Tag: History

HANNAH ARENDT AND THE ‘CRISIS OF OUR TIME’

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Undoubtedly, one of the most important books written in, and left to us from the 20th century was and is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Why? It is a thorough and spellbinding work on the history of the two-century unfolding of that nightmare of butchery and twisted deceit. It is also a deep and penetrating work of political philosophy which serves as a frightening and lasting reminder that humanity is permanently threatened by the destructive seeds from which that cancer grew. She reminds us that it could happen again.

Predictions are of little avail and less consolation, she writes, but goes on to say that there remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government -Totalitarianism.  In 1966 she held that this, as a potentiality and an ever-present danger, is only too likely to stay with us from now on,. Just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences, have stayed with mankind regardless of temporary defeats – monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism. 

Nearly sixty years later, with the evidence we have of totalitarian tendencies in our public life we are hardly in a position to dispute her assertion. 

Arendt began writing her study of the origins of totalitarianism as early as 1945. One incarnation of that catastrophic horror had just been eliminated at the cost of a terrible war. Another was still exercising the full force of its tyranny, while the third was about to begin its reign of terror in the Far East. The first to be vanquished was that which had spread across Europe from Nazi Germany; the second was Stalin’s Soviet Empire with its multiple puppet satellites in eastern Europe; the third was the People’s Republic of China with its overcooked clones, North Korea and Vietnam. That one is still with us, carefully camouflaging itself in an attempt to make us think that it is not what it really is.

We think of all these aberrations as 20th century phenomena. Arendt’s great and prophetic work shows us, however, that their origins go back through a century and a half of mankind’s confused reading of our world, human society and the many deadly turnings which political thought took over that period. 

Yuval Levin’s  book, The Great Debate, is a  study of the arguments between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine in the 1790s. In it he showed how the critical divergence in western political thought in our own time dates from then. That debate was essentially over the foundations on which the rights of man are based. In many ways it matches Arendt’s own vision of where our 20th century nightmare started. If we want a dramatic symbol for the turning point which led us to the disasters of our time we might take the enthronement of the goddess of reason on the high altar of Notre Dame de Paris. This was the symbolic and fatal moment when Man was declared to be the centre of all things.

I could not hope and would not dare to try to offer a succinct summary of Arendt’s masterpiece, all 600-plus pages of it. The best I can do is explain that In the three parts of her study – the first edition was published in 1950, later revisions in 1966 – the phenomena she holds to account for the world’s greatest catastrophes and the political impasse she saw in the Cold War in the1960s, are antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism which they spawned.

Arendt died 50 years ago (1975). The chilling thing about everything in her work is that she speaks to our world today in so many ways. One of the great evils which she saw in her time and which, in her view, contributed to the despair on which totalitarianism nurtured itself, was loneliness.  She noted that totalitarian regimes fostered the atomisation of individuals in society. Loneliness accompanied this, which along with distrust of others fostered the semi-worship of the all-powerful deadly state systems which the 20th century had to suffer. 

What is one of the tragic human maladies of which 21st century men and women have again become painfully conscious? Loneliness.

She wrote in 1966, reflecting on the deadly attraction of the so-called intelligentsia to this new state system, What’s more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be rash indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naïveté, the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members.

The dominant elites of the past thirty years may not have been consciously totalitarian but the antisemitic mobs which occupied university campuses, or London’s streets over the past two years did not come out of thin air. Do her reflections on the power and influence of the elites of her own time not sound familiar to us relative to the cancellations, no-platforming, silencing and destruction of freedom of speech in our time – not to mention their insane efforts to redefine and obliterate our very understanding of human nature?

Furthermore, she explained, this attraction for the elite is as important a clue to the understanding of totalitarian movements as their more obvious connection with the mob. It indicates the specific atmosphere, the general climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place. It should be remembered that the leaders of totalitarian movements and their sympathizers are, so to speak, older than the masses which they organize so that chronologically speaking the masses do not have to wait helplessly for the rise of their own leaders in the midst of a decaying class society of which they are the most outstanding product.

The ultra progressive capture of our academic institutions is now providing the elders of the movement. Over a few decades this is what has generated the mobs of young people who in the past decade have torn apart whole city districts and occupied campuses today.

Reflecting on what prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, she argues, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century. 

The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. The ‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes you as in a vise’ appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside all relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement. 

She explains how the process works by destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic into thought are obliterated.

 If this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. 

But sand storms are not permanent phenomena. They are destructive but temporary. Their danger, she says,  is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny. bears the germs of its own destruction.

The first part of her study deals with the growth of  secular antisemitism. The second part deals with the nature, legacy and corrupting nature of late 19th  and early 20th  century imperialism. In the third part she shows how the combined and intertwining legacy of these two fatal realities morph into the horror of totalitarianism.

