Advancement or Decline?

Eight years ago, historian and historical philosopher Dr. John Lukacs, in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “It’s The End of the Modern Age” wrote:

For a long time, I have been convinced that we in the West are living near the end of an entire age, the age that began about 500 years ago.

After a brief synopsis of the history of his thought on this matter he says that during the ten years prior to his writing:

my conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to which I have belonged, are passing but that we are living through — if not already beyond — its very end. I am writing about the so-called Modern Age.

This is a recurring theme in Dr. Lukacs’ writings and one which he has devoted entire books to. A Catholic and self-described reactionary who fled to the United States from his native Hungary shortly after the Communists took it over at the end of World War II, he has little sympathy for the ideas of progress, technology, and growth that many would see as the moving spirit of the Modern Age, but rather eulogizes the bourgeois values and civilization that were also associated with that Age.

Others, looking at the same phenomenon through very different lenses than those of Dr. Lukacs, have described it differently.

Neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, in the late 1980’s wrote an essay entitled “The End of History” which was later expanded into a book. The thesis of this arrogant piece of liberal triumphalism was that it was not just an age that was ending, but all of history, because when liberal democracy becomes universal, mankind would have achieved the end which human development was advancing towards.

The grandfather of postmodernism, French socialist and literary theorist, Jean-François Lyotard saw the passing of modernity (not quite identical to what historian Lukacs calls “the Modern Age” but there is much overlap) as something to celebrate. To Lyotard, the end of modernity meant the end of the meta-narrative, his term for theories which purport to completely explain the world, which he argued post-modern man had grown to be skeptical of.

While each of these views is quite different from the others they have in common the idea that the last century has been one of major societal transformation. Change has taken place and is taking place at an accelerated and perhaps accelerating rate. The question is: is this change good or bad?

As one who is naturally and proudly conservative by disposition, who rejects the Whig theory of history and favours Lord Falkland’s maxim “When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change” I am inclined to look at these revolutionary changes as being negative. Thus I find myself sympathizing with Dr. Lukacs’ perspective more than that of the other two. My temperament, however, is hardly evidence of the correctness of my judgment. Let us take a look then, at the question at hand..

Is civilization in decline? The answer depends on how what we understand “civilization” to mean. Many understand “civilization” to refer to modern developments in technology and science and the accompanying changes in the political, economic, and moral arrangements of the societies in which these developments have taken place, viewed in opposition to earlier “primitive” versions of the same. This understanding of “civilization” virtually demands that contemporary society be always viewed as more advanced than past society. It is inseparable from the progressive viewpoint.

This is not the only way of understanding “civilization” however. Another way, and one which I would argue is superior, is to understand “civilization” to refer to the quality of a society marked by civility and civic virtue. Civility and civic virtue are related concepts which largely overlap. While some would reduce “civility” to “politeness” and “civic virtue” to “obedience to the state” this is a very misleading oversimplification. Civility and civic virtue are both aspects of an understanding of self as part of a greater whole, i.e., society. The good of the whole is greater than the good of the self and therefore the self has an obligation or duty to society as a whole. The cultivation of that duty is civic virtue. Civility is the aspect of civil virtue in which we behave properly towards other members of our society. This includes, but is hardly limited to, politeness.

The idea that society forms a whole which has as its end the highest good, to which all other goods are subordinate, is fundamental to the ethics and politics of both Plato and Aristotle. George P. Grant said that “Western society at its height has been” the uniting of Christianity and Plato. In the Christian West, especially the English-speaking part of it, the idea that the good of the whole is greater than the good of the self was balanced by the concept of the rights and freedoms of the individual. It was a delicate balance. Society requires that its individual members put the good of the society ahead of their own to the point of being willing to die for their society in war. Society’s survival depends upon this sense of duty and obligation. If, however, society does not recognize rights and freedoms on the part of the individual which it cannot take away at whim, government can use the concept of the greater good to justify abuses.

The collapse of civilization at the end of the Modern Age can be regarded as the ultimate fulfillment of the goals of the liberalism which was the spirit of the Modern Age. Liberalism was a form of individualism which upset the balance between the whole and the self, by defining society as a contractual construction existing to serve the sovereign individual. Throughout the Modern Age which saw the ascendancy of liberalism, Western societies continued to regard themselves as societies with a Christian core identity.

Since World War II however, that has changed. Whereas non-Western societies have no problem continuing to identify themselves with their traditional faiths, Western societies now prefer to see themselves as having a secular identity, a post-Christian identity. Church attendance is in decline. Orthodoxy, which we will define as Scriptural doctrine as expressed in the early ecumenical creeds of the Christian Church – Apostolic, Nicene, Athanasian – is waning in the pulpit, as respect for Scriptural and ecclesiastical authority is waning in the pew.

