A Finnish correspondent sent me some questions about the current overall situation, where it’s likely to go, and what to do about it. I thought others might find them of interest, so here they are with my responses:
Q: How do we know that faith in the omnicompetence of technique will give way to anything else? What it means to live rightly is exactly what there is (at best) disagreement about. The ethical, philosophical and spiritual disarray of our time makes it a forlorn hope for the masses to live rightly and the liberal will grope about in the dark when he has finally seen that technique will save his society no more than it will save his soul.
A: People have tried to treat technique and expertise as omnicompetent and it hasn’t worked. They don’t keep beating themselves over the head forever. So eventually they’ll get fed up and stop believing in it. The collapse of socialism was a lesson for a lot of people. Not enough of a lesson, but it was a beginning. It raised some issues, and laid the groundwork for raising more issues.
Also, expertise to some extent is debunking itself. A few examples:
- Scientific studies of various types are suggesting severe limits on the usefulness of expertise and on various projects of social rationization. I recently discussed a couple of aspects of the situation (Sim City social science).
- Architecture and urban planning is another field in which recognition of the uselessness of modernism is making headway even among some experts. Nikos Salingaros is doing good work on those issues and has posted a lot of his work to the web.
- Telos, originally a New Left publication, has been a useful focal point for efforts to deal seriously with the failure of the modern project in a way that puts the necessary critiques and proposals for new departures in a form in which they can affect the discussions of the experts themselves.
So the counterrattack is gathering force, both at the level of popular disillusionment and at the level of organized thought that takes the form of legitimate expertise and so can’t easily be shrugged off. As an organizational matter liberalism continues to sweep all before it. Its hollowness though is increasingly evident even to its own proponents. That is one of the lessons of postmodernism.
Your big question is what comes afterward. Once people stop worshipping technique and their own desires they have a choice: they can drink themselve to death, fall back on various superstitions, or ask broader questions about how to live and try to recover what they’ve lost. Not everyone will take the first two choices.
I think the key is that expertise can never suppress informal knowledge altogether because action can’t be coherent without informal knowledge. Tradition can’t die because its death would mean utter idiocy. It would be like the final pages of a late Samuel Beckett novel. The human tendencies that give rise to tradition don’t die either. Feminism and other forms of radical egalitarianism require constant propaganda and policing.
Ilya Ehrenberg said that if the whole world were paved with asphalt a green shoot would break through somewhere. Eventually the propagandists get tired, the police get inefficient and corrupt, the experts stop believing in their own expertise, people stop taking in what the authorities tell them, and natural tendencies start reasserting themselves, guided by memories of a time when they were given freer rein and by the inherited habits that had been making a more-or-less-ordered social existence possible all along. Green shoots spring up and spread, and when people see something better than what they have they imitate it. The future belongs to the ways of life that work. Those ways learn to be what they are by looking at what’s worked in the past and drawing on what goods have survived.
So I see a restoration less as something to be planned by sorting out the good and bad in some organized way, and then propagandizing and instituting the good, than something that grows up as people abandon what they have come to hate, pick up on what they begin to love, and stick with what gives them solid rewards. Each of us can further the process by rejecting the bad and furthering the good himself as best he can. We can’t control the timing or details or even be completely aware of what’s happening. That’s an old point though—“the Kingdom of God cometh not by observation.” ( Luke 17:20 )
An additional point: something is needed that isn’t quite captured by the simple notion of traditional ways. Tradition can’t be understood as simply the self-organization of human life based on memories, natural impulses, and the experience of what works. It has to point to something beyond itself that validates it. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of rules that turn out to make things good for “society”—that is, for other people—but have no personal hold on someone who’s thoughtful and has come to see them as the merely conventional arrangements they are. That’s been a problem, e.g., for Roger Scruton.
The problem of liberalism—of the ontological, epistemological and ethical primacy of the naked ego—will be with us until people understand themselves more definitively as part of a moral order greater than themselves. It’s the primacy of the naked ego that makes the goal of liberalism—abstract equal freedom—seem so compelling. I am convinced though that some day people will once again understand themselves as part of a moral and spiritual cosmos. It’s the natural way for people to view things, and the alternative doesn’t work in the long run, philosophically, socially or personally.