The flawed notions of the rights of man which were championed by Tom Paine et al flourished over the nineteenth century. Add to that the plague of antisemitism and imperialism which spawned what she describes as ‘race-thinking’. This in turn undermined the historic model of the nation state and the sense of community which it nourished. The replacement of the old stabilising notion of the nation state generated pan-ethnic consciousness (Germanic, Slav and Russian) which in turn created stateless populations – including Jews – which found no home in those entities. Those entities themselves were partly driven by a desire for conquest and to create new empires. Out of all this emerged classless mobs worshiping a new notion of political power. These became easy fodder to nourish the central and eastern European totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

She makes an interesting observation on how the Mediterranean nations somehow partially escaped the frenzy.

The only countries where to all appearances state idolatry and nation worship were not yet outmoded and where nationalist slogans against the ‘suprastate’ forces were still a serious concern of the people were those Latin-European countries like Italy and, to a lesser degree, Spain and Portugal, which had actually suffered a definite hindrance to their full national development through the power of the Church. It was partly due to this authentic element of belated national development and partly to the wisdom of the Church, which very sagely recognized that Fascism was neither anti-Christian nor totalitarian in principle.

The real seed-bed of totalitarianism was Central and Eastern Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s, after the first World War, the chaos among the displaced populations, the ethnic majorities and the corresponding minorities, produced all sorts of conflicts, requiring the setting of new state boundaries. Ireland’s border predicament was a side show in comparison with what mainland Europe was experiencing. But the growth of race-thinking added more poison to the mix. Europe was awash with masses of stateless people. The League of Nations tried to institute what were called ‘minority treaties’ to establish some kind of human rights for these people. They can only be seen as dismal failures.

Add to this confusion the flawed notion of human rights without any philosophical or anthropological foundation – who has them, and on what basis?  In principle the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. But in practice this abstract notion of humanity guaranteed nothing.

The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. 

Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: ‘Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.’

She concludes that these facts and reflections offer what seems an ironical, bitter, and belated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. They appear to buttress his assertion that human rights were an abstraction, that it was much wiser to rely on an entailed inheritance of rights which one transmits to one’s children like life itself, and to claim one’s rights to be the ‘rights of an Englishman’ rather than the inalienable rights of man.” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France). According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy spring from within the nation, so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind such as Robespierre’s ‘human race,’ the sovereign of the earth, are needed as a source of law.  (Robespierre, Speeches. Speech of April 24, 1793.)

She asserts that the pragmatic soundness of Burke’s concept seems to be beyond doubt in the light of our manifold experiences. Not only did loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say how the concepts of man upon which human rights are based – that he is created in the image of God (in the American formula), or that he is the representative of mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred demands of natural law (in the French formula) – could have helped to find a solution to the problem.

The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger.

But Arendt is not a pessimist. Her final judgement echoes – but in a more Judaeo-Christian way – the final frames of Stanley Kubrick’s  masterpiece imagining of the future of humanity, 2001: S Space Odyssey, where the ‘star child’ enters the edge of the screen suggesting a new beginning for mankind.
She reminds us that there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est – that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.

“Atheism was the centre from which ran out all the mischiefs and villainies” of the French Revolution

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

EDMUND BURKE AND THE WAR ON THE ORIGINS OF SECULARISM – Part Two

The Goddess of Reason enthroned by the revolutionaries on the High Altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

Edmund Burke’s battles with what he saw as the malign interpretations in early Protestantism of mankind’s relations with the Creator is the focus of this second part of our reflections on the early life of this great Irishman.

Edmund Burke can be seen as an early warrior in the crucial confrontation of our civilisation with the degenerating phenomenon of secularism. Richard Bourke’s splendid book Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution  has a much wider focus and constitutes what was   described by the late Seamus Deane, himself a Burke scholar, as “the finest of all books on Edmund Burke”. I hope I can be forgiven for a degree of paraphrasing of Professor Bourke’s words in what follows.

The Catholic influences in Burke’s life are not over-emphasised by Professor Bourke. Nevertheless they were very real and cannot but be taken into account in any assessment of his overall grasp of the Christian faith. The backdrop of the Penal Laws to his life and the lives of many in his wider family, and to his Catholic friends and associates, inevitably had a bearing on what he could write and say. 

The author tells us that Burke’s sister, Juliana, married Patrick William French, a member of a prominent Catholic family from Galway. Burke himself was to marry Jane Nugent, daughter of the Catholic physician Christopher Nugent, based in Bath, whose son is also known to have married a Nagle from Ballyduff. Burke remained on intimate terms throughout his life with Richard Hennessy, the Irish Catholic brandy merchant, whose family had intermarried for generations with the Nagles. His “strong and affectionate memory” of Cork families like the Barretts and the Roches is similarly evident in much of his correspondence.  