The Christian Church will survive, of course. Jesus Christ promised that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. The question is will the societies whose civilization was once shaped by Christianity survive now that liberalism has triumphed and they have rejected their Christian identity?

The sweeping changes we see all around us in the post-modern, post-Christian era, mark the triumph of the self over the whole. The rights which protected the individual from the abuse of power in traditional society have been transformed into selfish demands that power cater to every whim of the self. Culturally, we have seen the media of art advance technologically. To give one example, the technology of recorded music has advanced from phonographic record, to audio cassette, to CD, to electronic music files, each step being marked by better quality in terms of clarity and definition of the sound. Yet as the media has advanced, the message has declined. Which is more important, the medium or the message? Sensible people would say the latter, and the same period that saw these incredible technological advances saw the new technology being used to convey music which is increasingly vulgar, profane, pornographic, anti-social and violent in its character. Those who vocalize objections to these trends are told in response that these judgments are all subjective, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and “who are you to judge”? What that really translates to is the assertion on the part of the self of its right and ability to define reality, including morality and aesthetics for itself.

This is also what we see in the post-WWII revolution in morality. The self has declared its own pleasure to be the highest good and declared entire categories of behavior that pertain to material pleasures to be off-limits to society and societal standards of what is right and what is wrong. The self will decide for itself what is right and what is wrong and society’s only role will be to affirm it in its decision. If the decisions of a couple of young selves (for we cannot call them a young man and a young woman – the self has reserved for itself the right to define what a “man” or a “woman” is for itself) results in a pregnancy, and the couple lacks either the ability or the desire to take upon themselves the duty of raising their child, society’s interest in preserving the sanctity of human life must take backseat to the interest of the self.

The advocates of this new empowerment of the self identify it with “freedom” but it is not freedom in any but the most superficial sense. The collapse of the cultural, moral, religious, and social core of a society creates a vacuum, and nature, as the old saw says, abhors a vacuum. The hole will be filled by political and economical control. The same decades that have seen the moral and cultural collapse described above, have also seen people’s ordinary, everyday lives become more and more subjected to bureaucratic administration and regulation, as well as the emergence of a new political and economical order carried out on an international rather than a national scale. The new “freedom” of the empowered self from cultural, moral, and religious restraint is only the opiate that blinds it to political and economic domination. Aldous Huxley saw it coming.

Political and economic total control, the collapse of national identity into a new international order, and the collapse of society as a cultural, religious, and moral whole. A “brave new world” it may very well be. A civilization, it is not. This is definitely a period of decline.

Real Conservatism is Social Conservatism

Aldous Huxley, in a preface written for the 1948 re-issue of his best known book Brave New World, wrote:

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase.

Huxley’s novel provides a literary example of this. Brave New World depicts a future where numerous progressive dreams of the ideal society have been fulfilled at the expense of a complete loss of political and economic freedom. Everybody’s life in this literary world, their career, their place in society, is planned for them in advance. To keep them from complaining or even being conscious of this lack of liberty they have complete freedom in the areas of sex, drugs, and pretty much everything that liberals and libertarians would call “personal lifestyle” matters today.

Huxley clearly was possessed of far greater insight than many who call themselves libertarians or even “conservatives” today.

Libertarians like to think of themselves as the only believers in political liberty, as an Aristotelian mean between two statist extremes, liberalism on the left, conservatism on the right. Liberals, they say, support freedom on lifestyle/social issues, but oppose economic freedom, whereas conservatives support freedom on economic issues, but oppose it for lifestyle issues. In contrast, they themselves support freedom across the board.

Huxley, however, was aware of something the libertarians appear to be blind to. Complete liberty in “personal lifestyle” matters is only possible through state intrusion into society and complete political control over our lives. In his novel, the sexual freedom that everyone possessed, was created by the elimination of the family. People enter this society, not as children born out of the love of their parents, but as fetuses created in a laboratory. They have no parents or siblings, they are conditioned for their role in society through technology that allows them to be programmed in their sleep in state-run institutions. Only thus can their ethic of “everybody belongs to everybody else” be achieved.

An objection might be made that this was, after all, just a novel, and that in real life we have more freedom in these matters today than 60 years ago without any of that happening.

Lets consider that a bit more closely. It is true that the state has not issued a decree saying that we are not allowed to live together as families any more, that all children are wards of the state, and that from now on all sex will be sterile and all reproduction will be done in a laboratory. It is also true, however, that a) the government is far more involved in our everyday lives than it used to be, and b) institutions like the family and the church are not as strong and influential as they used to be. These two things are directly related to each other and are the reason the sexual revolution was able to occur.

