Saturday, November 26, 2011

Civilization's Prodigal Generation

"The Course of Empire: Consummation," by Thomas Cole, 1836

Hatred of “civilization” is back in vogue. The storm clouds have been gathering for generations, but until recently they were a mere speckling on the horizon, confined to whimsical people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paul Gauguin or Margaret Mead – people who could afford to wile away their lifetimes turning their angst into fashionable theories. Few men and women had that privilege. That changed when the Industrial Revolution radically improved living standards all around the world (but particularly the Western world). Not surprisingly, as each succeeding generation saw their parents do things once thought impossible, they began to see the world in new ways. Their sense of mastery grew. With freedom from economic and governmental constraints came a longing for freedom from morality. Evolution wasn’t new (indeed, the essential tenets would have been familiar to all students of Greek philosophy) but the intellectual climate was. Darwin’s theory would have been universally rejected even fifty years before, but now the academia who ruled the Enlightened world jumped at the thought of boarding their ships like Tolkien’s Numenoreans and taking their grievances to the very shores of God’s country.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re still dealing with the fallout. If there is no Creator, then truth is relative, good and evil are mere conventions and life is meaningless. This new understanding of the world has been behind a relentless degrading of civilization, including the institutions, religion and arts that sustain it. It wasn’t so very long ago that Western Civilization courses were considered one of the brightest ornaments of a liberal education. Now there's an extensive campaign to mitigate them where they aren't discarded entirely. Multiculturalism reigns supreme, imposing its fluency in Ebonics, minority history courses, feminist, gay and lesbian studies on impressionable minds. Whether or not there's any intrinsic worth in such subjects, what's galling is that they're passed off as equally important as the humanities or Greek, Roman and American history. We’re essentially told nowadays that the art, architecture and culture of past civilizations, still magnificent to travelers even in ruin, are really no more remarkable than native huts and whittling. It just depends on how you look at it (And parents and teachers wonder why children are underachievers). Triumphs of science and technology that launched revolutions of the human condition are, by extension of this relativistic worldview, fruitless and vain. Thinkers, philosophers and conquering heroes represent oppression, not innovation. Consequently, where real oppression does happen, like to women in Muslim countries, we can’t be morally indignant because that would be insensitive to the culture or circumstances that produced it.

We must be quite a spectacle. Awash in wealth -even in what’s apparently the fiercest economic downturn since the Great Depression- with hardly a care in the world, yet hating every moment of it. Or is this self-loathing only a pretentious front put up to soothe our guilty consciences? If popular culture of the Avatar sort is the slightest indication, the American is to style himself a sort of Citizen Kane. This time disenchantment in Xanadu isn't confined to doubting whether the love of money can satisfy. It extends to doubting the morality of money and money-making themselves. And "Rosebud" is even more elusive. The neo-hippies of the self-sufficiency variety, the entertainment industry and Occupy Wall Street are all panting for a return to some fantastical, pre-Industrial state. Not that this ever existed, but the idea is that everyone farmed (but wasn’t a serf), ate only their own food (but didn’t die of malnutrition), made everything they needed themselves (including mining, smelting and forging all metal implements, presumably) had no need for society’s institutions (but was perfectly safe from theft, war and other myths), money (that cardinal token of vice whereby people are inspired to make things others want to buy) or banks or loans, and yet had plenty of time leftover for self-expression and writing free verse poetry (with homemade paper and ink?). If our familiarity with civilization has bred contempt, then our unfamiliarity with the lack of it has bred fantasies.

Friday, November 18, 2011

The Schism in Modern Political Thought

“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” It’s better to be consistent - to be hot or cold. Even a man who sells his sword to the wrong cause, but fights like the Devil in defense of it, wins honor and respect from his enemies. In the same way, if a man believes something false, but believes it with all his heart, he earns a kind of honor by his sheer dedication. He weighed the sides of the controversy and chose one to throw his whole weight behind. But a man who's weak, inconsistent or illogical is not only wrong; he’s contemptible.

Perhaps this is why the philosophies of two men continue to inspire so much respect. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could not have been farther apart on the political spectrum of 18th century America. Where Jefferson trusted “the people” to order their affairs better than someone in Washington could, Hamilton excoriated them as slaves to the “impulse of passion.” Jefferson wanted low taxes and the self-reliance of local governments; Hamilton wanted high taxes and a policy of easy credit for industries, roads, canals and bridges. Distribution and decentralization of government, the Jeffersonian ideal, stood in stark contrast to Hamilton’s desire for a “common, directing power.” The differences extended into foreign policy as well. The gentleman from Virginia wanted the policy of limited government he advocated on American soil to be equally as limited abroad: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” The New York lawyer had his heart set not only on establishing a European-style government, but an army and navy imperial enough to win battles, glory and overseas possessions. Despite all these differences, these two men had one thing in common: the beliefs of each formed a logical, reasoned whole.

