely to see.” The sad truth is that he may well have been right.    

Gary Dorrien - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: Prophets and Loss

{Pascal was sniffing around a stack of books on “Christus Victor” theology when he found an unexpected, albeit unrelated, treasure. He shares his reaction to it here, at some length.}

“They do not know how to do right,” declares the LORD, “who store up in their fortresses what they have plundered and looted. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Book of Amos)

When it comes to theology and scriptural exegesis: Lord, I do love a crank, an eccentric, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. And while it may be impertinent of me to describe as a “crank” a man so credentialed and distinguished as Professor Morris Silver, allow me to present my evidence. ¹

In 1983, Morris Silver published Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. The book was neither a best-seller nor a critical favorite, though even reviewers who opposed Silver’s thesis acknowledged his indefatigable multi-discipline research into his subject. “Silver's book will be useful to many because of the wealth of material he has collected,” one reviewer grudgingly conceded; another praised Silver’s “meticulousness and logic,” calling the book “a vivid example of how powerful the tenets of economic behavior can be in ordering even limited evidence.” A study of ancient Israel’s political economy might stir mild academic interest and/or disagreement, but it does not seem to be the stuff of major controversy.

Until, that is, you look at Silver’s main thesis:

The writing prophets of the eighth-seventh centuries—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and Ezekiel—succeeded in committing the rulers of Israel and Judah to welfarist reforms. With the support of the state’s armed might they unleashed a “prophetic revolution.” The ill-conceived policies severely damaged the economy and morale. Traditional historiography holds that Israel and Judah fell because the prophetic counsel was ignored. In fact, whatever its presumed moral virtue, the advice of the classical prophets was destructive from the standpoint of economic affluence and political strength. In the end, the prophets did not succeed in transforming the Israelite. Since they understood neither the man nor Israelite society, they succeeded only in making the former miserable while destroying the latter.

If you wonder why economics is sometimes called “the dismal science,” consider Morris Silver’s audacity in besmirching the reputation of the hallowed Old Testament prophets; consider how, as an economist, Profess Silver blithely dismissed the “presumed moral virtue” of the prophets’ declarations, as though calls to moral betterment were a mere distraction from the business of piling up treasure on earth.

Mustering economic and archaeological data I am not qualified to assess, Silver concluded that “By the beginning of the eighth century BCE, Israel and Judah [were experiencing] a glittering era of prosperity and power.” Why, then, did buzzkills like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah choose that time to denounce the nation in the name of (and at the command of) its God? What is so wrong with prosperity and power, even if somewhat unequally distributed? According to an earlier book by Silver (Affluence, Altruism, and Atrophy: The Decline of Welfare States), “Altruism or the taste for helping others is one of the ‘higher needs’ described by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow. [Research and behavioral evidence] suggest that affluence increases the demand for altruistic consumption, which often takes the form of state actions to improve the lot of the poor.” ²

By “altruistic consumption,” Silver meant “indulging in the senseless luxury of trying to help others”. In other words, the prophets were “social reformers,” over-educated and out-of-touch elites who, consumed by guilt over their own privileged lives and/or worried about potential social unrest (which they helped to stoke), demanded that the state implement policies to achieve “social justice”.

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Writing in the early Eighties, Silver was, for all intents and purposes, composing a revisionist gospel of Reaganomics. He accused ancient Israel’s elite of “talking to itself” through the medium of prophecy. “The struggle for social justice [in ancient Israel],” wrote Silver, was an effort by “the wealthy, both royal and non-royal, with the guidance of the prophets, to employ state power to nullify the laws of economics and society. These well-meaning but uncomprehending efforts backfired disastrously.” ³

As Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you, so why bother?” In Silver’s analysis, the prophets—reformers brimming with misplaced compassion and wielding well-intentioned blueprints for social reconstruction (“fundamental transformation,” as it were)—were the bane of Israel and the proximate cause of its downfall. ⁴ Barry Bandstra and John Lunn summarized Silver’s charge: “The governments of Israel and Judah responded to the calls of the prophets for land reform and other measures to aid the poor, and the reforms weakened the economies of the two nations, ultimately leading to Israel’s defeat by the Assyrians and Judah’s defeat by the Babylonians.”

“Silver’s hypothesis,” Bandstra and Lunn went on to say, “questions the use of the Old Testament prophets in evaluating modern societies. Following the ideas of Amos or Isaiah would harm rather than help the poor. Silver’s analysis upends the views of most Christians about the prophets,” they concluded. But maybe those views deserve to be upended, based as they are on flawed economic reasoning and on false assumptions about human nature? Incentives matter: give a man a fish, as Paul Ryan would tell you, and he’ll stay in his hammock all day long.

In the opinion of Morris Silver, to take at face value what the Old Testament prophets had to say about Israel’s economy and society would be “like writing a history of the US economy relying solely on the opinions of Ralph Nader.” Moreover, “From the perspective of the prophets (and of many modern social reformers), any economic transaction between a rich person and a poor person [qualified as] robbery, whether it was legal and uncoerced or not.” To hear the likes of Amos and Micah tell it, there is such a thing as systemic injustice, what we might call society’s “preferential option for the rich”. Professor Silver will have none of that. The Old Testament prophets, by preaching a God of social justice rather than cultic or national solidarity, actively sought to undermine both those latter elements; “the ordinary Israelite could not be converted to a new religion of social justice and social reform until he had been robbed of the peace of mind and the sense of belonging provided by the ancient religion.”

Silver did not hesitate to draw the obvious comparison: “The Israelite society portrayed by Amos and his successors suffers terribly from severe oppression of the poor, injustice, commercial dishonesty, and official corruption, all of which are linked to the lifestyle of a well-to-do middle class. The central image is one that is familiar to modern Americans, namely the blight of poverty amid affluence. There can be no doubt,” Silver wrote, “that the prophets were social reformers. For them, social injustice is neither private nor inevitable; it can and must be eliminated by a resolute act of social will. And the will—that is, the necessary force—is to be supplied by the state.”

In case the reader has not yet gotten the message, Professor Silver spells it out: “Modern liberalism is the closest contemporary analog to the program of the prophets. Motivated by idealism or personal ambition, [liberals] seek, with the support of the affluent, to commit the rulers to programs of social amelioration and regeneration.” He allows that “the prophets were authoritarians, not social democrats. For them, extremism in defense of social justice is the supreme virtue, while the passive acceptance of injustice is a vice. At times the prophets seem to play the role of revolutionaries and their oracles have the ring of sedition.” Nonetheless, the parallels with liberals today are clear.

