The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: The Trifecta

{Today, we offer three mini-lectures for the price of one full-length lecture. The common theme here is the disaster that is Modernity: how it happened, what awful changes it brought, and what we can do about it.}

Historian Andrzej Walicki, in The Slavophile Controversy, related how Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov bemoaned the changes that modernity had brought, and was bringing, to 18^th-century Russia, everything having been unquestionably fine until then:

The reverse side of progress was profound demoralization: children no longer revered or obeyed their parents, parents ignored their children’s upbringing, marital love had disappeared and had given way to widespread adultery, dissipation, and divorce. Families were no longer bound by ties of solidarity and every man was concerned for himself alone; there was no friendship, for it was all too easy to sacrifice one’s friends to one’s own advantage; love of one’s country had been replaced by the pursuit of status and rewards.

Traditionally, the upbringing of children was completely subordinated to religion. While this may have encouraged a number of irrational and superstitious beliefs, it also induced fearful obedience to God’s commandments. Increasingly, though, said Shcherbakov, “There was less superstition, but also less faith; the fear of hell disappeared, but so did love of God.”

Special attention must be given to the individualization of personal relations, and, as a consequence, the basic change in the attitude toward women. “Passionate love, formerly unknown, began to hold sway over sensitive hearts, and the female sex, which had been unaware of its beauty, began to recognize its power.” Love of luxuries and excess was encouraged to stimulate industries, handicrafts, and trade.

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{On top of all that, Modernity also spawned Leviathan, replacing local, grassroots autonomy with irresistible central authority and top-down control. Marc Barnes, writing at ‘New Polity,’ explains.}

Marc Barnes:

From France, to Germany, to Russia, every country that became what we now recognize as a modern State did so by weeding out local languages and dialects; by banning local militias and curtailing local police forces; by taking authority away from monasteries, fraternities, guilds, and extended families; by disciplining the population into conformity—unto a theoretical limit point at which only the individual and the sovereign State form the political whole. All instituted national policies of education over and against local learning. All disemboweled local customs of their traditional authoritative force. All enclosed common land and so reduced ownership to direct state ownership or private ownership (allowed and enforced by the State). All peddled, and still peddle, a notion of sovereignty that reduced any diversity in authority to a war in which only one could prove victor: and thereby become the State.

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Adrian Vermeule Against the World — NEWPOLITY

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{How, then, are we to live, given the corruption of our morals and the overweening power of the State? Marc Barnes, still at New Polity, has the answer (which, credit where credit is due, he took from Jesus): we must become like children!}

Marc Barnes:

Children are obviously free in and through belonging to their community. ¹ This entails obedience to that community’s authorities; obligation to the weaker and younger; being given over to those aiding them into virtue; and a whole host of positive, political relationships that ground and give substance to whatever negative freedom results from this belonging. 

Old-timers know it best, however nostalgic their lament: a child governed by an entire community is freer than a child whose parents enter into the liberal model and assert the radical freedom of their child with words like, “You can’t tell my child what to do.” ² The former freedom is the romance of the well-ordered neighborhood; roaming until dinner; hot water from a hose; mothers who trust each other’s common participation and stake in the good of every child on the street and so allow, quite peacefully, law and custom to be enforced at the Smith house as much as the Jones. The latter freedom is liberal freedom, the child awkwardly conceived of as an individual with a battery of rights that cannot be transgressed through communal governance; the freedom of the lawsuit; the freedom that takes down the trampoline and the playground equipment worth climbing; the endless suburban bickering.

We are all children. We are all sons and daughters. We are all free in and through being members of one body. The maturity of adulthood is real, and it is good, but it is not a stark, sudden entrance into an anti-familial police state. Adulthood is the perfection of our capacities in virtue and so of our capacity for serving the common good — not freedom from having to. “Eighteen” is not a magical number. “Eighteen” is a sign and symbol of the over-bloated power of the modern liberal state to extrinsically, juridically declare the logic of the family, and its order of peace, subservient to the logic of the state and its order of violence. In the coming postliberal society, its significance will be eclipsed by ceremonies celebrating an actual attainment of virtue and membership within one’s community, and the memory of that dismal birthday party, in which the child is invited out of the family and into the world of violence will dissolve like a nightmare in the morning sun.

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Children will destroy us — NEWPOLITY

¹ Melissa Harris-Perry: “We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘These are our children.’ We have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Ms. Harris-Perry was canceled (by MSNBC) for espousing such radical collectivism, but Marc Barnes, whose 'New Polity' promotes a 'Christian postliberal worldview,' endorses it.

² It takes a village! Why did no one explain this to us before?

This is the village our parents warned us about

The Last Dishevelment

{A final post on the consequences of nominalism: it was the best of philosophies, it was the worst of philosophies.}

“Nominalism,” we have seen, “was the great liberating force of modern civilization.” Alas, added Julius Friend, “There is another and darker side of modern civilization, and this no less than the bright side must be attributed to the nominalist doctrine. Our failures are but the reverse side of our triumphs; the virtues and vices of a civilization are equally involved in its pattern.”

Fair enough; let us allow Friend to enumerate the vices of our nominalist culture. “The evils of nominalism,” he begins, “were implicit in its first declaration that only the particular things of the physical world were real. Man was thus the creator of order, but only in a subjective, mental world.¹ The objective world, the "real" world, was shown by science to be a vast, mechanical, inhuman affair of colorless, soundless matter and energy.” In fact, once men removed the God-colored glasses they had been wearing, the heavens themselves revealed, at best, a deity “unconcerned with humanity.” More disenchantment was to come:

With Darwinian evolution the last blow to man's pride was struck; along with all life, he was a peculiar accident of mechanical selection and his mind but a still more peculiar accident, capable of understanding only a little of the inhuman comedy. The inference was inescapable: man was sadly isolated in a universe that cared nothing for his values and his concepts.

