G.K. Chesterton, referencing the Modernist era, once said: “A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.”
As you may recall, Modernism, beginning with the Enlightenment, sought to replace tradition with Reason. All human problems would thus be fixed. Me thinks Chesterton was on to something.
Today we live in a bifurcated culture. One might even call it schizophrenic. Which is to say there exists two camps where never the twain shall meet: socialism and capitalism. Both, believe it or not, are kissing cousins.
Capitalism, in a generalized sense, is the Enlightenment’s idea of the free market which sought to empower the individual over and against the feudal system of land owner and serf.
Based on thinkers such as John Locke and Adam Smith, the idea was to establish a system that emphasizes economic liberty for the newly emancipated individual.
As time wore on, the inherent deficiencies of this system became apparent, especially during the Industrial Revolution – and aided and abetted by the French Revolution. The former, in time, had broken up the traditional bonds of village, family, and church, so that the lone individual was increasingly cut off from fellow citizen, from any real sense of community.
Socialism arose in response. It focused on social ties and communal norms. It promised to eliminate all inequities by insuring the democratization (or leveling) of society (another Enlightenment theme). How it was to accomplish this was another matter, as history has shown.
Both views, seemingly opposite, are flip sides of the same coin – the rationalist/materialist coin, that is. Both promise to supplant tradition by creating a this-worldly utopia based on human logic.
Russell Kirk, the great 20th century American political thinker, was having none of it. He emphasized instead the critical importance of tradition, of culture and civilization, each premised on religion.
“In the beginning,” he writes, “culture arises from the cult; that is, people are joined together in worship, and out of their religious association grows the organized human community…If that culture succeeds, it may grow into a civilization.”
Such a culture, writes Christopher Dawson, “consists of an organized way of life with common traditions and conditioned by a common environment.” This environment is noted for its “common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value.” These are the ties that bind.
Above all, he asserts, culture “must be a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than any unanimity of physical type…Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion.”
Kirk agrees. Arguing for the estimable 19th century political thinker, Edmund Burke, he insists that a good and humane society requires not just good laws, but religion, traditions of living, a rich heritage of customs, and a complex pattern of relationships of all kinds. It is these things, together in all their innumerable, constituent parts, that make us truly human.
Along these lines, Louis Bredvold, also echoing Burke, writes that “politics ought to be adjusted, not to bare human reason, but to human nature, of which reason is but a part, and…by no means the greatest part.” Civilization, in other words, reflects and accommodates our truest nature.
The revolutionaries, however, would invoke a kind of “inverted religion,” which uses “a central political power and strength to enforce conformity to its ‘rational creed.’ Through the destruction of ancient institutions and beliefs, the way must be cleared for Utopia.”
Ironically, the revolutionaries were actually “subverting true ‘social freedom,’ which is maintained by wise laws and well-constructed institutions; they were seeking what never can be found, perfect liberty – which means that the bonds of social community are dissolved, and men are left little human atoms, at war with one another.”
In short, the French Revolution sought to “uproot the delicate growth that is human society,” the only way of being that makes life intelligible and meaningful.
Generally speaking, both today’s strict libertarian/capitalist thinking and socialist idealism are based on a secular fiction. For the former, the goal is to find security by means of unfettered economic activity, at the expense of community. For the latter, the goal is to achieve human community and equality, but with the loss of personal liberty. Both, it must be noted, leave God out, deferring to human rather than godly means.
The problem for the founders of capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries was that they assumed the moral and spiritual heritage of Judaism and Christianity would continue forever.
They thought its values of honesty, fidelity, diligence, reticence, delayed gratification, and self-control were unassailable. But after decades of self-expression, self-indulgence, instant gratification, and demands for the impossible, such traditional norms can no longer be assumed.
What’s left is something Michael Novak called the “empty shrine” at the center of our pluralistic democracy. The chimes of church bells, as it were, have grown ever faint.
Because secular capitalism has proved inadequate in filling this empty shrine, socialism comes along promising both moral and economic perfection. To a nation starving for community and stability, its lure is intoxicating.
But without God, and the civilizational traditions born of God, we end up with two polar opposites: the mindless, radical, individualistic pursuit of money – and the soulless, enervating conformity of socialism.
An unavoidable fact of life, one most reviled, is that human existence involves acceding to authority. That authority can come from either God or human beings.
The very first task of the Christian is to learn to fear God, and to accept human nature as fraught with sin and limitation. It is out of this basic recognition that humility and obedience to God’s righteous authority emerges.
Short of this, we rely solely on naked, abstract human powers, artificially torn from their natural habitat, from that which, ironically, makes us most human and most humane: i.e. a civilization formed in and through divine revelation, passed down by custom and tradition, itself reflecting countless generations of lived experience that faithfully accords with the unchanging, intractable contours of creation and human nature.