Even apart from its contemporary political implications, Silver’s analysis did not persuade most reviewers. “Not being a biblical scholar,” wrote one, “Silver makes many mistakes, and his lack of training in biblical studies [inevitably results in] a lack of method.” Bandstra and Lunn accused Silver of “misusing the models he employs to draw unwarranted conclusions” and to “claim ‘facts’ that are not in evidence in either the Scriptures or the archaeological record.” 

Morris Silver had anticipated criticisms, especially those which would dismiss his work as “a conservative polemic against liberal social reformers.” He lamented that “modern liberal-minded attitudes,” along with “presumptions of a Marxist-Leninist character,” had led to inaccurate (or meretricious) assessments of ancient Israel’s economic conditions. His research led Silver to insist that “there is no reason to believe that the [Israelite] poor became poorer”; rather, “there is abundant reason to conclude that an appreciable number of Israelite citizens became men of means during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.” A rising tide lifts all arks!

Silver’s thesis, of course, hinged in part on the claim that the prophets had significant influence and that their social critiques were translated into government policy. Again, Bandstra and Lunn: “The evidence from Hebrew scriptures does not provide an answer to whether Israel or Judah engaged in land reform and other welfarist actions.” For that matter, they add, “Although the biblical evidence is not straightforward, Silver utilizes the most skeptical school of thought regarding the scriptures’ reliability.” Not to overstate the obvious: “Silver’s characterization of the prophets is not typical for biblical scholars.” Silver himself, in a 1995 publication, described his proposition as ‘startling,’ which did not mean he intended to retract it.

Reading through the work of both Silver and his critics, one is amazed at the amount of dogged research that goes into this level of scholarship. Interpreting ancient documents written in archaic languages, correlating them with other contemporaneous materials, sifting through archaeological finds, and trying to piece together fragments of a culture distant from us in so many ways: all that is an extraordinary undertaking. No wonder scholars disagree—there is so much to disagree about, and so many ways to disagree about it.

That said, and given my own modern liberal-minded bias, I would like simply to conclude that Morris Silver was wrong about ancient Israel and about the Old Testament prophets; but I have, if I am being honest, no grounds for doing so. Silver’s thesis goes against the grain and against everything I have ever read or heard about Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah, and the other prophets; their words continue to inspire and to echo through the millennia, and I for one would rather not think of them as the mistaken proclamations of economically illiterate bleeding-heart reformers.

After all, man does not live by the “laws of economics” alone, but by the sharing of both bread and sorrow, of weal and of woe. Morris Silver’s market-based critique of prophetic calls for social justice may be economically defensible, but it will not get an “Amen” from me; as for me and my house, we will take our business elsewhere.

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Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. By Morris Silver.

Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel | Morris Silver - Academia.edu

Markets and Prophets: An Examination of the Silver Hypothesis* | Barry Bandstra - Academia.edu

¹ Morris Silver is Professor Emeritus of Economics at City College of New York. A member of the American Economics Association and a veteran of the U.S. military, Silver holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University.

² According to Doug Bandstra and John Lunn, Silver argues that “Political altruism tends to become perverse, weakening the economy and the society, in part because it is based on a taste for ‘doing good’ even when the results may not be good. Silver adds, ‘Altruism becomes dangerous because of the range of policy options available, the kinds of options selected, and above all the massive scale and persistence with which the attempt to improve society is carried through.’” As Silver explained the evidence, the prophets’ calls for economic justice were “perverse” and even harmful to the very people whose cause they claimed to champion.

³ Writing in 1983, Silver could have been providing a template for future works by the likes of Charles Murray (Losing Ground) and Marvin Olasky (The Tragedy of American Compassion). While the Invisible Hand of the Market is adept at turning self-interest into social gains, it seems to be all thumbs when it comes to spinning the straw of compassion into the gold of prosperity (see my forthcoming monograph, “The Rumpelstiltskin Economy”.) In fairness, the Invisible Hand is, after all, only a hand; maybe we need to give it an Invisible Heart?  

⁴ This is entirely irrelevant, but the online dictionary (“Oxford Languages”), while defining “bane” as “a cause of great distress or annoyance,” employs the following example: “The bane of the decorator is the long, narrow hall.” I must admit that, of all the baneful things in the world, that one would never have occurred to me. 

Thus says a voice in my head to which no one else is privy:

"Thou shalt not bite the hand that feeds thee, nor kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Neither is there such a thing as a free lunch. Those who do not work shall not eat." 

 

 

Saturday Lecture: The Social Construction of History

“Memory is the thread of personal identity, history of public identity.” (Richard Hofstadter)

“Historical memory contributes to the social construction of reality.” (Robert Wilken)

Robert Wilken (from The Myth of Christian Beginnings):

Memory is part of self-understanding and identity. Memories of our past become the vehicles by which we understand, identify, and find our place in the world. What memory is in the lives of individuals, history is for nations. The past is often more alive for a nation than it is for an individual. The way nations imagine and reconstruct their pasts, the times they choose to recall as well as the times they choose to forget, the idealizing and romanticizing of whole epochs, the embellishing of seemingly insignificant events, the creation of heroic types and symbols out of unknown men and women, are as much a clue to a nation’s self-understanding as its laws, political institutions, music, literature, or art. Men need a past, and if they do not have one, they will invent one to suit their purposes. A nation, like an individual, cannot bear the idea that it has no beginning and no history.

In the early years of this country, it seemed that, in comparison with the European nations, had no history. At first Americans took pride in not having a past. Instead of a past, America had a future, and this was more pleasing for the imagination to contemplate. Even so, there had to be a past—so why not Europe? All Europe, some said, was the American past, and the experiment in the new land was only the next stage in the development of European history.

Eventually, however, Americans began to create their own unique past—legends, sculptures, monuments, shrines, ballads, heroes, villains. What a past it was! The Americans outdid everyone else. The new nation was unique, without peer, unparalleled in the history of mankind—the chosen people. Until the appearance of the American nation, said President Woodrow Wilson, “The great body of our fellow human beings have been kept under the will of men who exploited them and did not give them the full right to live and to realize the purpose that God meant them to realize.” The nation signified a new beginning, the settling of a virgin land unmolested by the dirty hands of previous generations, for in this people the world was about to enter a new era in which the kingdom of heaven will fully come on earth.

In the space of two centuries, the small bands that had settled on the eastern shore of the continent had tamed the land, built cities, established universities, won independence from mighty Britain, mastered a vast continent, and founded democratic institutions unparalleled anywhere in the world. What wonders God had worked among these people in the new world!