The idea that the universe cared nothing for the individual's spiritual life was a mortal blow to the established religions. It produced on the one hand a vast indifference to religious doctrines, and, on the other hand, fideism, the teaching that one must have faith without reason.

Fideism ironically led back to the medieval view that earthly existence must reflect divine intention: “If God created the kind of world He did, He must acquiesce in it through and through. ² The next deduction follows all too easily—God hallows whatever succeeds. ³ The philistinism of the nineteenth century, according to which God decreed that the rich should be rich, and the poor should be poor, is an example of what happens when faith alone is appealed to.”

God having been disposed of for (literally) all practical purposes, men were free to pile up treasure here on earth, while taking out insurance against moths and rust:

The lack of a discernible supreme purpose has driven men to concentrate on the material and the immediately practical, but since the practical cannot be defined except in terms of a larger program, modern living has become the aimless and restless thing that it is. Modern civilization lacks a larger program; its social ideals are no more than the simple sum of the ideals of individualism, and all are directed at non-interference with the individual. Liberty, equality, and the so-called pursuit of happiness aim at giving the individual a chance to develop. To develop into what? Apparently to develop into whatever he desires.

As C.S. Lewis (among others) noted, our culture inundates us with objects of desire but provides no way of distinguishing between them. All desires are created equal; pushpin is as good as poetry.⁴

Encouraged to spend his time getting and spending, “The modern man is blinded to the nuances of experience and reduced to a dull factual outlook. From this blindness to values one value is pre-eminently excepted—property value.” Marie Antoinette’s blithe “Let them eat cake” was replaced by capitalism’s equally blithe “Let the market decide.” Given the amoral nature of the modern economy, “It is no wonder,” wrote Julius Friend, “that modern ethical standards should be hazy. According to nominalism, ethical criteria, like all judgments, become subjective (“matters of opinion"). Social contracts are considered from the angle of self-interest, and one treats a fellow human well because honesty is the best policy. Such an ethical program, negative and without transcendent authority, becomes subject to innumerable interpretations and exceptions."

Sanctioned by nominalism, modern individualism “led to democracy, but it also served to sanction the unlimited ambition of those who could rise above the masses. If all men were free and equal, they could look out for themselves. The powerful man had only his own sturdy self-reliance to thank for his success. He owed no obligations to those beneath him; on the contrary, they owed him gratitude, for by asserting his ability, the best interest of all was being served. This is the moral import of laissez faire or economic individualism.”

The displacement of abstract reason by empirical observation has led to a proliferation of facts and a paucity of explanatory theory:

The nominalist view of the particulars of sense experience as the only reliable evidence is called positivism in philosophy; practical reason is licensed by positivism, but speculative reason is disallowed as mere mind-spinning. Here we have an absolute inversion of the scholastic opinion which relied on speculative reason and scorned experimentation. As a result, scientific knowledge has become voluminous, more analytic, and increasingly specialized; but a synthesis of all its diverse facts has hardly been attempted. ⁵

Lastly, Friend complains, “The irrational tendency of nominalism is shown by modern psychology in which the mind is regarded as a separate object, to be studied analytically as a biologist might study a bug under a microscope. This approach makes the mind a mechanism acted on by the physical world, and its purpose that of guiding the physical organism in its various biologic functions. Hand in hand with such psychology goes that pestilence of modern thought—'psychologism,’ the mouthing of psychological tags as an explanation of almost anything. In this scheme of mentality, reason becomes "rationalization," and the question of falsity and truth is thereby rendered meaningless. Here is irrationalism in its last dishevelment. The development of nominalism has brought about anti-rationalism and a concentration on the emotional and impulsive side of mentality.”

If we jettison nominalism, however, what will remain of the modern mindset? Julius Friend certainly did not expect us to return to a hierarchical cosmos filled with supernatural entities; nor will we return to a belief that social hierarchies reflect divine intention. If nominalism has left us out on a philosophical limb without a metaphysical safety net, what can we do but cling to that limb as tightly as we can and hope it will hold our weight?

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¹ Enter Rene Descartes and his “Cogito, ergo sum,” an uncredited paraphrase of Augustine; later, enter Kant and his insistence that we can never know “things as such” but only our mental representations of them.

² Cf. Hegel: “Whatever is, is right.”

³ Cf. pragmatism: “Truth is what works.”

⁴ The “pushpin…poetry” example is taken from Jeremy Bentham, one of the earliest exponents of utilitarianism (and of the Panopticon).

⁵ The more we know, the less we understand; or, as Steven Weinberg put it, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” What Stephen Hawkings called the “grand unified theory of everything,” the holy grail of modern science, remains distressingly out of reach.

 

Julius Friend quotations are from: NOMINALISM: THE DILEMMA OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION on JSTOR (Virginia Quarterly Review, July 1935)

 

Wednesday with Pascal: The Virus of Nominalism

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat weighs in on the debate between philosophical realists and their bitter antagonists, the nominalists. Existentialist that he is, Pascal clearly privileges existence over essence; he also rejects any suggestion that earthly arrangements, political or otherwise, point toward some transcendent order.}   

According to the late Julius Friend:

The rise of nominalism was a cryptic attack on the supreme authority of the Church; it was the intellectual echo of the vague, almost inaudible murmur of the common man against his unchangeable earthly destiny; it was the manifesto of the growing attention to common earthly things and satisfactions as against the inhumanly remote; it expressed dissatisfaction with static and fixed conceptions.