Regardless of which man history vindicated, both have an unimpeachable record of intellectual honesty. Both were consistent. They understood that beliefs filter through one’s whole worldview to form an integral whole; beliefs can’t be mixed and matched according to preference. They can't be pawned to win votes or do what’s politically expedient without shaking the whole foundation on which they rest. Hamilton knew and admitted that an aggressive foreign policy required a complex, bureaucratic state at home. Jefferson knew that power corrupted. This led him to the conclusion that small government at home was meaningless if a powerful military establishment tempted the young republic into wars and empire-building. As his friend James Madison said, "War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few." Republicans today have rebuked their heritage as the party of humble foreign policy and instead embraced a massive military-industrial complex – as if this can be maintained with the low taxes and small government they trumpet. Democrats are no better. How can a welfare state of crony capitalism and exploding government hope to preserve the liberties the party professes such attachment to? Today's administration and its rivals insult our intelligence. Hamilton –whatever else one might say of him- would have known better.

Friday, November 11, 2011

In Praise of Myth

Before God was declared dead in 1882, the European elite had lost their willingness to believe. Nietzsche’s famous statement simply reflected the grave error of thinking that the intelligentsia’s lack of faith had nullified God’s faithfulness. Years before, European academia as a whole, stretched and stressed between rationalism and pantheism for decades, had made the fatal decision to play it safe and discard faith for reason. These Deists, blind to anything but what they could stare at past their own noses, promptly found that the next logical thing to do was to throw out the object of their faith, too.

Yet despite the relentless march of over a century-and-a-half of “progress,” the rocks still haven’t had to cry out (it must be frustrating to be a secular visionary). It seems that faith in something is as fundamentally needed in the human condition - even in its fallen-ness- as breathing. Think about it. It doesn't matter what archaeologists' spades do or don't uncover deep in the English loam. King Arthur held court in Camelot, surrounded by a troop of gallant knights. In the same way, the story of Robin Hood emerging from the shadowy eves of Sherwood Forest to secure justice for the oppressed is every bit as real in our mind's eyes as if he had existed just as the tales say he did. 

Decades of stressing objectivity, empiricism and rationalism in our schools have failed to erase these pictures, these “forms” that lie somewhere in the back of our minds in a place reason can’t reach. In the process of trying to snuff them out and preach only what we can know with absolute certainty, we've reduced history to a jumble of numbers and equations and proofs. Endless pages of quantitative statistics are needed to establish causality – and even then scientists accept that, at best, we can only know “probabilistic” truth. We've bumped up against the same wall through reason for which we through faith out the window.

And here we are, unable to teach Arthur or Robin Hood in history courses; unable to incorporate our highest aspirations and fears – in short, anything resembling a purposeful story – into scholarship. But why? Are these impressions false? Do they pervert our sense of history simply because they can’t be corroborated by a rock some farmer's plow caught upon by chance? Quite obviously, in the search for absolute meaning, it’s a zero-sum game: science has come up just as short as “myth.” I’m not saying legends should be taught as fact, but I am saying that they would not have been believed in the first place unless they contained a grain of truth. More importantly, in their essence they convey more truth than ten thousand pages of quantitative analysis. Arthur embodied for the Welsh the same kind of hope in a temporal redemption that they had in a spiritual one. Robin Hood will always be a lesson of compassion and justice conquering in the face of unjust rulers. In the words of Winston Churchill, "It is all true, or it ought to be." Which is safer? To accept things that we can't know beyond the shadow of a doubt and risk being wrong once in a while, or to acknowledge that we can't know anything?

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Two Wolves and A Sheep

"The Triumph of Representatives," William Hogarth, 1755
The Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin once wrote to Charlemagne, “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.” We of the 21st century can no doubt agree with Alcuin of the 8th. It’s a disturbing thing when the Mubaraks and Gadhafis of the world are unseated, mistreated or killed by the very people who brought them to power years ago. It would be shameful enough if it had been a single person who had offered himself in service to a master only to turn around and stab him in the back. But what are we to say when the instigator of this madness is an entire people? It makes the theorists’ claim that the people are a safer repository for liberty than the prince look specious at best.

One would have divine sanction for these macabre doubts, too. There is no religion in the world so opposed to the Tyranny of the 51% as Christianity. Chapter 23 of the Book of Exodus contains a prescient warning against such mob rule: “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd….” The New Testament continues this theme vividly. Indeed, we Christians have the distinction of being the only religion who can claim God as a casualty of democratic vote. Though he was raised from the dead, this was the work of an autocrat.

My point is not that monarchy or oligarchy is better than good, old “demokratis,” which, as an ideal, has been there right along with us throughout all the summers of Western Civilization. No, I agree too much with Winston Churchill that “…democracy is the worst form of government - except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Christianity recognizes that all men are equal, that they are given rights by their Creator – and this is the foundation of democracy. But it's not the cornerstone. Intimate knowledge of our own sin is. Truly, the only thing that makes the voice of people the voice of God is when the people know they are the farthest things possible from God. When they can acknowledge that they are the silliest, most temperamental and dangerous beings in the universe, then democratic government just may work – fingers crossed.

This knowledge of our fallenness is the vital ingredient missing from democracy across the globe today. It’s why Athens and republican Rome fell thousands of years ago and the French and Bolshevik revolutions created Hell on earth. It’s why the media’s pet Arab revolutions never know what to do but tear themselves apart once Big Brother’s gone. It’s why Occupy Wall Street’s solution is far worse than the problem. We’re no longer democrats because we recognize that we can’t trust ourselves with power over other people. We’re democrats because we think that we deserve whatever anyone else has. The same rights, the same treatment and the same amount of money. Bertrand Russell was right: "Envy is the basis of democracy."