A practical consequence is that the process of rebirth, rejuvenation, return, restoration or whatever has an essential religious component. The things tradition reveals can’t be understood as simply rules that happen to work, but as a revelation of realities that transcend us and make us and the world what they are. That’s another reason to think that a worthwhile future can’t be altogether planned. It’s not simply a matter of developing the right ideas and putting them into effect. The things at issue touch us too closely and are too comprehensive to be handled that way.
Q: Isn’t this to say that conservatives have no answers to current political problems? When a parliamentarian asks if you have any wishes, it does not do to say that he should be pious and reverent.
A: In a sense principled and coherent conservatives have no answer to current political problems because they think current political discussions, which identify problems and the sorts of things that would constitute solutions, is misconceived. Current discussions assume the world can be run by plan to bring about whatever purposes are chosen to a greater extent than it can.
Conservatives do have political goals though, primarily restricting the scope of government attempts to displace traditional institutions like the family with bureaucratic arrangements and to reconstruct social and moral reality. I think though that what’s needed most is an attempt to live better here and now without special reference to what government is doing. Political action would then be treated as mainly ancillary to that attempt.
Q: Perhaps groups like Amish and strictly orthodox communities are the hope for the future.
A: It’s hard to know. Such groups are in fact thriving. The strict orthodox have lots of kids and they get converts. The Amish don’t get converts, but they have lots of kids and maybe 80% of them stick with it.
It seems to me that at worst such groups will survive, find imitators, and eventually replace a liberal civilization that can’t reproduce itself socially or even physically. Then we would end up with a sort of neo-Levantine society of inward turning ethno-religious communities, probably in an overall setting weakly ordered by corrupt dynastic despotisms.
I say “at worst” because I’d much rather have a society of the Western type with more of a substantive public life. Science, philosophy, free government etc. are all good things and it’s upsetting to think they might all go. I don’t think though that liberal civilization will survive long-term. Right now it’s all-victorious, and other possibilities seem extremely speculative and even flaky because liberal civilization has basically defined itself as equivalent to reason itself. That self-definition though leads to a tendency to derive more and more compulsory social practices and even compulsory thought from universal abstract requirements. That makes self-criticism and dealing with fundamental problems impossible. It’s not really a strength in the long run.
Q: Conservatism traditionally calls for an elite. Obviously, a distinction between aristocracy and elite is crucial, otherwise the notion becomes void and we end up defending the liberal new class. But how do we distinguish these phenomena?
A: An aristocracy I suppose would be a legitimate elite, one that is constituted by its role in a social, moral and spiritual order that is superior to it in the same way the order is superior to the people generally. That order determines what the function of the aristocracy is, and both grants and limits its authority. It also imposes obligations that match privileges. An aristocracy is therefore not simply self-interested. If need be it’s capable of self-sacrifice.
A problem with the liberal new class is that everyone’s supposed to be equal so there really isn’t supposed to be an elite. That means everybody has to lie about the situation, and since there are no legitimate privileges and no legitimate personal authority no special personal obligations can be recognized either.
Q. Traditionalists, especially Catholic traditionalists, speak of the importance of liturgy. Even the journal Telos has picked up the theme. It seems unclear to me though how the liturgy conveys transcendent truth except in a vague and general sense.
A: It’s not liturgy in general, something put together by liturgists, that conveys transcendent truth. That’s more likely to be used to misrepresent or obfuscate transcendent truth. It’s particular liturgies—the inherited liturgies of Catholic and Orthodox Christendom—that convey it. A liturgist is almost by definition stupid or evil—stupid, because he has no idea what he’s doing, or evil, because he wants to manipulate the sacred in the interests of what he wants.
I agree about the importance
I agree about the importance of attention to the here and now. In a similar vein, I agree that charity begins at home. Although I agree with those principles, I cannot agree that those concerns are more important than attention to the political.
Man is a political animal. He wars and deceives in order to prosper. Yes we could do more to be perfect, but we are stuck in a chaotic world where time is limited and perfection requires infinite time. The private life is extremely important, but in the end we must protect ourselves from enemies that would destroy us. So the balanced view is probably Machiavellian; strive for perfection in the private life while doing what is necessary to protect the physical life. The necessary will be tempered by the perfection achieved in the private life.