If it was “a cryptic attack,” it came, as Friend acknowledged, from “within the citadel of authority—the Church. As a philosophical doctrine, it was formulated two hundred and fifty years before any concerted organization appeared against the Church, and four hundred years before the attack gained any headway; but Catholicism sensed the virus in nominalism from its inception and condemned it as heresy.” The earliest advocates of nominalism were monks and priests, which should come as no surprise—in the Middle Ages, who else had access to books or to education? Dun Scotus, Roscellinus, William Occam, Gabriel Biel: none of these nominalists were ever denounced outright as heretics, though certain of their teachings were condemned. ¹

In any case, nominalism began as a minority, even fringe, doctrine. Eventually, “it emerged triumphant with William of Occam in the first part of the fourteenth century, and the Church had to make terms with it as best it could.” In time, those terms would become more and more onerous:

Once it was believed and accepted that the individual mind originated universals and classifications, then it followed that God did not put order into the world, but that man read order into the world. Thus, it came to be believed that the individual, not God, conferred or vested power, and having conferred power could take it away or deny it. The representation of God on earth claimed by the Church became then a picturesque figure of speech, not a reality; and private communion with God, without intermediary, became a logical procedure. ²

The Church was not alone in being disrupted by nominalism. The elevation of the individual did not bode well for hierarchy:

Furthermore, an overlord now held his tenure purely by the consent of individuals; if the contract between him and his vassals should become one-sided, only force of arms and not the decree of the universe could keep it so. If all ideas, and consequently the power of order, issued from the individual and not from God or His eternal Ideas, any man was the master of his own fate and could carve out a career for himself; he no longer had to acquiesce in the misery of his earthly lot while looking forward to another world of heavenly bliss.

It was not that nominalism necessarily led to the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest; but ideas have consequences, right?

Speaking of ideas:

In the intellectual sphere, acceptance of nominalist beliefs brought freedom from the authority of old conceptions. Aristotle, the hitherto absolute word on the subject of natural science, was not necessarily right. The particulars of sense experience, "hard stubborn facts,” and not abstract speculation, were the touchstone of truth. Men of genius began to scoff at cloistered theories, and to favor experimentation. Observation, not reason, was hailed as the correct method in science. ³

Empiricism was one of the many products of nominalism, “the development of which required hundreds of years; not only was it stubbornly fought at every stage in its progress by the tradition of realism, but time was needed for its ideas to leave the cloister and seep down to the masses.” Thanks to nominalism, those "masses" now had access--widespread, if not universal--to education and to advancement; a person’s status at birth (including gender, race, social rank, or material wealth) no longer set limits on their possibilities.

No fan of nominalism, Julius Friend grudgingly acknowledged that “On the one hand, nominalism was the great liberating force of modem civilization. By removing the static order of Platonic realism, nominalism showed the individual man that he was the creator of conceptions and that his ability to make these conceptions actual had no limit. If this were all that needed to be said, a discussion of nominalism could be only a paean to Progress.”

So far, so good: several cheers for nominalism! But what else, in the estimate of Julius Friend, hath nominalism wrought? What happened when people ceased believing that language—including words like, say, “God,” “Satan,” “Heaven,” “Hell,” "Good," and "Evil"—was linked to some metaphysically transcendent realm? If words were only products of human invention, and if they expressed human ideas rather than eternal verities: what in the world (literally) was sacred?

Perhaps nothing?

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 ¹ Some of almost everyone’s teachings were condemned in the Middle Ages, including those of such academic stalwarts as Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard. In those days, prudent scholars kept their more controversial manuscripts hidden or wrote them in jargon sufficiently convoluted that authorities would either not notice or not understand.

² It is not a coincidence that Martin Luther was educated by teachers sympathetic to nominalism.

³ Let us not forget the impact of the “Age of Discovery” on the European mind. The revelations of hitherto unknown continents, hitherto unknown cultures, and hitherto unknown natural wonders went a long way toward discrediting received authorities.

Wednesday with Pascal: Modernity's Dark God

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat fancies himself something of a theologian, a philosopher, and an historian. No matter how often I remind him that he’s just a cat, he persists in thinking he can navigate deep intellectual waters; with today’s post, I fear he is once again in way over his head.}

Michael Alan Gillespie, from Nihilism before Nietzsche:

“Medieval Nominalism emphasized the supremacy of divine will. Modernity sought to construct a bulwark against the chaos that this will entails. Cartesian rationalism and the modern world present themselves as a new beginning, as enlightenment, but behind this bright dawn of reason stands the dark and mysterious form of the omnipotent God.”

The Christian God’s “infinity and incomprehensibility” had been clear from the earliest days of Christianity (and, before that, in the scriptures and traditions of Israel). God also possessed, in theory at least, “radical freedom,” that is, He was free to do whatever He wanted. He could, for instance, change His mind and alter his plans, as He did in Genesis when He despaired of His human creations and killed most of them in a flood; as soon as the survivors gathered their wits and began working together to build something, God confused their language and scattered them to the winds. A God with that degree of power and that degree of freedom was troubling; as a result, Christian theologians increasingly shied away from the deity’s “radical freedom” and sought to emphasize “the priority of reason within divine omnipotence.” God was, among other things, rational, and, with that in mind, early medieval Christians could breathe a sigh of relief; their God was a mighty God who could of course smite them at any moment, but that God had given them assurances as well as explicit instructions which, if dutifully followed, would protect against God’s wrath. All-powerful and radically free, the God of medieval Christianity could nonetheless be trusted not to do anything rash or irrational.

Dissenters, however, insisted that God was not limited by anything at all, including His own covenants and commandments. William of Ockham, whose nominalist philosophy and “divine command” ethics would eventually replace Scholasticism, said that God could not only turn night into day, reverse the movements of the stars, or suspend the ‘law’ of gravity; He could even change the past, without warning or explanation, and without any creature so much as suspecting the change had been made. ¹ Ockham, of course, never said that God would do such a mischievous thing; he merely said that God could do so, and that God had every right to do so if He chose. In short, God was not bound by reason, logic, consistency, time, space, or even by His own promises—since He could, if He chose, change the past so that those promises had never been made in the first place.

