Recently I was watching a YouTube interview with one of my favorite columnists who offered a startling observation. Except for maybe one or two, he said, most columnists avoid placing current events in the context of history. As a historian he always does.
For some reason this struck me, even though we live in an age that takes pride in avoiding history, if not rejecting it altogether. You might say it’s built into our DNA.
Though this trend has accelerated over the last 50-60 years, its roots go back at least as far as the Enlightenment some 400 years ago. Many would date it 100 years before that.
N.T. Wright, renowned New Testament scholar, former Anglican bishop, and currently a senior research fellow at Oxford (U.K.), has made the case that the Enlightenment could be understood as an updated version of ancient Epicureanism.
Specifically, ancient Epicureanism believed in a deep and unbreachable divide between the realm of the gods and the plane of human existence. Never could the twain meet.
Since human beings are incapable of knowing divine things, all we have is the this-worldly, the here-and-now. Ergo, the dictum to “eat, drink, and be merry.”
Although the Enlightenment rejected a philosophy of hedonism, it did accept the belief that human beings are incapable of knowing anything about the transcendent ordering of things.
This was, to put it mildly, a huge departure from traditional Western Civilization which, for at least 1,500 years, had lived by the Christian conviction that something of God’s order and truth, spiritual, moral, or otherwise, is accessible to the human mind. There was a given-ness to created order from which we could learn and to which we could strive to conform. Overarching metaphysical truths were taken for granted.
During the Enlightenment this was challenged and rejected, profoundly altering how human beings think about the very nature of being.
Prior to the Enlightenment, the West employed deductive reasoning to glean life’s truths. There was a divinely given order and a revealed metanarrative from which we could infer life’s meanings. It was a top-down process.
With the ascendancy of science and reason, tradition, doctrine, lived experience, and metaphysical truths were replaced by a new, this-worldly, bottom-up approach. Authentic knowledge could only be discovered by means of human investigation. The world was now but a blank slate upon which the Age of Reason would write a new and truer account.
All time-honored insights into the nature of being were jettisoned. History would begin anew, based not on unknowable metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, but on hard, objective, observable fact. A new and better world would be built from the ground up.
This premised a new future. As scientific and rational inquiry progressed, the passing years would yield untold blessings as life’s perennial problems were improved, if not solved, by human agency. Tomorrow would look nothing like yesterday or today. A future utopia was now within our grasp.
It’s as if a candle were lit in a dark cave, then another, and another, until the world was ablaze with light. The mystifications of the past would yield to the efficacious benefactions of pure unsullied reason.
In reality, such an approach is closer to an adolescent’s search for truth, as the traditions and insights of the past are scornfully rejected as outdated and in desperate need of change. Intoxicated with novelty and innovation, the adolescent plunges headfirst into the unknown with wholly unwarranted confidence.
Adolescence naively assumes it’s free of presupposition and claims therefore a false “objectivity,” mistaking a sliver of human history (the Now) for the whole.
Whenever the limited views of any age are taken to be the sole arbiter of truth, one’s perception of history is altered, effectively squeezed into a little box containing only the necessarily narrow, ever-fickle biases of contemporary thought.
The future suffers as well, as posterity depends on the witness of those who came before. All in all, within this scheme, the past, present, and future are radically abridged and deformed.
C.S. Lewis once remarked that the error of the contemporary “Innovator” is to take “fragments” of the truth and make them the whole truth. This he likened to “a rebellion of the branches against the tree.” To succeed would mean their destruction.
Besides, as he points out elsewhere, 99 out of 100 facts with which we reason depend on authority (that which is passed down from generation to generation). Were it not so, we’d know virtually nothing.
It’s as if one were to wake up each morning with no memory of the day before. A lifetime of experience, knowledge, and wisdom is lost to the all-consuming imperatives of the Now.
Like it or not, we are all children of the Enlightenment, which, despite its many admittedly laudable achievements, continues to create mass confusion in terms of how we make sense of our world. As a philosophy for how to live, in other words, it’s a mess.
Contemporary culture suffers from a tragic loss of meaning and purpose, animated by a false dichotomy between two extremes. These extremes are, oddly enough, flip sides of the same post-Enlightenment, post-structural, post-foundational coin.
The “progressive” Left rejects tradition and foundational structures in favor of a utopian scheme that believes it can transform human nature into something resembling perfection.
Creation has no permanent, divinely established order. Instead it is endlessly malleable, to be rearranged by human manipulation. There’s no set core to life which, like clay, can be willfully reshaped by means of enlightened social engineering.
The “conservative” Right which, for at least the last three decades, might more accurately be described as libertarian, is mostly a modernistic adaptation of classic “liberalism” (as in the 18th century understanding of the term).
Yet such “conservativism,” with no small irony, actually shares the very same anti-foundational presumptions as “progressivism,” its putative political rival. Which is to say it also rejects the seemingly confining insights of traditional society for a utopian promise of peace and prosperity by means of the blind, self-interested choices of free individuals and free markets.
Both philosophies, at base, dream of a better and brighter world built from the ground up, sharing in common the very same humanistic, utopian conceits and pretensions.
Then again, both were birthed by the same anti-traditional ahistoricism intrinsic to the Enlightenment project. The extremes found in the raging political and social debates of our age, then, agree more than they disagree. Which is perhaps why they fight so bitterly.
A mature and far more workable approach would be, rather than rejecting outright the Enlightenment’s insights and learnings, to incorporate them into the ongoing witness of lived tradition, into the ongoing foundational story of God and creation in and through time.
In short, we should conserve what is worthy of being conserved and reject what is not. This suggests not a stifling, wooden, anti-human traditionalism, but a living, breathing, reforming tradition, one that retains its essential, foundational insights into God and human nature, while simultaneously sifting through the vagaries of the present to discover those nuggets that necessitate considered change.