We are told how Burke’s intimacy with his Nagle relations first developed during the five years  or so that he spent in the Blackwater Valley, beginning around 1737. Having received his earliest education from his mother and subsequently from assorted instructors, Burke was sent to reside with the Nagles in Ballyduff. He went to school in nearby Monanimy Castle, where he was first taught Latin by a Mr. O’Halloran, the village schoolmaster.  

O’Halloran’s influence shows in Burke’s familiarity with Virgil. In a letter of that time he quotes the classical Master’s tribute paid in the Georgics to “the pathways of the stars and the heavens, the various lapses of the sun and the various labours of the moon”. In a letter to his lifelong friend from his school days, Richard Shackleton, revealing a Christian sense of wonder, he wrote:

“What grander Idea can the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious, and firy globe hanging in the midst of an infinite and boundless space surrounded with bodies of whom our earth is scarcely any thing in comparison . . . held tight to their respective orbits. . . by the force of the Creator’s Almighty arm.”

In a debate in Trinity in 1749, talking about the Sermon on the Mount, he spoke of how the Christian religion marked an advance on heathen morality by educating the feelings of the heart, perhaps sensing the same idea embraced in John Henry Newman’s wonderful phrase, “heart speaks unto heart”.

Burke’s friend, Richard Shackleton, was a committed Quaker coming from that famous Ballitore family whose school Edmund attended before Trinity, also in the company of Richard. The author notes how Burke was aware of the “Different Roads” towards Christian truth which both he and his friend earnestly pursued, and reflected on the “melancholy” fact that there existed “Diversities of Sects and opinions among us.” He lamented the reality of Christian disunity.  

For Burke, the author notes, toleration among Christians was a mark of piety, although his attitude to infidels was another matter. His hostility to atheists would reach a crescendo in the 1790s in connection with the French Revolution: “Atheism,” he said, “was the centre from which ran out all their mischiefs and villainies.” Beginning in the 1790s, he vociferously denounced the “enlightened” ideals of the Revolution. His intention was to ridicule the presumptuousness of natural reason and the pretensions of moral philosophies based on hostility to organised religion. 

The shadow of the “wars of religion” of the 17th century, not to mention the Irish rebellion of 1641 and the Cromwellian aftermath loomed large over the thinkers of the early 18th century. For many, religion was a malign force and they looked for ways to remove that malignity. For others that was a false road to peace and simply reflected a total misunderstanding of what the Christian religion was about.

Professor Bourke explains: While toleration… seemed to him a basic ingredient of the Christian message, he thought the dogmatism of sceptical deists promoted persecution. It was a common refrain among polemical deists that religion was a source of bigotry, leading inexorably to sectarian prejudice and strife. Burke accepted  Bishop Berkeley’s inversion of this formula:

“Christianity was a morally emollient system of belief. Religion was commonly a pretext of animosity, but never its fundamental cause…the identification of blind fury with religious piety by sceptics was the product of a pernicious brand of fanaticism.”

In formulating his approach to reconciling the worlds of faith and reason he argued that eighteenth century irreligion replicated the same tendency and could only provoke more conflict. The deist project to realise the “freedom of philosophy” nurtured an uncritical belief in the oracles of  reason. With this certainty came contempt for the utility of social habit, and disregard for the natural moral sentiments of mankind. 

Burke saw no alternative but to take on the radical sceptics and deists who were hell-bent on not only denuding religion of all meaning and value, but on destroying civilisation in the process. One of the targets of the sceptics was the destruction of the idea of mystery in religion and the elevation of pure reason as the only source in which mankind could find the answer to the meaning of life.

Burke argued, according to Professor Bourke, that while the foolish might expect that they could penetrate metaphysical secrets, the wise were struck with awe in contemplating the operations of the universe. Burke settled on this perspective after an extensive study of theology. In the process he came to doubt the powers of pure reason. This did not imply a rejection of the utility of rational inquiry. It meant instead that Burke accepted the limitations on human knowledge.

Burke’s weapon of choice was a polemical and satirical tract entitled A Vindication of Natural Society in which he attempts to expose the limits of deism. To some it was confusing, missing the satirical thrust of the work – because it is not at all a “vindication”. It is an attack on religious scepticism as publicised by men like John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal and Viscount Bolingbroke. 

From it, if read accurately, Professor Bourke says that Burke emerges as a figure keen to credit natural sentiment and convinced of the ongoing bearing of divine providence on human life. The immortality of the soul and promise of an afterlife were essential  to his conception of providential theodicy.

He saw the work of those authors as a pernicious attempt to barbarise and denature man. In their different ways, Thomas Hobbes, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins and Bernard Mandeville had variously contributed to this process. In their hands, the ancient schools of philosophy had been resuscitated and debauched in the service of a dogmatic assault upon religion. 

For Burke the style of reasoning of these writers dismantled the foundation of all belief. Its influence would lead to the elimination of Christianity as well as to the destruction of society in general. 