Michael Alan Gillespie summarizes:

Scholasticism rested on the assumption that God and the cosmos are essentially rational. Nominalism argued that it contradicts God’s divinity to claim that he is subordinate to nature or to reason. Nominalism’s effect was to sever reason and revelation; it liberated natural science from the constraints of religion and opened the door to empiricism, but it also established an omnipotent divine will unrestrained by any rational notion of the good. The rise of natural science was concomitant with the rise of doubt; to secure himself and his science, man first had to build ramparts against divine caprice or malevolence.

The God of the scriptures was anything but reasonable; He raged, He cursed, He lamented and regretted His own choices. He could also be persuaded, implored, argued with, wrestled with, negotiated with, laughed at, and more. He allowed Satan to savage Job’s life and to reduce the man to despair, and He flatly refused to explain His actions to Job. He was, by His own admission, a jealous God, and a vengeful one; somewhere along the line, He or some of His acolytes even invented Hell. 

In essence, William of Ockham acknowledged YHWH’s behavior and said, So what? We have no business judging God, Ockham proclaimed, and His freedom is not bound by human ‘morality’ or human ‘logic’. Ockham forthrightly answered the ancient philosophical/theological chestnut: is ‘the Good’ objectively good on its own merits, or is it ‘the Good’ simply because God deems it so? Ockham chose the latter—whatever God does, or commands, is ‘good’ by definition. That logic suggested that God could make torture and even murder ‘good’ if it served His mysterious purposes: Take your son Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and make him unto Me a burnt offering. Such divine freedom, unanchored as it was by any stable and predictable morality, allowed men in turn to commit atrocities in God’s name. Who, after all, was to say that God would never countenance such things? Did YHWH not order genocide against Israel’s enemies? Did He not suspend the sun in the sky so that Joshua’s armies could continue killing? Did He not harden Pharaoh’s heart so that Egypt would be devastated by plagues? Did He not, by proxy, torture Job? Did He not sacrifice His own Son?

Gillespie explains:

The late medieval conception of an omnipotent God inspired and informed a new conception of man and nature that gave precedence to will over reason and freedom over necessity and order. The modern world arose out of a crisis of late medieval Christianity; the nominalist idea of an omnipotent God is the source of the notion of an absolute will, and this notion lies behind Descartes’ project for the conquest of nature.

The Ockhamist God was an unlimited and therefore terrifying God. Ockham’s successors then set about finding ways to protect themselves from that God (while still worshiping Him). Having disconnected Scholastic reason from Biblical revelation, late medieval philosophers concluded that, while God was free in His own realm, the material realm was, at least provisionally, given over to man; and modern man seized power over nature with a zeal previously reserved for religious causes. The advances of science gave man confidence that he could unravel the puzzles of nature and of nature’s God; the advances of technology convinced him that he could bludgeon the world itself into submission. ²

It makes perfect sense: if God is Infinite Will, and if we are made in God’s image (though, alas, not omnipotent) then our Will is limited only by our ability to impose it, and neither Reason nor Morality need stand in our way. The more powerful humans have become, the less we have feared God; instead, we have come to fear ourselves and to fear each other. Modern man, says Gillespie, “bears a surprising resemblance to the omnipotent God of Christianity,” the God who had supposedly died or at least abdicated His throne. “Like that God, modern man is beyond reason, beyond nature, and beyond good and evil. He calls into question all that is stable and certain. He is a god of terror and of joy. He is everything’s creator, everything’s destroyer, and everything’s redeemer. At the end of modernity, we are thus brought face to face with the dark God that modernity was constructed to constrain.”

More precisely, we have become that dark God: we make weal, and we make woe, and we ask no one’s permission, not even God’s. In short, we are the deity our parents warned us against.

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¹ The Russian theologian-philosopher Lev Shestov argued a century ago that God could decree that “2 + 2= 5,” a notion also advanced by Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man”.

 ² Cf. Stephen Hawking’s musings on “knowing the mind of God,” and cf. Robert Oppenheimer on “We have become Shiva, Destroyer of worlds.”

Saturday Lecture: The Worm in the Bud

“The disappearance of evil as a concept is one of the most extraordinary features of modern society.” (Alan Macfarlane)

“Money changes everything.” (From the eponymous song written by Tom Gray)

Alan Macfarlane (from The Culture of Capitalism):

Traditionally, the essence of evil lies in a combination of several features. First, it is shadowy, mysterious, covert, hidden, not fully understood, hence the association with night, darkness, black, secrecy. Secondly, it is an active, aggressive force. Evil tries to destroy the integrity, the happiness, and the welfare of ‘normal’ society. It is aggressively, if insidiously, undermining, the worm in the bud. Witches are evil because they attack society, causing illness and death. These attacks are not justified; either they are motive-less or the motives are perverted. God or the ancestors are not evil when they afflict man, for their ends are good: to improve the afflicted. They correct mankind as a loving father corrects a child. Evil is an inversion of good; the moral standards of society are turned upside down. Thus, when havoc falls out of a clear sky and strikes down an individual or a society, evil is at work.

The moral economy of peasant societies included the economy of evil. Life and happiness were thought to be constantly threatened, by women (witches), by death, by secret evil, by diffuse and invisible powers. There was a never-ending war, both within the individual and against external dark forces. In Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian societies, a great amount of energy was spent in trying to hold back and defeat evil through the use of that ‘magic’ that is built into practical religion.