The conviction that the United States had a mission to redeem mankind grew out of the historical interpretation of the uniqueness of the American past. Even to this day, the belief in a ‘redeemer nation’ shapes the self-understanding of this nation, influences its way of life, education, and culture. It even determines aspects of our foreign policy. Such a vision of America was a credible interpretation of the American past, but the heroic view demanded much forgetfulness. Americans have their spells of amnesia. The other side of the American past—the exploitation and extermination of the American Indians, the devastation of the land, the rapacity and opportunism of American business, the prejudice against blacks (and, paradoxically, against immigrants and foreigners), the violence of American life: these were forgotten, no doubt because the future promised that the nation’s dream could one day come true.

In 1968, the report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence noted how forgetfulness is characteristic of the American view of the past:

 “Americans have been given to a kind of historical amnesia that masks much of their turbulent past. Probably all nations share this tendency to sweeten, through collective repression, memories of their turbulent past; but Americans have magnified this process of selective recollection, owing to our historic perspective of ourselves as a latter-day chosen people, a new Jerusalem.” ¹

Historians can debunk myths about our past, they can reinterpret the historical record and rewrite the schoolbooks, but they cannot ignore or easily dispel the magic of historical memory to mold men’s lives and thoughts. Historical memory has a life of its own; it contributes to the social construction of reality. What people consider ‘real’ or ‘plausible’ rests, in part, on historical constructions of the past. This does not mean that the historical memories of communities are false because they have been ‘constructed’. It simply means that, on the basis of the same historical data, different interpretations are possible and arise as much out of the collective imagination of communities as they do out of the historical ‘facts’.

When sociologists speak of reality as constructed, they mean that the worlds people inhabit are the products of the people who make them; the worlds derive their reality from human beings who continually reproduce them in their lives. To speak of historical constructions of the past is to speak of the way the memory of the past is formed by the experiences of a community and kept alive as the community reproduces these memories in its ongoing life. Someone living outside the community may have quite a different perception of the same historical events.

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Wilken, Robert L(ouis) 1936- | Encyclopedia.com

¹ “Violence in America” was the title of the bipartisan March 1968 report from what was popularly known as the Kerner Commission (after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois). The report singled out racism, inequality, and lack of opportunity as the primary reasons for urban violence. A month after the report was released, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered; riots broke out in over one hundred cities. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. That fall, Richard Nixon won the presidency, in part on the strength of his campaign promise to restore and enforce “law and order” in American cities. Kerner Commission - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: The Disease of Civilization

Richard Heinberg (from “Was Civilization a Mistake?”):

Here we are, some of the most civilized people on the planet, discussing in the most civilized way imaginable whether civilization itself might be an error. Most of our fellow civilians would likely find our discussion, in addition to being ironic, also disturbing and pointless: after all, what person who has grown up with cars, electricity, and television would relish the idea of living without a house, and of surviving only on wild foods?

Regardless, a critique of civilization is virtually inescapable for two reasons.

The first has to do with certain deeply disturbing trends in the modern world. We are, it seems, killing the planet. Revisionist “wise use” advocates tell us there is nothing to worry about; dangers to the environment, they say, have been wildly exaggerated. To me this is the most blatant form of wishful thinking. By most estimates, the oceans are dying, the human population is expanding far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the land, the ozone layer is dis- appearing, and the global climate is showing worrisome signs of instability. Unless drastic steps are taken, in 50 years the vast majority of the world’s population will likely be existing in conditions such that the lifestyle of virtually any undisturbed primitive tribe would be paradise by comparison.

Now, it can be argued that civilization per se is not at fault, that the problems we face have to do with unique economic and historical circumstances. But we should at least consider the possibility that our modern industrial system represents the flowering of tendencies that go back quite far. This, at any rate, is the implication of recent assessments of the ecological ruin left in the wake of the Roman, Mesopotamian, Chinese and other prior civilizations. Are we perhaps repeating their errors on a gargantuan scale?

If my first reason for criticizing civilization has to do with its effects on the environment, the second has to do with its impact on human beings. As civilized people, we are also domesticated. We are to primitive peoples as cows and sheep are to bears and eagles. On the rental property where I live in California, my landlord keeps two white domesticated ducks. These ducks have been bred to have wings so small as to prevent them from flying. This is a convenience for their keepers but, compared to wild ducks, these are pitiful creatures.

Many primal peoples tend to view us as pitiful creatures, too — though powerful and dangerous because of our technology and sheer numbers. They regard civilization as a sort of social disease. We civilized people appear to act as though we were addicted to a powerful drug — a drug that comes in the forms of money, factory-made goods, oil, and electricity. We are helpless without this drug, so we have come to see any threat to its supply as a threat to our very existence. Therefore, we are easily manipulated — by desire (for more) or fear (that what we have will be taken away) — and powerful commercial and political interests have learned to orchestrate our desires and fears in order to achieve their own purposes of profit and control. If told that the production of our drug involves slavery, stealing, and murder, or the ecological equivalents, we try to ignore the news so as not to have to face an intolerable double bind.

Since our present civilization is patently ecologically unsustainable in its present form, it follows that our descendants will be living very differently in a few decades, whether their new way of life arises by conscious choice or by default. If humankind is to choose its path deliberately, I believe that our deliberations should include a critique of civilization itself. The question implicit in such a critique is, what have we have done poorly or thoughtlessly in the past that we can do better now?

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Richard Heinberg - Wikipedia and Richard Heinberg.com

{Heinberg’s essay can be found in John Zerzan’s anthology, Against Civilization, a classic of the genre. The book, first published in 1999, includes selections from Thoreau, William Morris, Freud, Max Horkheimer, Chellis Glendinning, Edward Abbey, Kirkpatrick Sale, Ivan Illich, Theodore Roszak, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Griffin, and many more. It is, in other words, a veritable “who’s who” of cranks, eccentrics, dreamers, anarchists, and all those who rage against the machine.}  

[Photo from itsgoingdown.org]

 

Saturday Lecture: The American Temperament

{Written a century ago, this essay characterizes Americans as adventurous, individualistic, practical, optimistic, and dedicated to a gospel of hard work and material prosperity. The essay also expresses a certain uneasiness about a country where ‘men and even houses are easily moved about and no one, almost, lives where he was born or believes what he was taught.’}    

George Santayana, from “Materialism and Idealism” (1920):

If there are immense differences between individual Americans, yet there is a great uniformity in their environment, customs, temper, and thoughts. ¹ They have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistibly in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career. Hence, a single ideal figment can cover a large part of what each American is in his character, and almost the whole of what most Americans are in their social outlook and political judgments.

