—CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, 20091
I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can’t be removed from it. I start the story of the Miracle in the 1700s, because that is where prosperity started to take off like a rocket. But a rocket doesn’t materialize from thin air on a launchpad. The liftoff is actually the climax of a very long story.
Simply put, we got where we are because of God. I don’t mean this as an argument for providence or divine intervention. I believe in God, but if you don’t, you cannot discount the importance of God as a human innovation. I don’t mean gods—plural—but God as a single omniscient being looking at us in all of our private moments. Prior to the god of the Jews, gods were more like prickly servants than masters. Humans picked their deities to support their passions, to grant their wishes, to justify their conquests. The Romans, Greeks, Hindus, Vikings, ancient Chinese, Japanese, and others created gods to match their feelings, from hate and anger to lust and compassion. The Hebrew god reversed the division of labor, demanding that the people work for him, not the other way around. The Hebrew god recognized the moral sanctity of the individual Jew, both male and female. The Christian god universalized that moral sanctity. From its earliest days, Christianity recognized that every person was due a certain measure of justice, and every person was obliged to respect others as children of God. The golden rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is the seed from which grew the concept of the individual.2 Christianity, in other words, introduced the idea that we are born into a state of natural equality. For the Romans and Greeks, aristocracy was natural, and some men were simply by nature slaves. Of course, even after Christianity conquered Europe, the natural tendency of elites to lock in their advantages endured. Christianity’s emphasis on human dignity and equality did not destroy monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, or slavery for more than sixteen centuries. But the fuse, one could argue, was lit.
Christianity performed another vital service. It created the idea of the secular. As we’ve seen, Christianity divided the world between the City of Man and the City of God, in Saint Augustine’s famous account. These cities are entirely metaphorical, describing states of mind, not actual city-states. Those who live in the City of God devote themselves to love of God. Those who live in the City of Man devote themselves to their self-interests. Augustine clearly preferred the City of God. But he acknowledged that human societies would always be marked by this “fundamental cleavage” between those of faith and those without. The secular and the faithful had to live among each other and work to create political systems that protected their common interests in “earthly peace” and other “necessaries of this life.”3 Now, Saint Augustine was surely more of a theocrat than this makes it sound. But his realism about the nature of this world created a new space between the religious and the secular. For Augustine, society was divided, not between nobles and peasants (or slaves) or between rich and poor, but between believer and non-believer. And most important: The ultimate task of identifying who was who was left to God, not man.4
Protestantism made its contributions, too, as we’ve seen. Martin Luther’s emphasis on “faith alone” as the measure of righteousness liberated the individual conscience from the monopoly of the Catholic Church. It also led to an explosion of sects, which not only created new institutions and new habits of the heart—including a revolutionary respect for innovation—but also forced the state, ultimately, to expand the borders of liberty and tolerance.
The West’s advance was the product of a series of creative tensions: between balancing the rights of the individual and the powers of the state; between the dominant faith and religious minorities; between faith and reason; between religion and government; etc. But there were also creative tensions inside the human heart, some of which are as old as the human heart: between desire and responsibility; between self-expression and self-discipline; between the yearning to shine as an individual and participate in, and contribute to, the community; and, again, between faith and reason. These tectonic plates of human nature shifted and bumped up against each other, within society and within our own souls.
But there was one thing that informed all of these passions and ideas: the idea that God was watching. The greatest check on the natural human desire to give in to your feelings and do what feels good or even what feels “right” can be captured in a single phrase: “God-fearing.” The notion that God is watching you even when others are not is probably the most powerful civilizing force in all of human history. Good character is often defined as what you do when no one is watching. It is surely true that many atheists are people of good character. It is also true that peace has increased as society has become more secular (which is not to say that correlation is causation). But the very notion of what constitutes good character comes from countless generations of people trying to figure out how they should behave when only God knew what they were doing. And that is the most important tension: between our base instinctual desires and what God expects of us. This tension created space for reason to become a crucial moral tool in our lives. The medieval Doctors of the Church used reason to deduce and to discover God’s will and to breach the divides between all people by appealing to conscience. The rabbinical Jewish tradition has its own deep history of using reason and debate to discover the otherwise hidden will of God.