Where would the Amish be if
Where would the Amish be if Hitler had won the Battles of Britain and Stalingrad? They very possibly would be ashes scattered in the wind.
My point was that political
My point was that political action to defend or advance something is subordinate to the thing defended or advanced. I don’t see how that’s different in the case of physical survival.
The “Amish-and-Hasidim inherit the world” scenario obviously can’t come about in every possible setting. Something like it seems likely though if all states are failed states or close to it. A certain degree of social cohesion and public spirit is needed for a state to exist and function for any length of time. There’s no guarantee such things will continue to exist.
Mr. Kalb’s interlocutor
Mr. Kalb’s interlocutor asked:
“When a parliamentarian asks if you have any wishes, it does not do to say that he should be pious and reverent.”
When we are asked “have you tried prayer and fasting?” our response is often to respond “well, that is all well and good but what are the practical recommendations?”
But of course prayer and fasting _are_ the primary practical recommendations. Other things are important too, but the tendency to treat prayer and fasting as impractical or irrelevant is pretty much a summation of the problem.
Mr. Kalb wrote:
“A liturgist is almost by definition stupid or evil—stupid, because he has no idea what he’s doing, or evil, because he wants to manipulate the sacred in the interests of what he wants.”
That particular quote needs to get a wider circulation!
secular culture an
secular culture an uninhabitable world
This is from Jim Kalb’s Turnabout, a blog devoted to the restoration of traditional values in politics and religion. “The problem of liberalism—of the ontological, epistemological and ethical primacy of the naked ego—will be with us…
I have read somewhere that
I have read somewhere that the Amish only retain 50% of their children as faithful to their traditions. I also believe the same holds true for strict or devout Mormons.
Catholics are numbered about 60 million or so in the US, but only half of that attends church regularly, I think.
Regarding the Amish, the
Regarding the Amish, the documentary “Devil’s Playground” (2001) claims that the retention rate is almost 90%, and that this rate is the highest since the founding of the Amish church in 1693.
I’m not sure if this rentention rate is harmed or helped by the Amish tradition of “rumspringa” (running around) in which the young who have come of age basically, well, run around until they decide whether or not to be full members of the church and live in accordance with Amish ways.
I merely think it is
I merely think it is important to see the Amish as benign parasites, who could not exist but for the host, the sacrifice of the members of the surrounding society. People must do what is necessary to survive as long as it is not sinful. The Amish are unwilling to do what is necessary and are, therefore, of limited use as a model for a society.
I agree, however, that they have great value as a model. They show that self-discipline and social cohesion is possible. So any Amish offshoot that accepts technology is worth particular attention.
Amish people parasites? I
Amish people parasites? I dunno. It’s true that Amish and Hasidic Jewish societies do not have the ability to be freestanding, but must depend for their existence on the presence of freestanding non-Amish/non-Hasidic societies around them, and it’s true that such factions of the Left as liberalism, women’s lib, and homosexualism also are not freestanding. The difference is the way the latter continually strive to annihilate the society around them while the former do not oppose the surrounding society’s health.
(I was responding there to
(I was responding there to Mr. Murgos’ comment, above.)
The Orthodox historian David
The Orthodox historian David Hart has written two excellent essays recently, which address many of the same problems examined here. I noted both of Mr. Hart’s essays in this blog entry.
A sample:
“Nothing could be more important for an understanding of modernity . . . than to recognize that we are not living in an age in which religious adherence has simply withered away before the parching wind of Enlightenment reason, but in one in which a new evangel has—over the course of a few centuries—displaced the old, and with it the cultural energy and rationale of Christian Europe: a new religion, whose most devout believers are as zealous, intolerant, and absolutist as any faith has ever produced, and whose vast silent constituency is as unreflective, passive, and pliant as any enfranchised clerisy could desire. It is good for Christians to grasp that, even in this hour, we struggle not simply with disillusion and demystification, but with strange gods.”
Those Hart essays are linked
Those Hart essays are linked to here.
Hart’s “new evangel [which]
Hart’s “new evangel [which] has … displaced the old” is of course a religion too, though it pretends to reject religion. The severest, most pitiless tribunals of Tomas de Torquemada couldn’t hold a candle to the draconian arbitrariness of its Star Chambers. The destruction it has wrought on Western Civilization would make the Vandals and the Ostragoths blush; would make Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun avert their eyes.