In Christian society the government was never the primary enforcer of sexual ethics. It was traditionally the role of parents to raise their sons to respect women and to raise their daughters to guard their virtue. Parents were supported in doing so by the traditional culture – the songs, stories, legends, and folklore passed down through the generations that transmit a society’s identity, and values from one generation to the next, and by the institution of the church which provided spiritual and moral guidance. Further support came from the system of honor and shame, which far more effectively than the police, enforced society’s understanding of right and wrong. If wrongdoing crossed over into the realm of the criminal – if, for example, a girl’s virtue was taken from her by force, then it was time for the law to step in.

The sexual revolution was not a revolution against government power. It was a revolution against the church, a revolution against the family, a revolution against tradition and against society. How was this revolution made possible?

Several changes that occurred in the period immediately preceding, during, and following World War II opened the door to the revolution.

There was the transformation in how popular culture is created and transmitted brought about by the creation of the mass media. Popular used to be something people participated in, the songs and stories and literature they learned at the hearth, the bedside, in the fields, churches and taverns. The birth of the apparatus of mass communication, dubbed “The Great Stereopticon” by Richard Weaver, changed this. Popular culture became something produced for commercial purposes which people consumed rather than participated in. As such, its ties to the institutions of society were broken, and it became an instrument in the hands of those who sought to undermine traditional moral and social values, rather than to uphold them.

Then there was the transformation of public education. The original public schools were established by churches or by the local governments of small communities. Teachers derived their authority from the fact that they stood in loco parentis in the classroom and they were directly answerable to the parents. In the name of standardization, however, the schools were brought under the control of government bureaucracies and in the 20th Century governments began to use the public schools as instruments to challenge the authority of parents, tradition, and churches.

Then there was the establishment of the welfare state. The welfare-state was a massive 20th Century expansion of government relief programs. Behind this expansion lay the idea that it is the role of the state to feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe the naked, and provide shelter for the homeless. While society certainly has a responsibility to see to it that these things are done, the state, the defining function of which is to wield the sword in the upholding of law and civil order and in defense of the country, is hardly an appropriate institution to be used to fulfill these tasks. Furthermore, when it takes over these roles it usurps and undermines the other social institutions to whom these roles traditionally fall.

Finally, there was the development of new contraceptive and reproductive technology. Here the connection to Brave New World is most striking. The development of cheap, effective, birth control could serve no purpose other than to try and approximate the barren, purely recreational, sex of Huxley’s dystopia. In vitro fertilization and other artificial reproduction methods were developed, largely to meet a need created by the advancements in birth control, but note that they too bear a certain resemblance to the means of reproduction in the novel.

The development of these two technologies threaten civilization by undermining our respect for human life and for the sex which generates that life. To strip the latter of its reproductive potential and reduce it to mere recreation is to play with fire. The development of cheap birth control was followed by the demand for legal, government-subsidized, abortions, in which human lives are terminated, usually for no other reason than that they inconvenienced their parents (the hard cases, by which abortion-on-demand is sold to bleeding hearts, are a miniscule percentage of total abortions done). In vitro fertilization by its nature involves the deliberate creation of multiple human lives which will never be allowed to grow to their full human potential. Monstrous as that fact is, scientists are now reasoning, that because they are creating these human lives anyway, they should be allowed to take the unused embryos and use their stem cells for research.

This is what contemporary ethics has been reduced to. “You are creating the embryos anyway, we might as well be allowed to cut up and experiment on the ones you won’t be using, and besides, we might find a cure for all sorts of horrible ailments”. Consequentialism is never good ethics, and it is particularly not so when it is mixed with the reasoning that two wrongs somehow make a right.

The hand of government in most if not all of this should be apparent. Government schools now serve a government agenda which includes the undermining of the authority of parents and churches in the minds of children. Government social programs weaken the ties that bind families, churches, and communities together as a society, teaching people that they don’t need those institutions anymore because government is going to meet all their needs from cradle to grave. Government money pays for research into contraceptive and reproductive technology.

Progressives and libertarians think of social conservatives as theocrats seeking to leash the power of the state to a religious agenda and to impose their will on others through the force of law. While one or two people who meet that description might come to mind this is not what social conservatism is really about.

Social conservatism is the belief that society is an organic reality, that the most essential human relationships are those established by blood, kinship, and covenant rather than those established by contract in the marketplace, that the institutions of family, church, and community are more important than either the individual or the state, and that the spheres of the political and the economic are the secondary spheres of human existence, taking a backseat to what is really important, the spheres governed and defined by the family and the church.

This belief is consistent with a belief in political liberty and is even foundational to it. Political liberty cannot stand upon the foundation of the autonomy of the individual. Such a foundation leads only to anarchy, chaos, and moral nihilism, which lead in turn to tyranny. Political liberty must stand upon the foundation of life in society, as part of a social and moral order, transmitted from generation to generation, through the family and the church. Such a society, requires nothing from government other than it do its job and uphold the law, and otherwise mind its own business.