The American is the most adventurous, or the descendant of the most adventurous of Europeans. It is in his blood to be socially a radical, though perhaps not intellectually. What has existed in the past, especially in the remote past, seems to him not only not authoritative, but irrelevant, inferior, and outworn. He finds it rather a sorry waste of time to think about the past at all. But his enthusiasm for the future is profound; he can conceive of no more decisive a way of recommending an opinion than to say that it is what everybody is coming to adopt. This expectation of what he approves, or approval of what he expects, makes up his optimism. It is the necessary faith of the pioneer.

What maintains this temperament and makes it national is social contagion or pressure—something immensely strong in democracies. The luckless American who is born a conservative, or who is drawn to poetic subtlety, pious retreats, or exotic passions, nevertheless has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform, and prosperity dinned into his ears; every door is open in this direction and shut in the other; so that he either folds up his heart and withers in a corner—in remote places you sometimes find such a solitary gaunt idealist—or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save his soul—or perhaps not to save it.

The optimism of the American pioneer is not limited to his view of himself and his own future: it starts from that; but feeling assured, safe, and cheery within, he looks with smiling and most kindly eyes on everything and everybody about him. In his affections the American is seldom passionate, often deep, and always kindly. If it were given me to look into the depths of a man’s heart, and I did not find goodwill at the bottom, I would say without any hesitation, You are not an American. But as the American is an individualist, his goodwill is not officious. His instinct is to think well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he has given his neighbor a chance he thinks he has done enough for him; but he feels it is his absolute duty to do that. It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America.

Consider, though, the great emptiness of America: not merely the primitive physical emptiness, surviving in some regions, and the continental spacing of the chief natural features, but also the moral emptiness of a settlement where men and even houses are easily moved about, and no one, almost, lives where he was born or believes what he has been taught. Not that the American has jettisoned these impedimenta in anger; they have simply slipped from him as he moves. Great empty spaces bring a sort of freedom to both body and soul. You may pitch your tent where you will; or, if ever you decide to build anything, it can be in a style of your own devising. You have room, fresh materials, few models, and no critics. You trust your own experience, not only because you must, but because you find you may do so safely and prosperously; the forces that determine fortune are not yet too complicated for one man to explore. Your detachable condition makes you lavish with money and cheerfully experimental; you lose little if you lose all, since you remain completely yourself.

At the same time, your absolute initiative gives you practice in coping with novel situations and in being original; it teaches you shrewd management. Your life and mind will become dry and direct, with few decorative flourishes. In your works everything will be stark and pragmatic; you will not understand why anybody should make those little sacrifices to instinct or custom which we call grace. The fine arts will seem to you academic luxuries, fit to amuse the ladies, like Greek and Sanskrit; for while you will appreciate generosity in men’s purposes, you will not admit that the execution of these purposes can be anything but business. For the American, the urgency of his novel attack upon matter, his zeal in gathering its fruits, precludes meanderings in primrose paths; devices must be shortcuts and symbols must be mere symbols. If his wife wants luxuries, of course she may have them; and if he has vices, that can be provided for too; but they must all be set down under headings in his ledgers.   

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George Santayana, a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, was born in Spain in 1863. He moved to America at the age of nine and lived in this country for forty years. He studied under William James and Josiah Royce; teaching at Harvard for two decades, his students included Conrad Aiken, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Santayana emigrated to Europe in 1912 and lived there until his death in 1952.

George Santayana - Wikipedia

¹ Santayana adds, almost apologetically, the caveat that “some Americans are black.” Having acknowledged that discomfiting fact, he gives no further thought to the matter.

Saturday Lecture: "A Riot of Incapacity"

{Note: I could not find the publication date for this essay. From contextual clues, it seems to have been written in the early 1920s.}

Ralph Adams Cram (from “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings”):

The doctrine of progressive evolution which became dominant during the last half of the nineteenth century was one of the most calamitous happenings of the last millennium. In union with Protestantism and democracy, and apparently justified in its works by the amazing technological civilization fostered by coal, iron, steam, and electricity, it is responsible for the present state of society, from which there is no escape, it would seem, except through comprehensive calamity.

The entire scheme of progressive evolution was based on a very partial and limited knowledge of geological, biological, and anthropological facts, and on a particularly faulty deductive process, whereby the nature of man, the period of his existence in time and space, his relationship to other forms of life, his inherent potency and his ultimate destiny were gravely misinterpreted, with the result that he has been possessed by delusions of grandeur that have made it impossible for him justly to estimate his own acts, to acquire a right standard of values, or consciously to provide against the issue of his own follies and parlous courses.

According to this doctrine, man was the crown of an immemorial sequence of inevitable development from lower to higher, engineered by myriads of small, upward steps: from primeval slime in an ever ascending line to the glorious product of the Victorian era. Logically, or so it was thought, this would continue indefinitely, with an ever extending horizon of ever increasing glory and honor. The prospect was alluring; it was no wonder that it was accepted with avidity. What glory awaited in the proximate future if only the new things were pushed to the limit and the old and outworn things relentlessly cast aside.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, these ideas were in the ascendant. Since the Great War, however, there has been a very striking transformation in the attitude of thinking men towards their own time. Where once as an irrational overriding confidence in the destiny of man and in the methods and devices by which it was ultimately to be achieved, there is now a growing doubt as to the validity of pretty much anything. The Industrial Age has fallen into chaos. The machine has become a Frankenstein monster, nationalism a menace of further and final war. Both domestic and foreign politics come close to being a riot of incapacity, while crime increases and becomes more widespread and intimate, the domestic and social organisms more perilously poised on the rim of dissolution. The intellectual life, compared even to the last half of the nineteenth century, is arid and sterile, while art has achieved its nemesis in the movies, jazz, modernist architecture, the ‘comic strip,’ and the subway magazines.

One good sign is that physical science has lost its cocksureness of fifty years ago and no longer thinks it knows all about everything or even very much about anything except the most obvious phenomena. Most encouraging of all, however, is the fact that at last we are beginning to reconsider our standard of values, analyze institutions and achievements, and above all to draw comparisons between men, rediscovering the great figures of our historic past, evaluating them anew, rating their times in terms of their own qualities, and placing against them for contrast what we today have to offer. It is a salutary proceeding that has issued in manifold revelations, while its implications are singularly valuable in the light they throw on the dissolving dream of progressive evolution.

We have but to consider our present estate, when, at the summit of our Darwinian advance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest and the development of species have resulted in a condition where, with all the resources of a century and a half of unparalleled scientific and mechanical development, we confront a situation so irrational and apparently hopeless of solution that there is not a scientist, a politician, an industrialist, a financier, a philosopher, or a parson who has the faintest idea how we got that way or how we are to get out of it.