In the 1750s, Burke challenged the deists’ denial of providence which he saw as something driven by a determination to annihilate mystery. In the process this threatened to dissolve all confidence in society, and everything that supported benign credulity and civilisation.  

One of them had declared “Where the mystery begins, religion ends.”

For Burke mystery could be credited in the absence of demonstration on the basis of reasonable faith. The idea of reasonable faith implied degrees of probability extending from moral certainty to extreme implausibility. For him, Christian revelation, while not a mathematical certainty, nonetheless commanded our assent. Although the content of scripture was often miraculous in nature, its credibility could not reasonably be doubted.  

Edmund Burke’s political thinking, his un-ideological and common sense approach to the way we can best organise the business of statecraft, is now at the heart of the thinking of many who are opposing the dying but still poisonous progressive liberalism that has infected our public squares.

But much of Burke’s clear-sighted analysis of the attacks on religion in his time – and what, prophetically, that to which he saw them leading – can still also be of use to us in our ongoing conflict with the secularist movement of our time with all its crazy progeny. 

(First published in print and online in Position Papers)

Next Week: The Journey of Thomas Stearns Eliot – Part One

EDMUND BURKE AND THE WAR ON THE ORIGINS OF SECULARISM

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Part One

The forward march of secularism may seem to be a relentless one. It is. But we should also observe that it is a pointless one. A march to nowhere. Secularism and its deformed progeny, the so-called secularist world, have been well analyzed in its roots and progress by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory and others in recent years. There is no question but that it has been a destructive force in our civilization, masquerading as benign progress. Taylor and Gregory note its origins in the corruption of the Christian faith dating back to the Reformation and beyond.

But it is not a triumphant force and champions of Christianity have been opposing it for centuries with their robust allegiance to its dual enemies, faith and reason, ever since it appeared among us in either its nascent or full-blooded incarnation.

For both Taylor and Gregory the gradual flowering of this weed emerged with what Taylor terms the disenchantment of religion following the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of the illusion that reason alone had all the answers. In its most viral form religion itself, for Protestant “influencers,” became a solely rational thing and faith, if it did not satisfactorily answer all the questionings of reason, was but a fanciful thing.

But the voices which have resisted the removal of the element of enchantment from religious consciousness over the centuries have not been vanquished and never were. They were there when the first sceptical utterances began to emerge in the seventeenth century and then reached something of a crescendo in the eighteenth, morphing into deism and outright atheism. In the nineteenth century the great John Henry Newman exposed the inevitable consequences of the liberal mindset of his age, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries his thought has proved an important part of the foundation of the powerful encyclicals of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI defending the truth about mankind and our destiny.

From the secular world itself, in the twentieth century, the voices of G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and many more spoke up for the truth of Christianity, exposing once again the folly of men who say in their heart, “there is no God.” Ross Douthat of the New York Times very recently drew our attention to a reality that secularist triumphalism wants to ignore:

Yet for Christianity, the modern era is actually two stories intertwined: a story of conflict and failure and disappointment for many Christian institutions, their division and their weakness in the face of other powers, woven together with the story of the Christian religion’s resilience and global spread. Whether or not liberal modernity represents a “metaphysical catastrophe” (to pluck a phrase from one of its eloquent religious critics), it has created a world civilization in which the Gospel has been preached in the far corners of the planet; in which there are today, according to one study, 2.6 billion Christians; in which, amid a long-running crisis for Western Catholicism, more young Catholics attended the just-completed World Youth Day in Portugal than inhabited all of medieval Rome and Paris and London put together.

Back at the beginning of what Brad Gregory calls the “unintended reformation,” the very existence of Christian faith in the anglophone world was, either intentionally or unintentionally, under attack from thinkers nurtured in Protestantism – Bacon, Hobbes, Locke. Later, and more virulent, in the seventeenth century, came Bernard Mandeville, Viscount Bolingbroke, David Hume, and a host of others displaying various brands of scepticism, deism, and atheism. But there were voices of opposition, and among these one of the most powerful was Edmund Burke’s. Burke is probably the Irishman in history who has had the greatest influence on mankind’s efforts to organise the world in a civilised way for the betterment of humanity. The only competitors I can think of would be the Irish missionaries of the early Middle Ages – people like Saints Columbanus, Gall, Columba, Killian, and others who brought Northern Europe back from the brink of barbarism.

But just as it is impossible to engage with the modern literary world without knowing and understanding something of the work of James Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, so it is impossible to engage with the great political debates of our time without knowing Edmund Burke and the influence he has had on political thought over the past 250 years. Burke is best known for the four great causes he espoused on behalf of mankind throughout his political career. These were firstly his search for justice for the people of the Indian subcontinent, victims of the East India Company operating under the protective umbrella of the British Empire. Secondly, there was his futile effort to try to rein in the folly of the British monarch and parliament in their trampling on the civil rights of the citizens of New England. Thirdly, there was his constant effort to ameliorate the lot of Catholics in Ireland and Britain, persecuted as they were by the Penal Laws passed by the English parliament in the early 1700s. Finally there was his resistance to the influence of the revolutionary forces unleashed in France in 1789 which he saw as a force which could destroy all religion and as a consequence the wellbeing of humanity itself.