An archetypical example of such a world can be seen in much of continental Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout Catholic Europe, the Holy Office of the Inquisition set up an elaborate machine for seeking out and destroying evil. There was believed to be a vast conspiracy of Evil abroad: relapsed Jews, gypsies, freemasons, witches, Lutherans—all were sought out as agents of Evil, which was then purged from them by fire and the rack. The Devil was alive and well and hovered over much of Europe; few doubted the daily reality of Evil, the Evil One, and of evil beings. There was a Holy War for four centuries.

Contrast this with the world of industrial capitalism in the later twentieth century. Though ‘evil’ titillates in the films, television, science-fiction, and children’s stories, in ordinary life the concept and the reality have largely been banished. Most people live in a one-dimensional world that has expelled Satan, witches, the Evil Eye, and fairies. The supernatural dimension is dead, except as fantasy. How has evil, even temporarily, been banished?

Both the answer and the problem are encapsulated in St. Paul’s warning that ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ This dismissal of avarice is one of the central pillars of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which western civilization is based. Yet it could also be argued that the love of money—the famous propensity to trade, barter, and accumulate—is an equally important part of this civilization. Adam Smith most famously exposed this foundation of modern society, a feature without which capitalist societies would immediately collapse. Modern economies are built on a propensity that is, in the ethical terms laid down by Christian theology, evil. The foundations are laid on individual acquisitiveness, the love of money, and the pursuit of profit. Good and evil are mixed in the roots of modern society.

Money, and all it symbolizes, is the root of all evil in an even deeper sense. It subtly and insidiously eliminates the very concept of evil, or, rather, it makes it impossible to discriminate between good and evil. Money—which is a shorthand way of saying capitalistic relations, market values, trade and exchange—ushers in a world of moral confusion. Money disrupts the moral as well as the economic world. Money complicates the moral order, turning what was formerly black and white into greyness. Money, markets, and market capitalism eliminate absolute moralities. As Georg Simmel wrote:

‘By being the equivalent to manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler; it expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of ‘How much?’ Money becomes the common denominator of all values, it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific gravity in the moving stream of the economy.’

It became clear that what was considered to be the root of all evil was also the root of all that was good—the marketing, bargaining principle of Adam Smith. This paradox was so horrifying in its implications that, when it was pointed out, there was fierce condemnation. Out of vice and evil came forth wealth and goodness; evil lay at the heart of good in a capitalist society. Private vice, passions, and interests merged into public good.   

[All this] represented the culmination of a trend towards ethical relativism which argued (from growing evidence) that every civilization had its own appropriate moral system. Pascal had summarized this view in the seventeenth century: ‘We hardly know of anything just or unjust which does not change its character with a change of climate. Three degrees of polar elevation overturn the whole system of jurisprudence. A meridian determines what is truth. There is not a single law that is universal.’

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Alan Macfarlane - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: Christianity, Nihilism, and Ethics

“Religion is man’s great venture and man’s great, fatal failure.” (K.H. Miskotte)

K.H. Miskotte (from When the Gods Are Silent):

The gods are silent. The idea is still in the air, but it is mute. The shape lingers on the horizon but is suffused in a silent fog. The words still resound, as in a strange, unknown language or like a song from childhood; but they no longer speak the mystery to us. We no longer feel secure in the bosom of nature; we know that all things far and near do not speak, neither the Milky Way nor the electron. We are bound by the spell of things; the facts have us in their grip. We still feel an occasional prickle of dead before a higher power, but that power is voiceless, it no longer shows any signs of life.

Nihilism can be understood as a reaction to Christianity, which, after all, had increasingly put the stamp of the divine on worldly entities; in this sense it was the Enlightenment that inaugurated the process of nihilism in Europe. Then the Enlightenment itself strengthened ‘the agonizing feeling of the nothingness of science,’ for in a strange way understanding brings with it an emptying of life and initiative. According to Nietzsche, nihilism comes as a reaction to the mind’s habit of construing by means of value judgments an increasing number of areas and goals of life as being desirable and meaningful. But then, ‘The untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false. It makes no difference whether the question of meaning was a proper question to which previously we have given a false answer or whether it was a wrong question which must always be followed by a wrong answer.’

Nihilism may also take the form of saying, ‘There is no reality behind any faith or any ideal. There is nothing but an abyss of absurd existence. But hail to the summer, the sun, laughter; blessed be life and strength and women! We roam the world with hungry eyes to see everything we can; we want to fly to the moon; there is not enough time to enjoy to the full this terrible life!’ This kind of nihilism is genuine, warm, human, and understandable.

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{In which we are told that moral codes are made to be broken.}

“If someone asks me what he should do in a particular situation, I cannot tell him.”

John McConnachie (from Barthian Theology):

There is no such thing as a general ethic for man as to what he shall do, or not do, in all circumstances. Such a theory would presuppose an understanding of man as a being with definite plans and goals. But man does not have his life at his disposal in such a way. Man lives in a state of uncertainty in the face of what meets him from day to day, and every decision is a new decision. Ethical truth is distinguished from other forms of truth, such as mathematical truth, by the fact that it is never self-evident but becomes evident only in the concrete situation. The actuality of our present situation is always a decision which we have to make, and the ethical truth which appears is not a general truth but a particular truth. There is no such thing as ‘goodness’ in itself, nor is there any moral law as such.

There can be no such thing as a system of individual or social ethics. Neither is there any such thing as moral law as such. The idea of a ‘general’ ethics or a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. Ethics develops no program but deals from case to case. It uses no high-sounding language about the uplift of humanity or the creation of a better social order but gets down to real and simple things. A man knows only what he needs to do now, not what he may have to do in the next quarter of an hour.

