In reviewing A war for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman, Seth Bartee writes:
In A War for the Soul of America Hartman argues that the late 20th century’s cultural conflicts were born out of the tumultuous 1960s. To most observers this might not seem a particularly provocative thesis, but recent literature, as Hartman shows, has tried to downplay the radicalism of the ’60s by demonstrating that this era was also a period of great growth for conservative ideas. Where Hartman diverges from this view of a more moderate or balanced 1960s is in claiming that these years universalized “fracture,” thus setting up a wide plane of debate between the left and right that grew to a fever pitch decades later. [See How the Culture Wars Began (and Ended) .]
Baloney.
The 1960s were—at most—a political and cultural flowering of perversions long festering in the American mind and moral character and festering at a less toxic level in Western minds of various traditions. It was in the 1850s that Herman Melville expressed the fear that there as a strong streak of moral insanity in the American character, and he thought that moral insanity was in the form of a rebellion against God. A decade or so later, a very mainstream Protestant group, the Congregationalists, dropped the requirement that the individual congregations (parishes or local churches) hold to one of the ancient Christian creeds. (For a book-length discussion of the dangerous silliness of people not holding to a Christian creed and still pretending to be Christians, see: Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America by James Turner.) A couple of decades before the Congregationalist apostasy, Tocqueville had already seen the possibilities of a gentle totalitarianism growing up from the ordinary citizenry—my words: this was a citizenry already man-centered and not Christ-centered nor even Deity-centered. Let’s add: Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr, contemporaries of Melville, had very similar opinions to him about one early flowering of this insanity; the three of them considered Emerson and Thoreau to be morally insane, largely in their rejection of (Christian) charity and similar communal bonds.
What is true about the 60s is that it was a public, undeniable, and—thus—disconcerting flowering of this insanity so basic to the American character and a lesser but—as it turns out—deeply embedded part of the Western character in general. The psychedelic, politically disordered, morally disordered 60s were less a new growth and more a fantastic flowering out of a dying plant or society—the story could perhaps be better narrated by Edgar Allan Poe than by the greatest of historians, just because it was driven along by what was inside the American people rather than by objective factors.
But we Americans had moved into the 60s thinking it was all wonderful and moved on with barely a sense of a deep wrong in our own selves and in the United States and in the West. Ordinary middle-class men and women could live the country-club, out-to-eat, Florida-retirement-home life of the rich and the factory managers of earlier generations.
Intellectuals also, (self-deluding) conservative and (cartoonish) progressive, came out of the same environment as I did (born in 1955). I never met some of my mother’s upwardly mobile cousins though I was close to some of their parents, my great-uncles and great-aunts. In Sunday School, I learned little of those creedal matters still accepted by some local churches which were Congregationalist, but not in mine; we learned the most edifying stories of the Bible as well as some context-free stories, such as that of Noah and the Great Flood.
The two world wars and the economic extremes of the first half of the 20th century had freed many Americans with even a fairly small streak of moral insanity, freed them to be the individualists of their own morally perverse but all-American imaginations. The leaders were also freed. Consistent with the career of Bill and Hillary Clinton, I’d say that many of those progressivists of the 60s would gladly have become LBJ, or still worse?, if they had the chance. A lot of so-called conservatives proved little better when given a chance at exercising or influencing power. In the end, most were false conservatives in the sense they were just defending an already corrupted state of American, or Western, society. A truer conservative, such as Russell Kirk at his ineffective best, would realize that decay had already deeply damaged the true traditions, the “permanent things,” if you will. A only true conservative in the Modern Age can be an outright reactionary as was Orestes Brownson or an outright radical as was Augustine of Hippo—the lesson being that the reactionary and radical defenders of tradition are one in a strong sense. Defenders of the modern status quo, even that of the 1950s, are conserving very ephemeral things.