But to understand Burke and everything he stood for we have to go back to his early years and the first great cause he undertook – his defence of religion, faith, and reason in the face of the enemies we have referred to earlier. This phase of Burke’s life has rarely been examined in much detail. Those four great causes have overshadowed the early part of his life. Yet it is crucial in understanding the man and everything for which he stood.

In 2015, as I think never before, Burke’s early years in Ireland, even his childhood and adolescence, his time in Trinity College Dublin, his move to London to study law, his early writings, and his preoccupations with religion and philosophy, were masterfully dealt with by Professor Richard Bourke in his book, Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution. Bourke covers this ground exhaustively. However, as his title suggests, the main focus of the work, just short of a thousand pages, is Burke’s more global preoccupation.

Not only, however, is his life and thinking in those years of interest in the context of what Conor Cruise O’Brien referred to as “The Great Melody,” the title of his biography of Burke. They also represent a fifth great cause to which Burke vehemently lent his not inconsiderable powers of persuasion – the cause of religion.  Burke was intensely conscious mankind’s dependence on religion for the future of our civilisation, threatened by what we now see were the poison seeds of secularism.

Professor Bourke, with great subtlety, sets Burke’s Protestant faith in the context of the Penal Laws: his father’s pragmatic conversion, his mother’s under-the-radar Catholicism; his close relations with his mother’s up-front Catholic family, the Nagels of Ballyduff in Cork with whom Edmund lived and was schooled during some of his childhood years; his schooling up to the age of fifteen in the Shackleton Quaker school in Ballitore; his years in Trinity where he developed his debating skills and his theological sensibilities which became the armour and armament for his battles with the skeptics, deists, and atheists of his time; finally, his early years in London studying law.

In part two of this article we will look at how Professor Bourke explores those early years and how Edmund Burke confronted what he saw as the malign interpretations of mankind’s relations with the Creator in early Protestantism.

Part 2, THE DELUSION OF ‘SECULARISM TRIUMPHANT’, next Friday.

(Posted on Position Papers on )

Christianity and the political order

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Democracy, Faith Matters1 Comment

The world before Christ – and indeed for centuries after his advent – was a very savage place indeed. The ancient world, embodied in cultures which we identify as civilisations, and in doing so tend to soften the reality which they present to us, was a very cruel and unforgiving one. In this world, despite the benign and wise voices of people like Akenaten, Zoroaster, Socrates, Cicero and others, places like Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome, placed very little value on individual human lives or on many of the values by which we live and govern ourselves today. 

Tom Holland’s Dominion and Professor Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R. – to name but two relatively recent representations of that world – illustrate very well the great divide between the values of pre-Christian civilisation and that set in train by the advent of Christianity. 

But if Rome was not built in a day, neither was Christendom. Professor Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire, or the story of St. Columbanus and his missionaries in the turbulent Europe of the 6th and  7th centuries, show us how long it took to root the values we take for granted today in the soil of that still residually pagan world. Even into the 12th and 13th centuries, the flowering which we see in the lives of St. Francis, St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas, took place side by side with a brutality underwritten by an utterly confused and confusing political morality, exemplified by The Hundred Years War, blundering Crusaders and the disedifying struggles between the Empire and the Papacy. 

The path to the civilisation we consider ourselves privileged to live in today, great as its deficiencies may still be, was a long and arduous one. It was not only long but it was also faltering, faltering so badly at times that it seemed, as it did so at least twice in the last century, to be even threatened with extinction. What was the common denominator of most if not all the regressions experienced by what we used to call Christian civilisation but now coyly call Western civilisation? It was the abandonment of the principles of life and living which the followers of Christ have derived from the teaching of a Man who claimed to be, and proved to their satisfaction that he is, the Son of God.

Mark Hamilton’s new book looks at our world today and at the dominant political mechanism by which we seek to organise and govern it. He finds it in grave danger of catastrophic collapse. Of his book he writes:

The book stems from an awareness that the secular state cannot adequately  protect its citizens and that as time progresses such failure may prove  catastrophic for democracy itself. Democracy without Christianity is fundamentally incomplete — it is like a tree which has lost the roots which anchor and feed it. 

Hamilton argues that the decline in democracy can only be reversed if the secular state rediscovers its Christian roots. For this to happen, he says, Christians need to understand the challenges, immerse themselves in political life, and take the opportunities presented to restore the democratic process to a condition where it ceases to be hypocritical.