Neither man nor the world can be improved, they can only be kept in check, and that with difficulty. To treat the Sermon on the Mount as a general ethics, or as a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society, can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. This world cannot be ruled by the Sermon on the Mount; it is the ethics of the new man and of the new world, the ethics of the kingdom.

 

Saturday Lecture: The Pursuit of Shadows

{In the 1920s and 1930s, for a variety of reasons, Protestant theologians—most prominently, Karl Barth—abandoned the ‘social gospel’ and its aspirations to construct God’s kingdom on earth. Instead, they put their trust in a God whom they declared “wholly Other” and out of human reach. In effect, Barthian ‘neo-orthodoxy’ insisted we throw ourselves on the mercy of a mysterious, absentee Judge whose verdict would have little or nothing to do with the merits of our case. The following was written in 1933 by an admirer of Barth’s. You may note its resemblance to more recent polemics against Modernity; almost by definition, traditionalists have no new arguments to offer.}   

John McConnachie (from Barthian Theology):

A judgement is being pronounced today on our whole Western civilization.

To Modernism we can attribute much of the present disintegration of the old divine ordinances of society, of the family, home, marriage, which constituted the firm foundation on which life was lived in a former day. What man was, he was through those ordinances, but what he is now, he is through himself. The world in which we live now is one of convinced individualism, which accounts for the prevailing uncertainty and confusion of thought, and for the moral Bolshevism so rampant.

Humanity is not without its admirable features. Though subject to transitoriness and death, it has shown itself capable of great self-denial, and self-sacrifice, and through its efforts it has brought into being a whole group of cultural, aesthetic, and scientific values. But humanity conceals within itself the titanic impulse to storm the heights, to ‘build us a city and a tower whose top may reach to heaven, and to make us a name.’ By ignoring the distance between man and God, it has been guilty of Promethean pride and self-glorification, and has succumbed to the sinful ambition ‘to be as gods.’

In the faith of the nineteenth century in the unfailing progress of man, of human culture and morals, with Herbert Spencer as its high priest, this pride found arrogant expression. ‘Progress,’ said Spencer, ‘is not an accident but a necessity. What we call evil and immorality must disappear. It is certain that man must become perfect.’ The final product of this pride in humanity is Humanism, especially as it has come to full flower in America. John Dewey, the leading American Humanist, with perfect logic rules out God altogether; for if humanity be thus irresistible, if man can confront the world as lord, what need is there for a God anymore? Man is God to himself. Religion remains as a human product, valuable because of its usefulness, but the only possible religion in the end is the worship of humanity.

This proud self-conscious humanity, with all its gifts and powers, has come into the crisis of its existence and has been overtaken by judgement. All its fine idealisms have been seen to have been delusions, and all its self-deifications to have been dreams born of intoxication. Its judgment is revealed in its deficiency of power. It has become weak and almost despairing, for the crisis has revealed what it is not, as much as what it is. The proud Towers of Babel which it sought to build are toppling down. Its sin of trying to do without God is being discovered.

Our modern individualistic Protestantism has its roots much more in the enthusiasts and humanists of the Middles Ages than in the Reformers. A Church which has sunk in many places into being a social center, a home of Humanism, with nothing better to offer than some special brand of ‘Christian culture’ (higher than, perhaps, but no different in kind than that of the world) has lost its substance in the pursuit of shadows. The religion of temperament and sentiment has replaced the religion of will and obedience, but it has proved inadequate for our time. Synergism has been enjoying its great day, pervaded by a Pelagian conception of sin, salvation, and grace. We have come to understand ‘the Kingdom of God’ as a project of social and moral idealism, a perfect human society here on earth.

Our age can be compared with the age of the close of the Roman Empire. Now, as then, there is a widespread sense that the foundations are being shaken on all sides. Once more a quite elementary longing has arisen for something that is beyond time’s shakings, for an ‘Archimedean point’ outside, a longing for contact with a Reality above the relativity of history and experience.

This crisis is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of our age. For when humanity ceases to rely on itself and to make of itself a god, hope may be at hand. The world has experienced a veritable apocalypse of evil, which has shaken the faith of all but the very young in the nobility of human nature. The preaching of our time has sought to lift men by an appeal to their strength rather than by a reminder of their weakness. It has made much of the seeming good in human nature and has inclined to ignore the overmastering evil. The crisis into which such preaching has brought us must be regarded as a judgment.

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Shadows

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Our Comfortable Nihilism?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat claims to be done with Eric Voegelin and with the ‘Katechon’. He is not, however, done with Nihilism; now, he is caught up in the issue of Christianity’s connection to modern nihilism. David Bentley Hart’s ‘Christ and Nothing’ seems like a good place to start.}

“Christ and Nothing” first appeared in print in 2003, but the essay is as timely as ever. David Bentley Hart may or may not have revised his opinions from twenty years ago, but his description of modern nihilism remains powerful:  

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess. Our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a [certain] way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. We take as given the individual’s right not merely to obey or to defy the moral law, but to choose which moral standards to adopt, which values to uphold, which fashion of piety to wear and with what accessories.

To be clear, moderns generally do not accept “the individual’s right to defy the moral law,” they simply don’t think the moral law exists. It is precisely the absence of belief in such a thing as “the moral law” that leads to the emphasis on human freedom. The factors which undermined belief in “moral law” were many, and Hart does not elaborate; his point is simply that, moral law having been discredited, modernity had nothing with which to replace it:

A society that believes these things must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

Hart delivers his verdict:

Modern culture is nothing but the wasteland ¹ from which the gods have departed, and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myths of sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy. Our restlessness has become its own deity; and, where it works its most sublime magic, our culture of empty spectacle can so stupefy the intellect as to blind it to its own disquiet and induce a spiritual torpor more deplorable than mere despair.