So it is that Hartman apparently made the same mistake as many would-be conservatives. He associated the state of a decaying civilization with some sort of true order, though it wasn’t one Hartman would have endorsed:
Hartman observes that fracture became evident in the 1960s as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus disintegrated. And according to him, “The culture wars were the defining metaphor for the late-twentieth-century United States.” He begins the story in the 1960s, with New Left radicals who challenged the idea of “normative” America. Opponents of the New Left included former Leninists and socialists who became neoconservative intellectuals, along with familiar conservative political figures such as Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. [See How the Culture Wars Began (and Ended) .]
More baloney.
I have significant sympathy and even some admiration for Reagan and Nixon, but each of those men—as Eric Voegelin might have said—merely wanted to turn around and crawl back to a more pleasant spot on the downward path to decay and Nixon perhaps started his political career as the servant to established families which supported a sort of globalism-progressivism which served to protect or increase their wealth and power. Jacques Barzun might have also said something of the sort: after all, both Reagan and Nixon were born nearly 400 years into the downslope from the height of the West—see From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present by Barzun. The “Present” of the title was 2000. It took men more insightful than Reagan or Nixon, apparently more insightful than Hartman or Bartee, to see that the blush on the cheeks in the 50s was due to the fever preceding death. Tocqueville saw some bad signs in the citizens of this country who had freed themselves from the weight of tradition. Melville and Hawthorne, and maybe Poe in some sense, saw a bit more than even that great French thinker. Perhaps Flannery O’Connor saw the most deeply of all—she saw the South as a Christ-soaked but not Christ-centered region and seemingly saw the rest of the United States as voluntarily and happily free of the presence of Christ. I’d go still further in my understanding.
The 500 years of decay discussed by Barzun were a struggle by many in the West, not just intellectuals, to rid their individual and communal selves of Christ, blind to the fact that most of what was good in them, what was mature in them, what was sane in them, was intertangled with Christ and the communities of His friends—the Body of Christ. The West maimed its communal selves and its individual selves by the effort to remove Christ.
In my Christian understanding of human being, I make peace with Darwin and his successors. We are born human animals and something happens during some human lives to begin a transition to the state of moral person, including the higher state (not reachable in this world even by saints) of true membership in the Body of Christ. Perhaps we’re now seeing a rejection of such membership by the many children of those who were sort-of Christians, at least so long as Christianity and specific Churches or local churches served them. We’re seeing a failure by the leaders and intellectuals of Christianity to keep alive some Christian understanding of this world and more. Perhaps we’re also seeing other things at work, but the position of Hartman (and at least partly the position of Bartee) is wrong:
Hartman observes that fracture became evident in the 1960s as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus disintegrated. And according to him, “The culture wars were the defining metaphor for the late-twentieth-century United States.”
Behind us, there was no consensus though our ancestors acted as-if. There is no possibility of such a state—there is either true community, that moving toward the Body of Christ, or there is nothing but an amoral struggle between individuals, even between a mother and the child in her womb. There is nothing so shallow as modern, liberal understandings of being. Yes, it goes that deep, far deeper than the political and economic and cultural issues which concern Hartman. The heavily compromised understanding of being held by modern thinkers including most so-called conservatives and even most self-proclaimed religious traditionalists is in direct and brutal conflict with all plausible Christian understandings, including the archaic and creaking understandings which pass in the modern world as “Christian truths.” When faced with problems of the sort which became obvious in the later stages of the Enlightenment (say, the late 1700s), Augustine and Aquinas became radicals to defend their faith and the true Christian traditions upon which their faiths rested. (All faiths, all human knowledge and feelings and acts, are but approximations to the truth we’ll know if we join Christ in His Body.)