Free and compulsory education, democratic government and universal suffrage, and the unlimited opportunities of industrial civilization: these have clothed men with the deceptive garments of progressive evolution, but underneath he is forever the same. It is not until we are confronted with a thing like the Bolshevik reign of terror; or the futility of popular government as we see it in the sort of men that we choose to govern us in our cities, our state legislatures, and our national Congress; or the bluntness of intellect and lack of vision in big business and finance; or consider the monkeyshines of popular culture; only then are we awakened to a realization of the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong.

We are not behaving like the human beings we imagine ourselves to be because we are still creatures of the Neolithic age whom no camouflage of civilization can change. The gulf that separates us from our ideals is too vast to be bridged by any social, political, or biological formula. Political and social democracy, with their plausible devices and panaceas; popular sovereignty, the religion of the masses; the technological triumphs that were to emancipate labor and redeem the world; all the multiple manifestations of a free and democratic society fail of their predicted issue, and we find ourselves lapped in confusion and numb with disappointment and chagrin.

I suggest that the cause of our comprehensive failure and the obstacle to recovery is the persistence in ourselves of the Neolithic man and his assumption of universal control.   

_____________

[I have done some light editing for this post. The stylistic flourishes of Mr. Cram's day are, to put it politely, no longer in vogue.]

“Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings” can be found in the anthology The Superfluous Men, edited by Robert Morse Crunden. 

Biographical information on Ralph Adams Cram: Ralph Adams Cram - Wikipedia  Mr. Cram—who, as an architect, designed more churches than you can shake a bishop’s crozier at—is honored (along with Richard Upjohn and John La Farge) by the Episcopal Church with a feast day on December 16.

A Ralph Adams Cram Joint: The Cathedral of St. John the Divine 

 

 

 

 

 

The Joy of Heresy (Part 2)

{It has been suggested to me that very few people share my interest in early Christian heresies or in the ditheistic system of Marcion of Sinope. I find this difficult to believe. Is this not still a Christian nation? And ought Christians not to be on guard against the revival of ancient heresies such as Gnosticism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism? The roads to Hell are many and varied, filled with seductive roadside attractions and a plethora of unknown unknowns; the more we learn about the landscape of heresy, the better we can avoid it.} ¹

“In holding the idea that the revelation of God in Christ was transitory rather than intrinsic to the godhead itself, Marcion anticipated the modalist-Monarchians such as Praxeas and Sibellius. His Christology inevitably led him in the direction of patripassianism.” (R. Joseph Hoffmann, from Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity)

Whatever happened to the Modalist Monarchians? They were one of the best of the New Wave/punk pseudo-apostolic bands; Praxeas and Sibellius were the Lennon and McCartney of their era. Perhaps they got lost on their way to Patripassianism; it is, I have heard, a long and winding road, and the signage, in koine Greek and Aramaic, is confusing.  

As we were saying, heresies—by which we mean, divergent views about Jesus and about the implications of his life, death, and resurrection—abounded in the early centuries of Christianity. It was only a matter of time before authorities stepped in to quell the riot of religious and metaphysical speculation. Unfortunately, by the time order was restored, an entire clowder of Gnostic cats had been let out of the bag. We turn again to Rufus Jones (The Church’s Debt to Heretics) for explanation:

It is no exaggeration to say that by the middle of the second century the Church found itself engaged in a life and death struggle with the multitudinous forms of Gnostic religion. With all their variations, they can quite well be grouped under the label, 'the Gnostic complex.'  ‘Complex’ seems a very appropriate word for these movements. The word properly means organized tendencies or sentiments which are in some degree confused, morbid and abnormal. They are usually found in individuals, but here in these movements we are confronted with social waves, or tides, or drifts, of morbid and unbalanced sentiments which were more or less 'contagious.' We have revealed to us in these movements a society which seems neurasthenic and psychopathic—suffering from nervous prostration— in which almost any ‘suggestion’ may powerfully operate and effectively work.

A great many of the Gnostic societies are, of course, not rightly called heretical. They were often wholly outside the sphere and area of the Church. Some of them plainly antedate the birth of the Church, but they tended all the time to influence and color its life and thought, and the movement was the fertile mother of heresies. Christianity has throughout all its history borne the marks of its conflict with this mélange of rival faiths, for while it was ostensibly victorious over them, it was at the same time in some degree 'led captive' by those whom it conquered.

Gnostic writings were given to speculation about the origin of the world and the source of evil, but they were much more akin to magic than to philosophy, and they drew upon mythology and imagination for their constructive material rather than upon rational and verifiable grounds of truth. They are decadent forms of religion, full of confusion, superstition, gullibility, credulity and wild imagination. ²

With all due respect to Rufus Jones: just hold your horses there a minute, buddy. “Mainstream” Christianity was chock-full of so-called "divine revelations," miraculous events, and what might plausibly be called wild imaginings. Paul deliberately eschewed and explicitly denigrated “rational and verifiable grounds of truth” in favor of mystical visions he modestly claimed to have been granted (“whether in the body or out of the body,” he did not know); those visions revealed to him, in his words, "things hidden since the foundation of the world."

As for Gnostics’ belief in magic: I am at a loss as to how anyone can view the transformative effects of pneuma, as described by Paul, as anything other than magic; pneuma was said eventually to transform believers into quasi-divine creatures with authority to judge angels. ³ The Church’s official doctrine of eucharistic “transubstantiation”—bread and wine transmuted into “the body and blood of Christ”—is as magical as the day is long, especially as it is facilitated, according to the Church, by formulaic words being spoken as part of a structured ritual by an authorized priest. You simply cannot get more magical than that.  

Continuing his polemic, Rufus Jones damned Gnostics with the faintest of praise, suggesting they were, at best, industrious scavengers:

Gnostics were very skillful in their use of “the debris of ancient faiths,” out of which they fashioned new and fantastic structures. They “plundered” the older faiths somewhat as the builders of new temples plundered the ancient shrines for their building material. The religions of Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Old Testament and Greece, especially the imaginary world system set forth in Plato’s Timaeus, furnished suggestions, and sometimes even body and filling, for the weird Gnostic “gospel” during the prolific period of the first and second centuries.

Again, with respect: Gnostics were no more guilty of “plundering” than were orthodox Christians, who expropriated in toto the sacred scriptures of ancient Israel, reinterpreting them at will and using them as a cudgel with which to browbeat the Jewish people. Moreover, while the Gnostic gospels were undeniably “weird,” I would hesitate to make that point if I were, like Rufus Jones, an adherent of a religion which worships an incarnate God who was born of a miraculously impregnated virgin and who, after performing all sorts of miracles, allowed himself to be cruelly murdered before rising from the dead like a phoenix from the ashes and then disappearing from the planet for good.