The book is a calm piece of didacticism rather than a polemic raging against the failures of secularism, the flawed pedigree of relativism or the apathy of supposedly committed Christians. It logically explores the political landscape and encouragingly points to a way forward to restore the damaged fabric of democracy on the basis of the Christian values on which, he argues, it is based.

His arguments will make great sense to some. They will not be easily accepted by others, but one suspects that their counter-arguments will seldom rise above the level of superficial knee-jerk reactions – like the lazy confusing of misguided christian zeal with what is of the essence of Christianity. If superficiality could be avoided one might see the book provoking a valuable and intelligent exploration of a very real problem – the growing sense of deficit which is building up around our democratic institutions.

Dr. George Huxley, classicist, mathematician and archaeologist – to mention but three of the disciplines in which he is distinguished – is emeritus Professor of Classics at Queen’s University Belfast. In a lecture given in University College Dublin some years ago he defended Aristotle’s right still to be considered a wise man. Huxley said:

We speak much of democracy because we have elections and a wide franchise for women and men. But an ancient Greek democrat would with reason question our assumption that we are democrats. We emphasize elections, but we take too little thought for the quality of our elected rulers. Unlike the Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, we do not subject office holders to adequate scrutiny. 

While, he admits, some effective scrutiny is to be seen in the activities of Congressional Enquiries in the United States he describes House of Commons committees as toothless instruments by comparison and finds little evidence of scrutiny of European Commissioners. In judicial enquiries were necessary because elected representatives failed to police themselves, and for the most part were tardy, cumbersome, expensive, and inconclusive. 

Huxley suggests that we are deceiving ourselves. Perhaps it is this self-deception that is getting to us and disillusioning us about our ‘democracy’? Modern governments, he thinks, are not democratic but oligarchic. The oligarchic establishment of the self—describing ‘great and good’ knows how to use the law to defend itself. An Athenian, therefore, would question our democratic credentials and Aristotle, who yet had grave doubts about radical democracy, would have agreed with him: the millions. of dollars required to secure election to the Presidency of the United States, or the close connexion between British politicians of all parties and business interests, or the ability of powerful persons here in the Ansbacher polity to circumvent the law, are all oligarchic features. 

For an ancient Greek, he said, there were two important questions:  are the laws good and are they obeyed? If they are not good, they can be changed, but they must not be circumvented. How then would an ancient Greek, having read Aristotle’s Politics, classify most Western polities? He or she would not call them democracies. They are, rather, oligarchies interrupted by elections with low turnouts.

So, is it the case that in our readiness to live a lie about our political institutions we do not even reach the standard of the pre-Christian Greeks? Honesty, integrity and a sense of justice are human virtues attainable by all humans. But the element of Grace which is the gift devoutly to be wished for by all Christians is the most powerful of all the agents which reinforce these and the other virtues which keep us civilised. It is in recognising this that Hamilton is correct in seeing Christianity as the true guardian of the common good in the world. What makes a christian Christian is Grace and not self-description. A Christian’s  understanding of his or her identity is that to be truly human they are so because of their Grace-enabled identification with the perfect Man, Jesus Christ – who is also God. 

Democracy is a ground-upward system of defining and governing society. The character and identity of what that ground is composed of is the crucial issue. This brings us to the one haunting question posed implicitly by Hamilton’s book but not really addressed – perhaps because he feels it is not the context in which to address it. That is, where are the Christians who will transform this self-deceiving world? Democracy is not an ideology. It is a process through which a community gives expression to a vision. If that community is as dazed and confused as ours now is then democracy will do no more than create the chaos begotten by that confusion. By all means Christians should engage in the democratic process but perhaps their first responsibility and their first desire should be to speak their faith loudly and clearly, live by and help many others to live by the truths and values which their faith embodies. Then, perhaps slowly, as they did at the dawn of Christianity, but certainly surely, they will transform the society in which they live.

The sacred and the profane

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“History is written by the winners” is a trite adage which was probably first circulated by some losers. Ever since, it has been used to cast a shadow of doubt over every account of struggles between human beings of which history purports to tell us.

Searching through our past is a sacred pursuit. It is the pursuit of truth and, regardless of whether or not the goal is attained, if ever the pursuer veers from that course, seeking to serve ulterior motives, the sacred is profaned.

There is, sadly, a surfeit of this kind of profanity for us to contend with in our time. Pseudo historians and journalists – on the pretext that their work is the first draft of history – constantly try to pass off as a true account of the past, narratives which are nothing more than the whitewashing of the victors and the blacklisting of the vanquished.

In the ebb and flow of that cold conflict which we call the culture wars – particularly in the theatre of war where religion and secularism are the protagonists – the secularists seem currently to be the in the ascendant. Their ascendancy is partly the fruit of their committing this very kind of sacrilege – the representation, or misrepresentation, of facts in a wilfully selective way, serving an ulterior purpose.