This is obviously not true of every society everywhere. Some societies substituted the honor of their ancestors for God—and that is a very different thing. The ghosts of ancestors do not necessarily tell you to treat strangers as worthy of respect. Regardless, in the West, where the Miracle happened for the first and only time in human history, it was God, as defined by organized Christianity and informed by Judaism, who shaped our understanding of what right and proper behavior was. Religion provides a framework for how people approach the world, for how they prioritize wants and desires, for how they structure their days and their lives. It is—or was—the primary source of ideas about why you should get out of bed and how to behave once you did. God had a magnetic pull on the otherwise inner-directed compass of human nature, pointing us toward something better.
Regardless of whether you believe in God or not, it is simply the case that the idea of God has shrunk in society and in our own hearts. If you believe that man has a strong religious instinct, if I’ve convinced you that nature—including human nature—abhors a vacuum, then you have to believe that God’s absence creates an opening for all manner of ideas to flood in. As the famous line (attributed to Chesterton) goes: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”5 This, as we’ve seen, explains all manner of totalitarian efforts to create a heaven on earth, to replace a religion that places utopia in the hereafter with a “scientific” religion that will usher in a new heaven on earth in the here and now.
But that is not the only possibility. Totalitarian movements have a very poor track record of making people happier, and so even people alienated by capitalism and democracy recognize that such movements may not deliver what they desire. And so they look elsewhere. Some retreat into themselves, in search of their own inner-defined meaning, obsessing over, say, physical fitness.6 Some might retreat into the virtual world of video games. Others might look for new, exotic religions that promise to provide answers they think traditional religion cannot. Some just fanatically pursue wealth or celebrity as an end in itself rather than a means to one.
But most of these things require work and effort, and for many that’s too high a price of admission. In Liberal Fascism, I argued that fears of America ever becoming an authoritarian or totalitarian police state were wildly misplaced. The greater threat, I argued, lay not in Orwell’s 1984 vision of a boot stomping on a human face forever but in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Huxley’s famous 1932 novel of a futuristic society (set in A.D. 2540), children are hatched in artificial
wombs, and citizens are kept happy and docile by taking a drug called soma. As I noted in Liberal Fascism, Brave New World raises questions that are more relevant and vexing than Orwell’s 1984. Everyone understands why 1984’s society of perpetual war and propaganda is undesirable. But in Brave New World everyone is more or less happy. The Miracle was built on the bourgeois idea that everyone had the right to pursue happiness, implying it would take effort and work. But what if we can just have happiness delivered? As technology—computers, robots, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and pharmacology—improves, and as entertainment becomes ever more immersive, why go to all the trouble of pursuing happiness when it can come to you on your couch? There’s an app for that, as they say.
My rebuttal remains the same: The promise of such a society is fool’s gold.
Earned success is the secret to meaningful happiness. The government can improve your net worth with a check, but it cannot improve your self-worth. Likewise, entertainment is not a substitute for effort, and it is certainly a poor replacement for God. But the pursuit of fool’s gold has led many people to tragic ends. One of the great morals of life, for individuals and civilizations alike, is “You are what you worship.”7 The theory that capitalism came out of Protestantism may not explain it all, but it explains a lot. Believing that God is not only watching you but has high expectations creates one kind of society. Believing that getting “likes” on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat (or whatever comes next) undoubtedly creates another kind. The average iPhone user unlocks his or her phone at least eighty times per day, and that number is rising every year.8 And yet, despite the fact each of us has access to more information in our pockets than any scholar in the world had twenty years ago, we don’t use it. We drown in information but we starve for knowledge. As I was finishing this chapter in 2017, a poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania reported more than one out of three people couldn’t name a single right listed in the First Amendment. Only one in four Americans, 26 percent, can name all three branches of government. That’s down from 38 percent in 2011! A third of Americans can’t name a single branch of government.9
Ignorance of government, in itself, is not necessarily horrifying. But it is troubling, not least because of the national obsession with encouraging people to vote. If you don’t know what the executive branch is, why is it vital that you vote for president? Democracy is supposed to rely on an informed electorate, after all. The answer to this question—why vote?—is invariably romantic, not reasoned. People must express their will! They must participate! Yes, yes, fine. But voting should be the culmination of one’s civic engagement, not the gateway to it. Yet the tide pushes the other way. Legislators in California and elsewhere increasingly want children to vote. Others want people to vote online so as to not have to suffer the inconvenience of pursuing democracy.10 Better to have it delivered like open phone lines during American Idol.