In other words: let whoever is without weird religious ideas of their own cast the first stone at the glass houses of others.

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¹ See Fr. Tim McCauley’s prescient warning: Beware the Neo-Marcionites (crisismagazine.com)

² Pagans like Celsus and Porphyry described Christianity itself in almost identical terms.

³ Pneuma was also said to help build strong bodies 12 ways--I think. 

 

The Little Red Blog's research assistant

The Joy of Heresy

{My research into Paul the apostle has led me to reading about Marcion of Sinope, a 2^nd-century Christian bishop who fell out of favor with orthodoxy over his claim that the God of Jesus was an entirely different God than YHWH, the creator God of the Old Testament. He based this on his reading of Paul’s letters, and he then interpreted (and “corrected”) the gospels accordingly. In a sense, Marcion was the original booster of Pauline Christianity, albeit in a form quickly condemned by other Christian writers. Since Paul’s writings also appealed to some Gnostic groups, he became known by critics as the “apostle to the heretics”. Marcion, with his doctrine of two Gods, had a substantial following, but, as Christian orthodoxy solidified, he was effectively banished from Christian history, only to begin making a comeback starting in the 19^th century. The point I’m trying to make is, Christian history is fascinating, and so are Christian heresies.}

So many heretics, so little time! Such was the lament of Professor Rufus Jones back in 1924, when he published his The Church’s Debt to Heretics. “My greatest difficulty in preparing this volume,” he explained, “has been the problem of selection. The material vastly overflowed my limits of space. I was compelled to choose a few specimens from the prairie harvest which the centuries laid at my hand.” A prairie harvest of heresy! There is a title waiting for its book to be written. “Some readers,” Jones acknowledged, “will look in vain for their pet heretic, while others will find someone praised and glorified whom they would prefer to see burned or at least left to oblivion.”

Christianity did not exactly invent the idea of heresy, but it certainly did its best to perfect and to promote it. Forbidden ideas and forbidden books drew the censure of church authorities ever since there was such a thing as “church authorities”. Paul himself warned against “false apostles” and counterfeit gospels; while his gospel was authorized directly by God and therefore could not be questioned, subsequent Christians had to rely on the Church to refine (and define) orthodoxy for them by sifting heresy from the voluminous deposit of faith—and by the occasional “inquisition” and burning at the stake to make sure everyone took orthodoxy and heresy seriously.

Despite the best efforts of the doctrinal gatekeepers, heresies refused to go away. The Protestant Reformation, by allowing heterodoxy to flourish, let a veritable clowder of heretical cats out of the bag; the Enlightenment came along and made things worse. Twenty years or so ago, Philip J. Lee, a Protestant pastor, felt compelled to write a book (Against the Protestant Gnostics) in which he denounced much of modern Christianity as infected by Gnostic and Pelagian heresies. More recently, the nationally syndicated columnist Ross Douthat, a convert to Roman Catholicism, surveyed the American religious landscape and pronounced it filled with heretics; his book was titled, straightforwardly enough, Bad Religion.

I raise the issue of heresy because I have been reading about post-apostolic Christianity, which was a veritable smorgasbord of religious oddities. My readings of, and about, Paul have made it clear to me that the original “Jesus movement” was much less unified than standard Church history would have us believe; Paul himself encountered resistance to “his” gospel, and his letters largely focused on combating what he saw as misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and demon-inspired opposition to that gospel. Neither Paul nor the other leading apostles—i.e., Peter, James, and John—were able entirely to control the religious and spiritual energies that their movement tapped into and unleashed. In the decades following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (70 CE), and as Jesus’ original disciples and earliest followers died off, extravagant and increasingly inventive versions of the gospel were in circulation—most of which the Church managed, one way or another, to suppress.

One man’s heresy is, of course, another man’s orthodoxy; “right belief” is in the eye, and the heart, of the believer. Second- and third-century Christianity was something of a religious carnival in which various sideshow attractions congregated, from Marcionites to Valentinians and from Docetics to Montanists, with variations of each and with numerous hybrids in different combinations (e.g., Marcionite Gnostics, for instance). The label of “heresy” was applied to these sects both contemporaneously and after the fact by the version of Christianity that ultimately prevailed. Ironically, the Ebionites, a sect of Jewish Christians who hewed closely to Jesus’ teachings and lifestyle, were among the groups judged as heretical, raising the question of whether Jesus would have been accepted—assuming, of course, that he would have wanted to be—by the religion which he supposedly founded. ¹

The point of Rufus Jones’ book (The Church’s Debt to Heretics) was that orthodoxy was clarified, revised, and made explicit in response to “heresy”. He went so far as to claim that heretics provided (or provoked) “discoveries of fresh insight,” and that some of them, at least, were “recipients of new illumination, gifted leaders of unwon causes, prophets of neglected or forgotten truth, and profound interpreters of the deeper significance of life.” Then again, he acknowledged, some heretics were merely “capricious innovators, freakish disturbers, hysterical champions of novelties, and unhappy rebels against whatever exists.” Furthermore, as Jones pointed out, heretics are not necessarily more tolerant or open-minded than their orthodox opponents; in fact, “Heresy asserts a fiery infallibility” of its own. It “challenges the ideas of orthodoxy, insisting that its own ideas are more true and closer to the eternal nature of things.” It would be an exaggeration to say that within every heretic is a potential inquisitor, but it would not be altogether wrong. History is full of sectarians who break with orthodoxy and then attempt to impose their new orthodoxy on members of their sect.

Rufus Jones also noted this distinction:

Orthodoxy in all ages has been concerned with the preservation of an objective system that has come to be considered essential to salvation, since the mission of the Church, in the mind of the faithful, orthodox believer, is to be an instrument of salvation. Orthodoxy has thus, in the main, formed around the essentials for salvation and around theories of eschatology. Heresies, on the other hand, have been more concerned with life, with experience, with maintaining a continuous revelation of the Spirit here and now. They have inclined to shift the emphasis from heaven to earth.

Heretics speak both for the primacy of individual conscience and for the ongoing work of the Spirit. How can the Church, or anyone else, close the books on revelations? Heretics can be disruptive, of course—but is that not the nature of the Spirit? Churches, say the skeptics, are built not just as shelter for believers; they are built to keep the Spirit out.

How can we tell the difference, then, between constructive and destructive dissent? Well, we could ask the Authorities what They think and accept Their verdict. Or we could take our cue from the first-century Rabbi Gamaliel, as quoted in the Book of Acts: “I advise you, Leave these people alone! Let them go! If their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is from God, you will not be able to stop them.” When it comes to heretics, by their fruits, as it were, we shall know them.