In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we saw a new state of being, one seen in the Eucharist and the other Sacraments, indeed in all of sacramental reality. It took centuries before Aquinas and a few other Christian thinkers could develop an intellectual understanding of the being seen in the Eucharist. After the century or a little more of turmoil which followed the High Middle Ages, that deep understanding of being was thrown away pretty quickly, partly because the founders of modern thought, including those who built the foundations of modern political and economic liberalism, rejected Aquinas’ imperfect but promising understanding of being—divine and created, and adopted bad theories of being, mostly tinged or outright infected by some sort of Nominalism. Communities, even the Body of Christ, were nominalistic entities. The Trinity became not just a mystery beyond our immediate understanding; it was in direct conflict with our liberal beliefs in freestanding individuals and in the need to be able to touch and directly model any true being. Knowledge was fully externalized rather than man’s approximation to being. More recently, thinkers remain obstinately blind to the lessons of Einstein and Dirac: true being can present itself to the morally well-formed mind and imagination without being directly perceptible. To be fair, there is at least a hint of this in the claim of some scientists that “there are no facts without theories.”
No one saw that modern knowledge of the evolution of man and of the workings of the human body should lead us to fear that a man or a woman is but a placeholder, a named pseudo-entity, which actually points to a bundle of processes which sometimes fight against each other and of even alien creatures—bacteria and viruses which often play an important role in our good health.
No one foresaw, and few see even now, that modern mathematics provides ways of describing global entities made of regions which are real individuals in the sense of having their own independent parts and aspects. The universe is itself, a global entity, and also something of a collection of individual regions and localized entities, stars and comets and men and rattlesnakes.
The greater understanding of being which I’ve developed is that of a greater realm of created being which includes the perceptible and measurable being of this world and the more abstract forms of being described by mathematics and quantum mechanics and other realms of human study. It reconciles modern radical philosophers of quantum physics with St John the Evangelist in positing the primacy of relationships over stuff. Not surprisingly, this greater realm—Creation to some of us—can be seen only by a disciplined exercise of the imagination and only seen more clearly if the work I’m doing or the work done by others, philosophers and theologians and artists and poets and architects and technologists perhaps unborn, expands from philosophical sketches and contemplations to become part of a greater understanding of Creation, an understanding which is the true heart of a Christian civilization, an understanding implicit in the way we build houses as well as the way we speak of God and His acts-of-being.
Modern, Western man sneered at or simply refused that greater understanding of created being which existed in some form from the time of Aquinas or even earlier. In a weird and almost demonic dance of the mind and heart as well as of the hands, modern, western man gave up that understanding, gave up his faith, gave up a sacramental world, gave up his faith and the Sacraments given to us by the Lord Jesus Christ. To speak simply but not simplistically at all, the loss of faith in the Eucharist drove the West into what certainly seems to be a terminal state of decay. Perhaps the West might even revive without dying and being born anew, but such a revival can happen only if Western man begins first to hunger for Christ’s Body and Blood, begins to desire to be Christ’s friend and to be part of the Body of Christ and to be Christ.
Otherwise, if something new springs up in Europe and the Americas, it will be pagan, though perhaps it and its members will be more open to Sacramental Christianity than are the current secularized, liberalized caricature of Western Civilization and its sad, cartoonish members.
It’s sad that so many intelligent people have played seemingly profound games upon the surface of being, thinking that political and cultural and economic reforms, and other reforms, were possible without a re-understanding of a world different from, more complex and richer than, anything possible in the assumed or even proposed metaphysical systems of the modern world. Yet, modern man acted as if consciously knowing that metaphysics had to be obscured because the only such systems possible to Western men were those drawn ultimately from a truly weird but also truly profound and truthful combination of Biblical revelation with Greek philosophical speculation. Aquinas should be restored to a central position just because he was willing to somewhat (only somewhat!) distort Plato and Aristotle by subordinating them to St John the Evangelist. The distortion was not so great in the end because Plato and Aristotle saw truths of being more clearly than do the vast majority of self-proclaimed Christian thinkers of the modern West.
[At this time, I should point out that I also—honestly and explicitly—had rejected Thomism and other metaphysical systems, until I received some gentle but piercing critiques of that position in personal correspondence with Stanley Hauerwas. This is somewhat strange since Professor Hauerwas rejects, in principle, natural theology though my way of doing metaphysics through natural theology is closer to the ways of Aquinas and even Augustine than they are to modern forms of natural theology. And my way even resembles the way of that great, and persecuted, Catholic scientist and theologian named Galileo Galilei.]