“It is good for Christians to grasp that, even in this hour, we struggle not simply with disillusion and demystification, but with strange gods.” Yes, and accordingly it is good to call this new evangel always by its right names, in order never to lose sight of the fact that it, too, is a religion. Its right names are The Religious Left, or Secular Fundamentalism ( * ), or The Liberal Religion, or the many others which the true cognoscente know it by.
“Strange gods,” indeed—weird, ghastly gods it worships, ones which Christians (and Jews of course) should want nothing to do with.
( * ) See, for example, this sentence: “Inconveniently for today’s secular fundamentalists, God remained central to Thanksgiving well past colonial times.” ( http://www.towardtradition.org/article_Chanukah_2003.htm ). This phraseology leaves no doubt but that what we are dealing with is a rival religion.
If I had said “not
If I had said “not freestanding” instead of “benign parasite,” I would have retained most of the punch I was looking for without the excessively negative connotation that parasite carries. I tried but couldn’t think of a better word at the time. So thanks to Unadorned for the better word. I admire the Amish.
Peace, all.
Quoted above:
Peace, all.
Quoted above: “A liturgist is almost by definition stupid or evil—stupid, because he has no idea what he’s doing, or evil, because he wants to manipulate the sacred in the interests of what he wants.”
Then a response: “That particular quote needs to get a wider circulation!”
I differ. By definition a liturgist works in liturgy. If you alter the definition to describe a person with unseemly qualities, you have engaged in a osrt of conservative PC in Wonderland: changing the language to mean exactly what you want it to mean.
The quote should be retired, and people of any ministry should be urged to continuing study, spiritual formation, and pastoral sensitivity.
Thanks to Todd for his
Thanks to Todd for his comments. The quote is an extreme formulation and I hope it didn’t look like something to take literally. I don’t doubt that many liturgists have intelligence and good will.
The point though is that there’s something very odd about notions like professional liturgist, creative liturgical committee, expert composer of prayers, and what not. The most natural attitudes in connection with liturgy I think are contemplation and receptivity. The important action is God’s action, which in the mass is always available to us and the same in all times and places. It seems to me that our role—at least the thing that brings me to mass—is to recognize that action and accept and cooperate with it. With that in mind individual, local or contemporary self-expression seem distracting and aside the point. To the extent they seem to import somebody’s particular point of view or agenda into the lex orandi they even seem oppressive.
So “stupid” was intended to say as vividly as possible that such things are misconceived. As to “evil,” it seems to me that a spiritually disordered person would have a very strong motive to redo the liturgy. In my experience spiritually disordered persons are also extraordinarily single-minded, tenacious and manipulative. So it would be surprising if such people never succeeded in affecting efforts to update, reform or otherwise change the liturgy.
It’s always hard to know what language to use. It seems to me that liturgical reformers have had their way, the results have been bad, and the bad results have come from fundamental flaws in the modern way of thinking about these things. Under such circumstances strong language seemed justified to raise the issue as forcefully as possible.
A few comments on the
A few comments on the comments above:
The phrase “secular fundamentalist”, IMHO, is on target, very on the money.
Regarding the Amish: I think we should not be too harsh on them, even though there are members of a man-made ‘church’. We in the dying West, being super high-tech as we are, are too vulnerable in too many areas vis-a-vis our technological way of life. It would behoove us, in case we somehow lose our computer-driven, oil-driven, electricity-driven civilization (or at least have it knocked out for a long, long time) to develop a back-up mode of operating society – like the Amish – to keep things going. Or rather, like the Amish but with a Traditional Catholic soul, mind, ethos and politics.
Finally, on Matt’s comments from near the top: He also has hit the nail on the head. Too many think that that sincere prayer and fasting – at least, returning to the Friday fasting from meat – will not change anything at all. Or perhaps, not change anything except in a slow and gradual fashion, when they need and want an immediate change for the better.
Let’s remember what the last surviving seer of Fatima, Sr. Lucia, said about the Rosary, and I paraphrase: “There is no problem today, spiritual or temporal, personal or national, that cannot be solved by the praying of the Rosary.”
I belive the exact quote can be found or searched by checking out the Fatima Crusader website at:
http://www.fatima.org
Thank you all for your time and patience.