Idols for Destruction
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Idols for Destruction

The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture

Herbert Schlossberg

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eBook - ePub

Idols for Destruction

The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture

Herbert Schlossberg

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About This Book

This analysis of current events examines the wrong beliefs America has held supreme—"idols" that are to blame for our nation's decay—and suggests how our culture can be healed.

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Publisher
Crossway
Year
1993
ISBN
9781433554179

C H A P T E R O N E

Idols of History

ALL idols belong either to nature or to history. The whole creation falls into those two categories, and there is no other place to which man can turn to find a substitute for God. Any idol that is not an artifact of the natural world is an artifact of the social world.1
In this chapter, history is used in a more restricted sense. We are considering here the idolatrous thinking that focuses its attention on the historical process itself, reserving for later a discussion of the outcomes of such thinking, that is, the idols created from within the theater of history. It may suffice to say at this point that idolatry based oh history becomes power politics and, finally, one of numerous systems that people use to control other people.
History as a Religious Enterprise
Early in this century German historian Oswald Spengler published his monumental interpretation of Western civilization, The Decline of the West. With equally monumental confidence, he declared that the book “contains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once enunciated clearly, will . . . be accepted without dispute.”2 Spengler probably had in mind, as did many of his contemporaries, the great scientific theories that had received virtually unanimous acceptance, and he hoped his theory of history would have similar success. The book achieved great popularity but never fulfilled its author’s expectations. It is little read today, and one would have to search hard to find anyone who found its argument “incontrovertible.” Spengler’s mistake lay in thinking that theories of histoxy were of the same order as theories of physics or biology. Time, however, is a religious concept, and there can be no agreement on a philosophy of history without agreement on religion.
Whether time is important or unimportant, intelligible or absurd, cyclical or linear are questions intimately bound up with the most fundamental of metaphysical, anthropological, and theological convictions. The linearity of Western conceptions of history reflects the conviction that history is what comes between creation and final judgment. But there are other models. Ancient theories of cyclical history were related to religious ideas concerning the periodic nature of redemption. Norman O. Brown, Freud’s romantic reviser and popularizer, rightly described secular rationalism, dependent as it is on Newtonian time, as a religion. The new relativist notion of time represents the disintegration of that religion.3
What we think of the meaning of history is inseparable from what we think of the meaning of life. “In this sense,” says Herbert Butterfield, a Cambridge historian, “our interpretation of the human drama throughout the ages rests finally on our interpretation of our most private experiences of life, and stands as merely an extension to it.”4
That the question of history has any importance at all is in itself a religious conclusion. The classical view was that reason transcends the facts of history, just as universals transcend particulars. Therefore, historical events—as, indeed, all change—were relatively unimportant. The cycles of history were not drawn to a goal but would keep on recurring endlessly. This notion devalued events and robbed them of significance. Eastern mystics also devalue history, regarding events as particularities in which, they have no interest and preferring instead to contemplate the unity from which they believe the particularities derive their meaning. That is why, as G. K. Chesterton said, it is fitting that the Buddha be pictured with his eyes closed; there is nothing important to see.
Western civilization, in keeping with its Christian underpinnings, has always valued history highly. But as it has departed from the faith, that value has been transmuted. Rather than the arena in which providence and judgment meet the obedience or rebellion of man, history is now seen as the vehicle of salvation. Whether in the form of doctrinaire Spencerian evolution (now rare), the Enlightenment type of progress (also rare), Marxism (not so rare) or Western social engineering (the most common form of this cult), it places salvation within the institutions of history and thus fulfills the biblical definition of idolatry. The idolatries of history exalt an age (past, present, or future), or a process, or an institution, or a class, or a trend and make it normative. They place the entire meaning of life within the historical process or some part of it, allowing nothing extrinsic to it. Historical events in their relationships exhaust the whole meaning of history. In a word, the meaning of history is wholly immanent, and that is a term we shall find occurring repeatedly in our consideration of idolatry. History, to borrow the expression C.E.M. Joad used in a different context, is “the whole show.”
The Cult of Historicism