Christian belief and the Catholic Church in particular are being vilified with every opportunity which presents itself to blacken the name of those who adhere to them. The shelves of our bookstores, the pages – hard or soft – of our news media, our broadcast services, all carry ample evidence of this. The callous indifference of the liberal West to the violent persecution of Christians and the burning of their churches in many parts of the world is just another dimension of their hidden – or not so hidden – agenda.

The consequences of this hostility are felt by ordinary Christians on our streets, in their workplaces and on college campuses every day. How about this, from David Quinn, director of Ireland’s Iona Institute, a secular Ireland’s bête noir in that country?

“It’s getting nastier out there. In the last couple of weeks, I have had a Sinn Fein supporter say on Twitter that I will be paying for my ‘crimes’, and sooner than expected. The University Observer at UCD tried to have me barred from taking part in a debate there and a guy from the paper accosted me afterwards. There was the protest against me the other night in Enniscorthy by People before Profit members. ” (Facebook post)

Even Dublin City Council, in its recent three-week-long Festival of History did not escape the reach of the secular culture warriors. A great deal of its programme was good, some of it very good, but a little too many of its presentations were no more than an opportunity for the ground troops of progressivism to gloat on their victories at the expense of the vanquished.

Black legends passing themselves off as the history of Christianity are nothing new. Each era seems to seek to generate its own to contribute to this destructive campaign. Here and now history is being used to pass judgement on and blacken the reputation of a generation of Irish people and of the Catholic Church, past and present. At the Festival Professor Frank McDonagh, in answer to a question related to his colloquy on his new book on Nazi Germany, wisely reminded us, History is an investigation of the past, not a judgement on it. Too many writers about the past undertake their work as counsels for the prosecution or the defence. They should be neither.

The destructive campaign against religion and religious institutions is being pursued ostensibly by some under the cover if investigating sad injustices perpetrated in the past by individuals and some institutions. In the way this is being done they are only piling injustice upon injustice.

This doubling of injustice is being perpetrated firstly by presenting fractions of truth as the whole truth; secondly by judging the deficiencies of another time in dealing with social problems by the mores, standards and circumstances of our own time; and thirdly – in the case of some at least – by weaponising the victims of past injustices in pursuit of the ulterior goal of destroying a targeted institution and its adherents.

Caelainn Hogan is a journalist who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Guardian, among others, chronicling for the whole world the injustices she claims the entire Irish State and the entire Catholic Church has inflicted on the people of this island. She has now written her first book, entitled Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s institutions for ‘Fallen Women’. She contributed to the last weekend of this festival in an event where she was ‘in conversation with Tuam survivors.’ This was billed in the published programme as follows:

Until recently, the Catholic Church, in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of ‘fallen women’. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother—and—baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted — sometimes illegally. Mortality rates in these institutions were high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at the mother—and—baby home in Tuam made news all over the world. The Irish state has commissioned investigations, but for countless people, a search for answers continues.

That may be good sensational journalism – if you like that sort of thing. But it has nothing to do with history. It was sad to see this rubbing shoulders with the contributions of people like Tom Holland and Margaret Macmillan and Jung Chang – all of whose presentations were filled with the nuance which the complexity of the past demands.

There is no doubt but that we need to hear the sad accounts of people who have suffered injustice. We need to hear it because we need to help heal the wounds inflicted on them. We need to hear it because we all need to reform what needs reform in ourselves and in our institutions. But when our response to this moves us to general judgements on whole populations and everyone serving in institutions, this does not serve any concept of truthfulness, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which honest historical narrative seeks.

To identify the faltering but earnest efforts of the entire Irish state to serve its people in those decades with the tragic mistakes made in some of those efforts, is to portray it as a monster. To identify the Catholic Church in a similar manner is equally gross. This is the institution which for millennia has nurtured our civilization from the rough justice of pagan times, through era after era when new forms of barbarism threatened to swamp it.

In our own time the Catholic Church is the only global institution standing firm against the new barbarism which manifests itself in the daily slaughter of thousands of unborn children.

The writing of tendentious historical narratives seems to be just one more weapon in an arsenal assembled for the destruction of all semblances of Christian values in our civilization.

History gives us many examples of justice warriors who have felt it necessary to destroy their flawed but workable institutions to establish what they saw as justice. Most of them, in doing so, have left trails of pain and suffering in their wakes, until Christian inspired restorations brought the world back to some semblance of justice, even if only of the faltering kind which our race is capable of achieving.