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¹ I am being provocative, but only mildly so. Rufus Jones wrote, “What we may properly call ‘Galilean Christianity’ had a short life.” Christianity as it developed became more about believing in Christ than about living like Jesus.

The Heresy III floor-standing speaker from Klipsch

Satan's Limitless Imperialism

{Though some may dispute the relevance of Satan, he has been in the news lately thanks to Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who stated that the Catholic Church is “controlled by Satan,” and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, who is explicitly running against the “Satanic Elites,” the “Satanic Regime,” and the “Luciferian Cabal”. My own interest in Satan is less political, but I applaud Greene and Taylor for their audacity in standing up to the Prince of Darkness. Yesterday, I offered an excerpt from Mark Twain in which he discussed his own lifelong curiosity about Satan; since that excerpt exhibited a streak of irreverence, today I provide a more orthodox perspective.}

It is good to know one’s enemies. For Christians, the primary enemy is Satan, and Christian scholars through the ages have expended much effort (and much ink) to explain Satan, his diabolical nature, and his malevolent intent. ¹

According to Denis de Rougemont (The Devil’s Share), “The Bible informs us that Lucifer is an angel fallen from heaven.” In fact, the Bible says little if anything about Lucifer, but de Rougemont takes Jesus’ statement “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” as definitive.

I have no idea how de Rougemont knows so much about Lucifer/Satan, but I can assure you that none of what follows can be sourced to the Bible:

Angels are spiritual creatures living and functioning on the frontiers of the Eternal and the Creation, of eternity and time. They are divine intentions, messengers, servants flying on lightning wings, whose speed is that of thought, and this is why they are invisible to us; intelligences without fraud, participating in the omniscience of the Creator, and this is why we have difficulty in understanding them. At the summit of the angelic hierarchy are the Archangels. One single Archangel betrayed his mission, his message, and his very being, and this is Lucifer, the bearer of Light. Satan rebelled, he refused to serve, he refused to transmit his divine message, he wished to become original, the author of his own destiny, the bearer of his own light. And immediately, by the very laws of Being, he fell from heaven, which is the region where God’s intention reigns absolute. Lucifer became his own messenger, and as he is but a pure spirit, once the source of the Spirit was cut off, he became the messenger of Nothingness and its mysteries.

Though fallen, he has kept the nature of a pure spirit. Like an artist who has lost his genius and who no longer believes in painting, but who has kept his ‘knack’ and his eagerness to belong to the vanguard, Satan still knows Spirit and spirits, but no longer the end and the glory to which they are destined.

The dazzling and consuming act of pride which transformed the Angel of Light into an Angel and Prince of Darkness condemned him to a limitless and therefore desperate imperialism. The entire world could not fill the void which the consciousness of having left his rightful place in the world forms in the heart of a creature. Having fallen from the eternal, Satan wants the infinite. Having fallen from Being, he wants Having. But his problem is forever insoluble. Everything that he annexes to himself he destroys. To be sure, he can have everything, since he is called Prince of this World in Scripture—but he will never have anything but this world. He will never reconquer Heaven, which is properly the soul of the world; of the universe, he will have only the material carcass. It is from the debris of this disaffected Mansion that he will make the firewood to kindle his Hell.

He knows it full well. This is why his desire and his rabid jealousy focus on individual souls. He prowls around us like a roaring lion in quest of his prey. He prowls around us like a gangster obsessed by kidnapping. His victories will always be sterile, for one does not become a father by kidnapping a child; one can steal the child, but not paternity. One can steal power, but not authority. Satan can steal this world, not its divinity.

___________________________

¹ Ink is known to possess anti-demonic properties. Martin Luther once routed the Devil by hurling an inkwell at him.

Denis de Rougemont was a Swiss author and “cultural theorist” best known for his classic study Love in the Western World. He won a defamation suit in 1982 against a journalist who accused de Rougemont, in print, of advocating “French Fascism” and who compared him to the Vichy collaborators in World War II.

Denis de Rougemont - Wikipedia

Rougemont 2.0: Denis de Rougemont's complete online — Rougemont 2.0 (unige.ch)

English translations of de Rougemont’s works are available online, for free, at www.archive.org

Professor Arguendo on Eric Voegelin's Gnostic Modernity

{Eric Voegelin looms large in postwar conservative thought; his work, unfortunately, is almost deliberately opaque. Fortunately, secondary works about him and his philosophy abound, e.g., Ted McAllister’s 1997 Revolt Against Modernity, which focused on the anti-modern/post-liberal ideas of Voegelin and of Leo Strauss. In the essay below, guest blogger Professor Arguendo discusses Voegelin through the prism of McAllister’s book.}

“The death of the spirit is the price of progress.”  (Eric Voegelin)

In Revolt Against Modernity, Ted McAllister summarized Eric Voegelin’s quarrel with the modern world: “Modernity,” in Voegelin’s opinion, “is a gnostic revolt against reality.” Because most people are not familiar with the meaning(s) and implication(s) of the term “gnostic,” and because ancient Gnosticism in no way resembled the modern project (“salvation through world-immanent action”) to which Voegelin linked it, Mc Allister was forced immediately to clarify what Voegelin meant: 

Gnosticism, in the Voegelian sense, is a belief in the power of knowledge to transform reality, to create earthly perfection. It refers to an existential core that has three primary components: one, a strong sense of alienation, a feeling that some essential part of one’s humanity is unfulfilled; two, a revolt against the conditions that create alienation; and three, a belief that human knowledge is sufficient to overcome these conditions, that humans have the power to transform themselves, or both.

Even setting aside Voegelin’s idiosyncratic use of the term “Gnostic,” his claim that modernity is the quest for “earthly perfection” remains hyperbolic if not tendentious. A less pejorative way of describing the modern project might be: “Dissatisfied with the often-dismal state of human affairs, modern men and women have attempted, using the knowledge available to them, to change, reform, and improve the conditions under which people live. That knowledge may or may not, at any given moment and in any given situation, be ‘sufficient,’ but it is nonetheless all we have with which to work.” Apparently, neither Voegelin nor his numerous acolytes were familiar with words like “ameliorate” or with the concept of “meliorism”; they could only conceive of challenges to the status quo as impossibly utopian and hubristic.   

In Voegelin’s analysis, modernity replays, as it were, the scriptural drama of Eden. Aping Adam, modern man’s reach exceeds his grasp:

Pressures springing from human experience demonstrate the uncertainty of human understanding, spawning the perpetual dream of grasping the whole of reality with the certainty of a god, a creator. Given the anxiety of human life, torn between the material world and the pneumatic pull from a palpable spiritual source, the greatest temptation is to believe in a symbolic expression of a deformed but fully intelligible reality. ¹ Modernity is just such a deformation.