There is general agreement that the modern form of the historicism we have been describing finds its classic expression in the philosophy of Hegel. Karl Popper, whose work is among the most illuminating on this subject, believes that Hegel’s aim was to transcend the intractable dualism that Kant had established between phenomena—the realm of particularity, fact, event—and noumena—the world of value, spirit, faith. Hegel’s philosophy coalesced the duality of ideal and real, of right and might, finding that fusion in the historical process. This means, says Popper, that all values “are historical facts, stages in the development of reason, which is the same as the development of the ideal and of the real.” Everything is fact, but some facts are also values.5
Woodrow Wilson’s ideas on law provide an example of how this abstruse philosophical point has come to affect men of power. He believed that laws must be adjusted to fit facts, “because the law . . . is the expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered the facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts.”6 Walter Lipp-mann, a determined foe of historicism, nevertheless expressed an idea almost identical to Wilson’s, showing how pervasive the doctrine has become. Laws must change, said Lippmann, because they are based on sentiments that “express the highest promise of the deepest necessity of these times.”7
The disastrous quality in this confusion of fact and value is that it is utterly relativistic; as the facts of history change, values, and consequently laws, will have to change with them. That is the justice in Martin Sklar’s remark that whatever should happen to evolve in the social system, according to Wilson’s theory, would be morally indisputable.8 For Lippmann, whenever the “sentiments” of society change, the laws must change apace; thus, it is not only events that are normative, but sentiments. We can expect, therefore, that when the sentiments shift from nursing homes to gas chambers as the answer to the problems of the elderly, the laws presumably must comply. Lippmann, of course, would not countenance that application of his idea, but it is the logical outcome of the historicism into which he inadvertently stumbled. And while Lippmann would shrink from that outcome, we shall see further on that others do not. Thus, by the alchemy of historicism, fact is turned into value. In this fashion, says Jacques Ellul, a contemporary French social critic, history “is habitually transformed in modern discourse into a value, a power which bestows value, and a kind of absolute.”9
History as Lord of the Universe
Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, similarly vexed by historicism, showed how its relativism issues forth in determinism. “History has no windows looking out into eternity. Man is completely enclosed in it and cannot elevate himself to a supra-historical level of contemplation. History is the be-all and end-all of man’s existence and of his faculty of experience. And it is ruled by destiny, the inescapable fate.”10 Just as man cannot understand history by reference to anything beyond it, so is he powerless to struggle against anything that history has a mind to accomplish. Karl Mannheim, as if to provide an illustration for Dooye-weerd’s point, dismissed the possibility that a central planning authority might be avoided. We do not have a choice between planning and not planning, he said, but only between good planning and bad.11 In the conclusion to his investigation of the good society, Lippmann declared that classic liberalism was the culmination toward which history had always been reaching. Spengler closed his two volumes of doom with perhaps the best example we could find of the role of fate in historicism: “We have not the freedom to reach to this or that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him.”
Historicism, in taking freedom out of the historical experience, parallels similar tendencies in the social sciences that make it impossible to retain the Christian conviction that people are responsible and accountable for what they do. If there is no freedom to do this or that, how can it be said that responsibility inheres in the person who does something or refrains from doing it? Here is a philosophy made to order for a generation of intellectuals infatuated with Niebuhr’s teaching that doing evil is inevitable, that one’s choices can do no more than mitigate its severity.
This complex of ideas, like so many others, has not remained the exclusive province of intellectuals, and we can identify examples of its use by people who do not know its origins. One of the most common is the saying, “We can’t turn back the clock.” The progressive connotations of this saying are wholly illusory. It actually looks back and says that the trend of which the present moment is only the most visible manifestation is the inevitable one, that anyone who disagrees with it is trying to squeeze the whole world into a time machine and return to an earlier era. But in refusing to believe that an identified historical trend may be challenged, the historicists have divinized history. In any given case, they have absolutized this trend and thereby put history’s seal of approval on this status quo, one, no doubt, that is moving their way. The paradox of a moving status quo is explained by the function of historical movement in historicist thinking; it plays precisely the same role as the lack of movement to a traditionalist, acting as a standard or value with which one must not tamper.