It is not surprising that a Christian theologian deplores our contemporary culture, politics, and lack of moral integrity. What is surprising is that Hart accuses Christianity of having been one cause, at least, of the modern predicament—not in the sense that, for Hart, orthodox Christian belief was or is in any way mistaken, but in the sense that Christians, both individually and collectively (that is, institutionally), failed over time to hold fast to Christian truth. This failure was matched, ironically, by Christianity’s success in clearing the field of its pagan rivals, leaving the Christian God as the only transcendent option available; when Christianity lost its compelling hold, there was nothing to supplant its God aside from man himself. In the words of Karen Leslie Carr, “In the absence of something higher, something larger than themselves, some transcendent horizon, human beings make themselves God.” ²

In Hart’s view, “The wasteland from which the gods have departed” is the result of Christianity's having first triumphed and then surrendered the territory it had gained. “Surveying the desert of modernity,” Hart admits, “we would be morally derelict not to acknowledge that Nietzsche was right in holding Christianity responsible for the catastrophe around us; we should confess that the failure of Christian culture to live up to its victory over the old gods has allowed the dark power that once hid behind them to step forward undisguised.”   

Does Hart’s perception that darkness and nihilism have enveloped modern culture stem from his feeling of being entirely outside that culture? He would insist, one assumes, that the evidence of modern decadence and decline is overwhelming; that claim had been made by many others (e.g., Richard Weaver, Ortega y Gassett, T.S. Eliot) long before Hart. Not all observers agree, however, and we might want to hear other perspectives before we condemn modernity as hopelessly corrupt.  

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Christ and Nothing by David Bentley Hart | Articles | First Things  2003

¹ “Nothing but the wasteland”: An homage, perhaps, to T.S. Eliot, author of “The Wasteland,” a modernist critique of modernity.

² Karen Leslie Carr (from The Banalization of Nihilism), referring to the views of Karl Barth. I await an explanation of why making mankind its own god is such a bad thing. Is there a better candidate somewhere?

Nothing ventured. Nothing gained

Saturday Lecture: Beyond Nihilism?

{In Michael Polanyi’s opinion, modern nihilism emerged from a common-law marriage between secularism/rationalism and the millenarian passions of Christianity recast as Romanticism. In ‘Beyond Nihilism,’ Polanyi briefly outlined the trajectory of modernity and its unintended consequences. He ended his essay on a note of cautious optimism, urging readers to learn from the past, to embrace civility and moderation, and to eschew radicalism; since his essay was written in 1960, we must conclude that it failed to have its desired effect.}  

Michael Polanyi, from Beyond Nihilism (1960):

Jean-Jacques Rousseau anticipated in three respects the inherent instability of the rationalist ideal of a secular society. He saw that it implied an unrestrained individualism, demanding absolute freedom and equality far beyond the limits imposed by any existing society. Next, he saw that such absolute sovereignty of individual citizens was conceivable within society only under a popular government exercising absolute power. Thirdly, he anticipated the rise of an amoral individualism, asserting the rights of a unique creative personality against the morality of a discredited society. These implications were the logical consequences of their antecedents: that is, of a skeptical rationalism combined with the secularized fervor of Christianity.

By his argument and rhetoric, Rousseau poured into the channels of rationalism a fierce passion for humanity. His thought so widened the channels that they could be fraught eventually with all the supreme hopes of Christianity, the hopes which rationalism had released from their dogmatic framework. The legacy of Christ blighted the hopes of complacent rationalists; it had other tasks in store for humanity. The rationalist philosophes not only failed to establish an era of quiet enjoyment, but induced instead a violent tide of secular dynamism, which degenerated in many places into a fanaticism fiercer than the religious furies which their teachings had appeased. Even before the principles of scientific rationalism had been fully formulated, Rousseau had conjured up the extrapolation of these principles to the kind of secular fanaticism which ultimately resulted.

The predominant opinion of Enlightenment thinkers opposed both the premises and the conclusions of Rousseau, and they continued confidently to pursue the prospect of free and reasonable men in search of individual happiness, under a government to which they would grant only enough power to protect citizens from encroachments by their fellow citizens or by foreign enemies—disregarding the question as to who would arbitrate between the government and the citizens.

Little did the great rationalists realize the transformation they were engendering. They did not suspect that the spirit of fanaticism would enter the teachings of the philosophers and set the world ablaze with their arguments, or that rationalism, so inflamed, would transform the emotional personality of man. Yet this is what followed. Man’s consciousness of himself as a sovereign individual evoked that comprehensive movement of thought and feeling now known as Romanticism.

In 1789, France led the world towards a revolutionary consummation of the contradiction inherent in a post-Christian rationalism. The ideology of total revolution is a variant of the derivation of absolutism from absolute individualism. Its argument is simple and has yet to be answered. ¹ If society is not a divine institution, it is made by man, and man is free to do with society what he likes. There is then no excuse for having a bad society, and we must make a good one without delay.

In the 19^th century, a new scientific sociology claimed to have proved three things: (1) that the total destruction of the existing society was the only method for achieving any essential improvement of society; (2) that nothing beyond this act of violence was required, or even to be considered, since it was unscientific to make any plans for the new society; and (3) that no moral restraints were to be observed in this revolutionary seizure of power. The revolutionary process was historically inevitable and so beyond human control; morality, truth, etc. were merely epiphenomena of class interests. Revolutionary action would embody all morality, veracity, and justice, in the scientific sense.

People often speak of Communism and Nazism as secular religions, but not all fanaticism is religious. The passions of the total revolutions and total wars which have devastated our age were not religious but moral. Their morality became immanent in brute force because a naturalistic view of man forced them into this manifestation. Once they are immanent, moral motives no longer speak in their own voice and are no longer accessible to moral arguments; such is the structure of modern nihilistic fanaticism.