The urge to comprehend reality, Voegelin asserted, required that reality be reduced to the limits of human comprehension. ² Voegelin preferred the pre-modern “Christian order” which, lacking as it was in our technological superiority over nature, had retained a sense of the mystery of existence, along with an acceptance of the limits of human knowledge. Modernity, by contrast, was not just deformed, it was also de-divinized: “The Christian order, articulated best by St. Augustine, had radically separated the mundane from the divine by emphasizing the eternal destiny of humans. Gone were the polytheistic societies in which the mundane and the divine commingled in the world. The Christian order secured the sense of human limitation while promising perfection in another world.”

Except that, as McAllister explains, when it comes to the divine, nature abhors a vacuum; or, as Bob Dylan put it, “You gotta serve somebody." Mankind, having banished (if not euthanized) God, had to seek (or to create) other deities: thus, “Modernity, as Voegelin meant it, is the process by which the world is re-divinized and the uncertainty of faith (as expressed in Hebrews 11:1) is replaced with the certainty of ideology. ³

One can argue whether humans require a divinized order; but it is the case that, for most of human history, such an order existed. But what if a divinized order seems stalled in its tracks? In view of the indefinite postponement of Jesus’ promised return, and given the prolonged reign of Deus Absconditus, it seems to have been inevitable that Western man would eventually decide to stop waiting around and instead to get busy constructing its own version of the kingdom. It was, after all, an empirically observable fact that, for over 1500 years after Jesus, the meek did not seem to be inheriting much of the earth at all.    

The undoing of the Christian order commenced, according to Voegelin, in the twelfth century, with seeds of modernity being planted in medieval soil: the mystic monk Joachim of Flora “began the gnostic revolt which governs the self-interpretation of modern society to this day’.” Joachim’s trinitarian eschatology divided history, like Gaul, into three parts, each part corresponding to a member of the Trinity and each being more spiritual than its predecessor. Joachim’s “Age of the Spirit” was to begin in 1260 and “would bring the perfect spiritual life”. Joachim’s schema, wrote Voegelin, was the basis for the progressive view of history which would become standard for modern ideologues. It eliminated the tension and uncertainty of history by giving it a goal and a sense of inevitability, which, to be clear, were “deformations” in Voegelin’s estimation. ⁴

The “Gnosticism” of Voegelin’s eccentric understanding “represented an attempt to alter the human perspective”. ⁵ Rather than being actors in a cosmic drama not of our own making, modern humans would become co-authors and even, after God’s demise, sole authors of our destiny. By means of science, technology, and instrumental rationality, Modernity claims to have found an “Archimedean point” from which to view—and, more importantly, to transform—our existence. Voegelin's Gnosticism, says Ted McAllister, “is the closing of the soul and the construction of an alternative reality, ‘a counter-existential dream world’.” In his most famous formulation, Voegelin declared, “The immanentization of the Christian eschaton made it possible to endow society in its natural existence with a meaning which Christianity denied to it. The totalitarianism of our time must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search [for heaven on earth].” ⁶

McAllister acknowledges that Voegelin’s account of modernity’s origins, like his understanding of Gnosticism, is unusual. “Few scholars,” he writes, “have given so obscure a figure [as Joachim] such a central place in the drama of history.” ⁷ Still, although “the distance between Joachim of Flora and Hitler is vast,” history is “filled with numerous figures who, infected with a belief in the saving power of knowledge, have played their roles in the deadening story of modernity. According to Voegelin’s account, each of these thinkers, in very different ways, believed that he had achieved the knowledge necessary to transform this world of woe into a paradise. Those dispossessed of utopian imagery nonetheless projected a progressive future fueled by human knowledge and control over the environment.”

Utopians and progressives, totalitarians and liberals, Bolsheviks and Democrats: all are infected with the virus of Gnosticism, Voegelin-style. Joachim of Flora, Protestant sectarians, Levelers and Diggers, Jacobins, Marxists, Fabian socialists, Pragmatists, nihilists, anarchists, Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Hitler, FDR, LBJ, Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama: all shared utopian dreams and Luciferian ambitions. Thus did Joachim of Flora, by however many degrees of separation, pave the way for the gas chambers and the gulags; or so Eric Voegelin claimed.

Arguendo, what is truly tragic in modern thought is the inability—on the part of partisans on both the Left and the Right—to distinguish among myriad visions of a better human future. Distinctions are critical, because not all knowledge is destructive; not every human project is utopian; not every tower is the Tower of Babel; and not every reformer is a revolutionary in sheep’s clothing. The sorting of political and ideological strains into only two categories, "us" and "them," is an attempt to escape the necessities of thought, which necessities include self-criticism and, at the very least, some grudging effort to appreciate other points of view.

However nuanced and however profound Voegelin’s thinking may have been (for those who could decipher it), he did no one any favors with his wholesale denunciations of modernity. Those denunciations have too often been substituted for genuine analysis of our modern dilemmas; they have also too often served the purposes of ideologues and demagogues alike.

[Respectfully submitted by Professor Arguendo]

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For the prospective Voegelin-head : Welcome to VoegelinView - dedicated to the thoughts of Eric Voegelin

For the merely Voegelin-curious: Eric Voegelin - Wikipedia

¹ Given the widely advertised “death of God” in the mid-19^th century, where Voegelin expected anyone in the 20^th century to find “a palpable spiritual source” is unclear.

² Modernity’s proudest achievement: ^“Honey, I Shrunk Reality”

³ Voegelin’s reference to “the uncertainty of faith” is confusing. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” That does not strike me as “uncertainty”. Rather, it resembles Bolshevism’s faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, which was matched only by its certainty of a future communist Utopia: which is to say, the distinction between religion and ideology seems specious, and the latter appears to be only a secular version of the former—a point Voegelin himself made elsewhere.

⁴ I do not see how this view of history differs from the Christian claim that the end of history was determined and demonstrated by Jesus. Christians are fond of nodding sagely and dismissing the world’s tribulations by saying, “We know how the story ends.” Good for them, but please don’t blame the rest of us for trying to arrive at a satisfactory ending of our own.

⁵ Of course, so too were Voegelin’s writings “attempts to change the human perspective.”

⁶ Gnosticism itself had no interest in such a search and would not have undertaken it under any circumstances.

⁷ McAllister was perhaps overlooking Richard Weaver’s singling out William of Ockham (1285—1347) as the source of modern decadence. More recently, Brad Gregory pointed an accusing finger at Duns Scotus (1265—1308). Who can forget the memorable ditty, “Roll over, Bill Ockham, and tell Duns Scotus the news?”