In 1961, John Courtney Murray delivered a brilliant lecture titled “Return to Tribalism.” He had a prophetic warning: “I suggest that the real enemy within the gates of the city is not the Communist, but the idiot.” He did not mean idiot in the “vernacular usage of one who is mentally deficient” but rather in the “primitive Greek usage.” To the Greeks, the idiot was the private individual who “does not possess the public philosophy, the man who is not master of the knowledge and the skills that underlie the life of the civilized city. The idiot, to the Greek, was just one stage removed from the barbarian. He is the man who is ignorant of the meaning of the word ‘civility.’ ”11 (The word “idiot” didn’t take on the connotation of stupid, low-IQ, etc., until the fourteenth century.)12
No doubt this sounds outrageously elitist. So be it. I am an elitist in the sense that I believe in objective standards of right and wrong, excellence and sloth. But let us also be clear: Our elites are a problem as well. Patrick J. Deneen, a brilliant and intellectually anachronistic (in a good way) professor at the University of Notre Dame, writes:
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
He goes on to explain that his students—not just at Notre Dame but at other elite schools where he has taught, such as Princeton and Georgetown—are all smart: “They are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject).” He adds, “They build superb resumes” and “are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.”
But…
ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?
Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?
A few hands may go up at this or that question, but that is usually a fluke, accidental knowledge from a quirky class. In short, they are idiots in the original Greek sense. Very clever idiots. Maybe even brilliant idiots. But, in the true meaning of the term, that is no contradiction. “They have learned exactly what we have asked of them—to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present,” Deneen laments.13 The liberal arts as originally conceived were intended to be an antidote to this form of idiocy by equipping students with the arguments and knowledge necessary to protect and defend liberty.
Instead, these are the leaders of tomorrow that the leaders of today have created. They are the children of the new class, so ignorant of their own civilization that they have no response to those who insist with righteous passion that our civilization is not worth defending. They are a reserve army of ingratitude uninterested in defending the very soapboxes they stand on and, often, all too eager to take a sledgehammer to them in the name of fighting “hate speech.” In college, the privileged children of our elite live the most bespoke lifestyles of any humans in history, getting their wants and desires fulfilled on demand. Among the affluent, most do not work to pay their tuitions. They think it is normal that others prepare their food, clean their dorms, fraternities, and sororities, and protect them from not just physical violence but allegedly “violent” ideas—and yet they are convinced they are “independent.” Is it any wonder that they want to make society as whole as sheltered and nurturing as the only world they’ve known? Is it any wonder that they let their feelings and desires guide their sense of right and wrong?
* * *
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“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with som
e equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy….In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.14
The primacy of feeling—that quintessential hallmark of romanticism—has now become a live idea about how we should organize our lives. “It is ideas which rule the world, because it is ideas that define the way reality is perceived…” This line from Irving Kristol is one of his more famous quotes.
But it’s only half the sentence. Here it is in full:
“[Adam Smith] could not have been more wrong. It is ideas which rule the world, because it is ideas that define the way reality is perceived; and, in the absence of religion, it is out of culture—pictures, poems, songs, philosophy—that these ideas are born.”15
Kristol’s point was that conservatives—and defenders of liberty generally—were losing the battle of ideas because they had not come to grips with the fact that the popular culture had left religion behind. Popular culture, with its emphasis on hedonism, animism, or just simple feeling, is the primary public conveyor of meaning in our lives, and it is, with a few exceptions, unattached from (and often hostile to) higher understandings of meaning, morality, or religion. Much of classical music, painting, and architecture was dedicated to the greater glory of God.
We are becoming what we worship, and what we worship is ourselves. Outside of the occasional country-western song, when was the last time you engaged with mainstream popular culture that was dedicated to anything like the greater glory of God? Refreshment of the soul is another matter. But that’s the point. In popular culture, nearly all efforts to refresh the soul fall under the tiresome cliché “spiritual but not religious” or, more likely, “discovering yourself”—not God.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 40