As a matter of simple historical observation, it would be hard to find a common saying as implausible as “We can’t turn back the dock.” The reason intelligent observers of the past found the cycle theory of history persuasive is precisely because it seemed as if the dock had been turned back. For, if turning back the dock describes the ending of a perceived historical trend and a reversion to the historical configuration that it replaced, we could list examples of this phenomenon endlessly: alternations between democracy and authoritarianism, high and low hemlines, moral permissiveness and prudery, war and peace, and so on. At each turn of the times we might be able to find historicists (witting or otherwise) saying plaintively that we can’t turn the dock back. As a polemical device this idea pictures historical trends as juggernauts that cannot be stopped even if one were so foolish as to wish to stop them. These juggernauts, in fact, always do seem to be stopped eventually; and after they are, it is not a convincing explanation of what happened to say that the dock was turned back.12
The problem with the dock that cannot be turned back is that it is the wrong metaphor. Only a metaphor having to do with space rather than time will help us out of this blind alley. That seems like another paradox, since the whole discussion is one of historical and not geographical interpretation. The resolution of the paradox lies in the fact that people support or oppose historical trends on the basis of the ends to which they are directed. “This will lead us to the welfare state.” “That will lead us to a society based on competition.” The analogue of those ends is destination, and so we need to speak of taking a path to a place we wish to reach. We take a wrong turn and find ourselves in what appears to be an endless bog. We decide to turn around and retrace our steps to discover the correct route to the destination. However, someone in our party has read his Hegel and tells us that we want to turn the dock back. The reply to that is that to go straight ahead will take us deeper into the bog without knowing how many miles it stretches or what lies beyond, that the destination is elsewhere, and that the only way we shall find it is to discover where we made our mistake. Thus, the turning back has to do with space and not time. Of course, that scenario makes the disagreement of smaller importance than it commonly is. The conflicts to which historicist polemics are applied often center on the identity of the desirable destination. When that is the case, the values of the respective disputants are so fundamentally at odds that the tactical questions are irrelevant. But when that is true, people often still propose the clock metaphor. Their values are up-to-date, they say, and their opponents’ values are not.
Getting in Step with History
This application of historicism, like all of them, deifies time, making it an idol. Time will unfold all things, it says, in a way that is inevitably right no matter what happens. But this particular kind of idol could only appear as a distortion of a biblical concept, because systems of thought having other origins do not take history seriously. The evolutionary philosophy of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is another example of the same heresy: All things work together for good to him that is in tune with the times. Trying to “turn back the clock” becomes more serious than impropriety or stupidity; it is an act of impiety. Historicism is a dogma, Robert Nisbet has said, “that has had greatest appeal to several generations of intellectuals bereft of religion and driven thereby into the arms of the waiting church of historical necessity.”13 This is a church with many branches, all of whose members are on the move. Anyone convinced that X is the wave of the future is tempted mightily to enter the struggle on the victory side. Certain that he is on the team that the future will vindicate, the historicist fights with abandon; tepidity is only for people with doubts.
The ferocity of some forms of historicism, such as Marxism, devalues people and events in favor of apocalyptic visions. J. L. Talmon reached that conclusion in comparing Hegel’s historical ideas with some aspects of medieval metaphysics. For Hegel, particular facts were not quite real. They took on meaning only insofar as they could be related to the grand scheme of the movement of history. Within this framework, history assumes the quality of “essence” in medieval thinking, the facts being accidents. People lose all significance, except as fuel for the progress of history and as symbols of ideas.14 As with Hegel so with his disciples, and the dehumanization of mankind in Marxist practice is consistent with its historicist foundation.
Less ambitious forms of historicism do not profess to see what the purpose of history is but, with failed imagination, expect that whatever the trend is will inevitably continue. History is assumed to be going someplace, and if its final destination remains a mystery, at least in the immediate past events we can tell the direction it is traveling. If one is pleased with the way things are going, the result is optimism. If one is displeased, the result is pessimism. Concentrating on the perceived trend locks one into a mindless optimism or a hopeless pessimism. Thus does historicism bring us what Chesterton called those two great fools, the optimist and the pessimist.
Inevitable Progress
Toynbee placed the terminal date of the age of faith at the start of World War I, because that was when expectations of a golden age to be ushered in by science died.15 But that pronouncement was premature, not only because it overlooked the power of Marxism but also that of the milder ideologies in Europe and the United States. The optimi...

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