Back in the 90’s I came across a historian who discussed the lifecycle of civilizations and societies. He cited the post-WWII period in the United States as an example of a civilization at its peak.
American society was cohesive. That is, we agreed on the basic goals for our nation. Our disagreements had more to do with how to achieve them.
This historian’s assessment of the 90’s was that we had entered a period of fracture, of unwinding, as increasingly competing groups and sensibilities were tearing the country apart.
No longer could we agree on much of anything. We were in that phase where civic society loses its sense of identity and purpose. What would take its place was up in the air. American society would need to be reconfigured and reconstituted.
Almost 30 years later, in a fascinating article entitled “Return of the Strong Gods,” published In First Things by its editor, R.R. Reno, the argument is that we are in the midst of a far more advanced stage of such uncertainty and reconfiguration. “The wheel of history,” as he puts it, “seems to be turning.”
By this he means the 20th century is finally beginning to end. And with that what he calls the “post-WWII consensus.”
This postwar consensus emerged after the failures of the first half of the century when the “strong gods” of hyper-nationalism led to violence and bloodshed, leaving Europe in shambles. “The West could not endure another round of nationalist zealotry,” he explains.
The way forward would be through “disenchantment,” which would involve, among other things, “a weakening of the powerful loyalties that bound men to their homelands.” This new consensus would also reject earlier ideological commitments and passions that had produced brutality and moral blindness.
A deliberate “softening and weakening” of civilizational thinking would restore a more humane way of life in the West. Steps would be taken to “disenchant and desacralize” public life. Any and all strong claims would become taboo.
This involved a two-pronged approach. For one, economic and commercial ties would temper any narrow sense of nationalism. Secondly, a conscious effort would be made “to defend the human person against the claims of strong gods in any guise, even in the garb of moral truth.”
This “imperative of disenchantment” would require a new post-ideological mindset. Radical French students in 1968, faithfully mirroring this sentiment, scribbled graffiti on the walls of Paris that read, “It is forbidden to forbid.” Anything strong and limiting had to go. All social authority must be weakened so that humans could live more fully.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, any nominal sense of cultural unity in the West, held uncomfortably together in order to combat the threat of communism and the Soviet Union, fell too.
Into this breach came global capitalism which, as I say, would limit the narrow parochialisms of the nation-state, bringing global prosperity and cooperation in its wake. On the other front, a philosophical “weakening of Being” would promote “tolerance, peace, and freedom.”
Of the latter, Reno writes, “If there are no strong truths, nobody will judge others or limit their freedom. If there is nothing worth fighting for, nobody will fight.”
“The great commandment,” he adds further, “is not to love our neighbor as we love our self,” but “to go easy on our neighbors as we go easy on ourselves.”
This two-pronged “economic and cultural deregulation and disenchantment” may have made some sense in the aftermath of WWII, he says, but its time has passed.
In fact, he persuasively argues that the disruption currently found in the West in general, and in the U.S. in particular, is because this old consensus, along with its “imperative of weakening,” is faltering. It no longer works.
What people are experiencing now is communal, psychological, and, not least, spiritual homelessness. Communities are rent apart, while its elites, the wealthy and successful, are set apart from the rest of society physically, economically, and culturally. Separate groups, social and political, are irreparably alienated one from the other, each shrilly vying for increasing power and influence.
In the meantime, the call for ever more “weakening” in a society already straining with the loss of the sacred in both public and private life is taking its toll.
In the end, Reno contends, what we’re now seeing is the collective fear of a culture out of control, beyond the comforts and strengths of that place we used to call home. Everything has been made “fluid and uncertain, leaving us with little that is solid and trustworthy.”
The God of our forebears (and this would include the church) as well as the guiding, formative institutions of family and the larger civic order have given way to postmodernism’s “hearth gods of health, wealth, and pleasure,” our high priests having become “medical experts, central bankers, and celebrity chefs.”
In the end, what is now most needed is what Reno calls “the greatest and highest covenant,” the religious.
As he puts it, “The religious-covenant relativizes our other loyalties. It smashes idols not by relying on the postwar pattern of disenchantment, but instead by romancing our souls with a higher, more powerful enchantment.
“The most reliable protection against a false and dangerous sacralization of ideology, nation, Volk, or any other populist perversion is not multiculturalism or post-national globalism. It is instead love and loyalty ordered toward the highest good, which is God.”