Nature abhors a vacuum. Thus, whenever human beings attempt to eliminate a set of moral precepts, there’s always another waiting in the wings.
I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in suggesting that one of the defining, bedrock principles of early America was Judeo-Christian tradition. Of course, there were other streams of influence as well, not least British culture which served as the repository not only of Christianity but ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, government, and law, each revised and refined over centuries by considered insight and lived experience. British culture embodied the best of Western Civilization.
One basic insight shared by Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome alike, undergirding the entire Western edifice, was the fact of flawed human nature.
In addition, all three insisted that the universe has a certain givenness to it. In other words, creation is bounded by irrefutable, unchangeable laws. Thus, the proper task of education is to discover these laws and align oneself to them, to avoid going against the grain of reality.
For its part the church insisted that, in addition to natural law, there exists divine law. The task of the Christian, as such, was to conform one’s will to the Creator’s in order to live as God intends.
Since all agreed human beings are congenitally imperfect, it stood to reason that none is born virtuous, and possesses only the potential in achieving it. Character, in other words, must be learned, practiced, and, over time, inculcated, in much the same way one might learn a language. To repeat, the goal was to discover and seek conformity with the unyielding laws of God and nature. Anything less was to live a diminished life.
In a timely new book entitled, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business, Stephen Soukup charts how this basic understanding, dating all the way back to antiquity, was to change over time in America. As with most philosophical change, it took decades and involved various twists-and-turns along the way.
The Enlightenment, Soukup argues, played a key role in altering how we moderns think. It would redefine our relationship to the world, and in fundamental ways.
Specifically, the Enlightenment attempted to replace the old order with an as yet unrealized utopia built on the implicit promises of science and reason. Freed from the medieval, mystical obfuscations of church dogma, human beings could finally unleash the latent potential hidden within nature and harness it to serve human purposes. Progress was the order of the day.
Yet to be accurate, one must distinguish between the Continental Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish version. Notably the latter, most prominent in early America, did not reject God.
Then again, in time, the Continental version did enjoy increasing support in America, reaching its apex in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fueled in part by the remarkable civilizational advancements of the West, especially in science and technology, a powerful albeit naive optimism was to greet the new century.
Other inventive theories played a role as well. For one, there was Charles Darwin’s study of evolution, which fit nicely into progressivism’s flirtation with German Idealism, which held that human nature and history are evolving into ever higher and more complex forms. It was Continental Enlightenment on steroids.
Redemption would now be premised on the future. The past was the past. What then was required to meet the challenges of this brave new world? A more enlightened scientific approach, of course.
And who then would lead us in meeting this challenge? Piggybacking onto late Romanticism’s enthusiasm for “genius” (as opposed to the stolid moralism, stability, and benefactions of bourgeois society), power would be transferred to a small, specially educated, administrative gentry class, and away from the great unwashed.
This newly minted “expert” class alone was capable of elevating society above the ignorance and blinkered self-interest of the masses. Only it could provide the clear, objective, unbiased, and scientifically determined set of policies necessary to build a perfect world.
Its effect, however, was short-lived as faith in the whole progressive project began to wane in the years following World War I. As many historians have noted, perhaps the biggest casualty of the war was the loss of confidence in the West’s cultural foundations and ideals. Disillusionment followed in its wake.
D.H. Lawrence, referencing this anomie, once observed, “All the great words were cancelled out for that [post-war] generation.” Or, as contemporary writer Roger Kimball puts it, “Honor, nobility, valor, patriotism, sacrifice, beauty: who could still take such abstractions seriously after the wholesale slaughter of the war?”
Into this void came a new search for meaning. Prior to the war, various writers, artists, and thinkers had gleefully anticipated the downfall of the West. Their idea was to tear the system down and recreate society on modern precepts. The war only seemed to confirm and amplify the sentiment.
Amid growing skepticism, reliance on empirical reason, moral law, and the belief in progress, all having defined early progressivism, yielded to a toxic blend of abstraction, sentimentality, emotionalism, and narcissistic fantasy, especially in Europe.
With the weakening of traditional norms and values, a grandiose and untested aesthetic intellectualism sought to refashion the present and future. This hardnosed pretender to the cultural throne aimed to exploit the vacuum left by the West’s lost ideals and replace them with what would prove a speculative, utopian mental construct.
Soukup argues that the earlier progressive project, premised on the rule of an expert class and its pursuit of empirical scientific truths, effectively ended with the publication of Dwight Waldo’s influential 1948 book, The Administrative State.
Therein Waldo dismissed the progressive faith in objective, scientific truth. There’s a difference, he pointed out, between “value” and “fact.” And since politics and administration are value-laden exercises, not fact-based, they should be treated as such.
What progressives saw as objective, rational, scientific truths, Waldo perceived as merely subjective, conditioned, arbitrary. Truth is not derived from nature or its laws, but solely on the biased disposition of the interpreter. There is no set truth. Nothing about reality is ironclad. All is relative. An objective world beyond the self simply doesn’t exist. Rather, life is altogether changeable, pliable, evolving. Nothing stands still.
It should be noted that this way of thinking betrays an ancient heresy – Gnosticism. Unbound by the laws and limitations of creation, the individual is free to interpret reality as he or she sees fit. Nothing is fixed. Humans are infinitely malleable, protean creatures who are free to refashion themselves – and the world – as they so desire. Life no longer is defined by what is, but by what might be, by the possible, by what one, in effect, wills reality to be.
From a Christian perspective, this suggests that it is our will, not God’s, that sets the course of history. That which is eternal and unchanging is replaced by the temporal and transitory. It is we who author the future. Which is precisely Adam and Eve’s “original” sin – their desire to be gods rather than creatures fashioned by and for God’s purposes.
In the end, the progressives were wrong in naively assuming they could manage society by reducing the messy, infinitely complex and unpredictable realities of human nature into a neat set of objective, scientific schemes. Where they were right, however, was in their respect for the fixities of science, morality, and nature as foundational to the human enterprise.
From this point on, a new perspective on history and human nature began to creep further into our everyday thinking, first among intellectuals, but eventually to the public at large.
Increasingly, this change was to affect virtually every institution in America, even amongst the most reliable redoubts of hard-nosed, results-oriented thinking – the corporate world.
Part II will attempt to explain how this came to be.