This is my diagnosis of the pathological morality of our time. What chance is there of remedying this condition? The Enlightenment, having secularized Christian hopes, destroyed itself by its moral inversion, which proved disastrous in its turn; but we cannot simply return to older ideas which had proven unstable. The rule of some dogmatic authority is no more acceptable today that it was in the age of Voltaire. We shall not abandon the scientific revolution which has secularized extensive domains of knowledge. We shall not go back on the hopes of Christianity and become as calmly indifferent to social wrongs as secularized antiquity was.

We have arrived beyond nihilism today, even though the place at which we have arrived resembles that where we stood before; we cannot foresee the creative possibilities by which we may discover an avenue that does not lead back to nihilism. May we not, however, learn from the disasters of the 20^th century to establish civic partnerships, united in their resolve on continuous reforms—our reforming dynamism restrained by the knowledge that radicalism will throw us back into disaster the moment we try to act out its principles literally?

It may happen, but we cannot limit ourselves to speculation. From here onward, thought must take on the form of action. ²

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Michael Polanyi - Wikipedia

¹ With all due respect, Polanyi was simply wrong on this point. The arguments for “total revolution” and “absolute individualism” have been repeatedly and decisively answered, and had been long before Polanyi. That, of course, has not ended the debate. Fanaticism has a mind of its own; it tends to be impervious to reason.

² “From here onward, thought must take on the form of action” strikes me as being not unlike Karl Marx’s “Hitherto, philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” I do not know if Polanyi noticed the similarity between his formulation and that of Marx.

Nihilism,
as portrayed by an AI program

 

Another Blog About Nothing

{In ‘The Banalization of Nihilism,’ Karen Leslie Carr looks at nihilism from the standpoint of Christian theology—in particular, the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth which further chastened humans already chastened by the Great War and the collapse of Enlightenment dreams. Pessimism was in the air, and pessimism is a well-known gateway to nihilism.}

Karen Leslie Carr (from The Banalization of Nihilism):

As the twentieth century unfolded, it became increasingly difficult to deny that the combined legacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was dubious at best, for it had left its heirs with, on the one hand, a conviction of the desirability, even the necessity of truth, and, on the other hand, a radical suspicion of all claims to have found truth. The existentialist response was widely criticized as pessimistic, even nihilistic. This criticism stemmed not so much from the fact that the existentialists pointed to a world of purely human origin and found its promise of meaning counterfeit, but because they seemed to welcome this void, even to cultivate it, as a necessary aspect of human existence.

God having been pronounced dead in the nineteenth century, what followed his demise was not encouraging. “Man come of age,” as Bonhoeffer was to christen him, seemed distressingly immature, if not downright infantile. The first half of the twentieth century could be considered one long tantrum by overgrown children obsessed with ideology and armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Nietzsche, among others (e.g., Dostoyevsky), had seen it coming:

Nietzsche, dubbing it ‘the uncanniest of all guests,’ believed nihilism to be ‘one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection, of humanity.’ Characterizing it as a disease that was pathological in its intensity, Nietzsche nonetheless thought that nihilism had within it the possibility of redemption from an interpretation of life that was both hypocritical and debilitating. ¹

Fortunately, as Carr explains, dialectics, as put forward by Hegel and perfected by Marx, came to the rescue, effortlessly reconciling opposites, squaring circles, and turning sows’ ears into silk purses:

There is something both provocative and perverse in the often grim insistence of dialectical theologians that the dissolution of sense is the beginning of real meaning. Central to their construction of what could be called a ‘soteriology of ambiguity’ were two related beliefs: an understanding of nihilism as the loss of something deemed desirable, even necessary, for human survival, coupled with a conviction of the importance and value of truthfulness in the face of such loss. It was precisely the tension between what one wanted—in this case, a transcendental meaning or ground accessible to human inquiry—and the realization that this could never be had that provided the content for the vision of humanity such theologians proposed. The despair bred of this tension was constitutive of human existence, they argued; recognizing and accepting the basic ambiguity of all human endeavors despite one’s ineradicable need for certainty was made the basis for authenticity among existential thinkers more generally. ² To be fully human meant to affirm both the utter emptiness of a world devoid of meaning and the human need for a meaningful world. To give up either—to lose oneself in an ‘ism’ purporting to be absolute truth or to deny the fundamental drive for meaning shared by all members of the human race—was, from this point of view, to succumb either to inauthenticity, in the former case, or unthinking animality, in the latter.

The good thing about nihilism—aside from the fact that we are stuck with it—is that, by clearing the ground of traditional meaning(s), it allows us the freedom to make our own existential choices, among which the primary contenders are Karl Barth’s Old Testament God, postmodern variations of Marxism, and the pleasures of consumer capitalism. ³ So far, the first option seems out of favor, the second is little more than a red herring mostly invoked by its opponents, and the third option has the overwhelming support of ordinary people for whom shopping is more satisfying than either ideological combat or prayer. 

The pursuit of happiness takes many unexpected twists and turns, but for the most part, it's fair to say that the motto of nihilistic modernity is, we’d rather shop than fight.

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Neo-orthodoxy - Wikipedia

¹ The “pathological” nature of modernity has also been emphasized by, among others, Eric Voegelin. I would add that the diagnostic profile should include “anosognosia,” that is, the sick patient is not aware of being sick but considers their condition to be normal.

² Again, Carr is here following Voegelin, who labeled “Gnostic” the refusal to accept the tension between transcendental ideals and mundane reality, that is, life in the metaxy.

³ Of course, that sort of freedom is exactly what conservative thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Alasdair Macintyre thought was wrong with modernity.

Nihilism: Accept No Substitutes