Constantine reformed a Roman regime which brutally tried but failed to destroy the Christian religion; throughout the Middle Ages the Catholic Church resisted repeated incursions of barbaric forces, eventually converting them and with them laying the foundations for what we today call Western Civilization; honest historian now recognise that even the much maligned Inquisition was in fact and effort to ameliorate the kind of summary treatment of dissent which had been standard practice prior to that; nearer our own time came the French Revolution, whose reign of terror held sway until eventually a fragile Christian order brought the Enlightenment back to its sense of humanity; the sad history of the twentieth century’s blood-soaked efforts to supplant Christianity bled itself right into our own time

The Catholic Church has battled on through all these storms and for anyone who wants to question its perennial commitment to justice and truth and the ultimate welfare of mankind, let them start by taking up that seminal document, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is by this compendium of all the teaching of its Founder, as found in the scriptures, its traditions and its explicit pronouncements down through the 2000 years of its history, that it should be judged. The faltering efforts of its adherents can of course often be found wanting, sometimes gravely wanting – and indeed be occasion for scandal. They should not however, be a pretext for condemning that which the Catholic Church works constantly for, and which it insistently asks and encourages us to aspire to and strive for.

Global warming or global amnesia – which is the bigger threat?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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The catastrophe of our time which conventional wisdom identifies readily – even ad nauseam – is the calamity we are promised if we do not deal effectively with the causes and consequences of global climate change.  But there is an even greater catastrophe unfolding in our midst. It is nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the fabric of our civilization and it is far more threatening to the welfare of humanity than the natural changes to our climate.

Two reasons should assure us that global warming is not going to wipe out the human race. For one, that elusive force of nature, ‘political will’, seems now to be in harness to lead the charge against this threat. Secondly, human ingenuity, scientific and technological resourcefulness are all on our side to ensure that we will probably cope reasonably well with the effects of this unruly phenomenon.

Much more destructive of our fragile civilization than the climate-change denial everyone is getting so worked up about is the consignment of our wealth of human memory and tradition to the scrap-heap of history.

Surely one of the greatest malaises of our time is our failure to value our past? That failure is primarily the result of our self-inflicted ignorance. Everywhere around us we see public policy undermining that vital umbilical cord which links – or should link – successive generations of mankind down through the ages. The end result is a denial  which amounts to blindness – creating an empty black hole where there should be a vast reservoir of truth and wisdom. The consequences of such a radical denial cannot but be catastrophic.

It is not that we are unhappy to indulge our nostalgic sentiments with pastiche historical concoctions like Downton Abbey, or  the bizarre mindless faux historical narratives of Dan Brown. All this, some of it little more than vain fantasizing, without the foundation of truthful scholarship, without the training of young minds in the skills involved in the pursuit of historical truth, will at best  be nothing more than a superficial gloss. At worst it will be up there with the Wagnerian fantasies of Adolf Hitler, foundation stones for new tyrannies.

As veteran film-maker Ken Loach said recently, when asked about the popularity of British drama, such as Downton Abbey: “This rosy vision of the past…says, ‘Don’t bother your heads with what’s going on now, just wallow in fake nostalgia.’ It’s bad history, bad drama. It puts your brain to sleep.

“It’s the opposite of what a good broadcaster should do, which is stimulate and invigorate. You might as well take a Mogadon as watch it.”

What history must do – and include in that concept everything we know about archaeology and the study of historical literature and art – is unite us with the generations of men and women who have preceded us, not for a moment denying that among them we find the good, the bad and the ugly. The loss of intimacy with the minds of the past which is evident in the minds of the present must remind us of one thing. It must recall for us the hordes of barbarians who descended on the civilizations of the past – the Vandals, the Goths and the Huns on the Roman world, the Viking hordes invading the Celtic world, and in our own time, the Islamic jihadists and their destruction of the remnants of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East.

Just recently in Britain a campaign has had to be launched to prevent the removal of archaeology from the senior school curriculum. The subject is now joining art history and classical civilization in the school bin. Sir Tony Robinson, presenter of the serious television history programme, Time Team, is dismayed at the trend. “It feels like the Visigoths at the gates of Rome,” Sir Tony told the Guardian. “All these incredibly valuable and important subjects are being cast into the fire.”

At the heart of all this is a denial of the value of our knowledge of the past and of the traditions of of our ancestors. Denial of tradition is a denial of our humanity and it is at the heart of modern individualism, that ideology which is even more inimical to our common good than Communism was.

All this, in part at least, is a consequence of the neglect of history and its systematic removal from school curricula.

Dorothy Day, reflecting in the mid twentieth century on the loss of the sense of the past and the sense of their origins among young Americans, wrote, “Tradition! We scarcely know the word any more. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.” She regrets the loss of the sense of origin of the Irish, the Italian, the Lithuanian who have forgotten their birthplaces and “no longer listen to their mothers when they say, ‘when I was a little girl in Russia, or Hungary, or Sicily.’ They leave their faith and their folk songs and costumes and handcrafts, and try to be something which they call ‘an American’”.

G. K. Chesterton read the issue politically, interpreting the denigration of tradition as something alien in a true democratic heart. “Tradition is democracy extended through time. Tradition means giving the vote to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are walking about.”

The enemies of tradition have probably always existed.  Their interventions in history have, for the most part, been violent ones. But it was not until the Enlightenment that they really took on an ideological character. In the culture war which their emergence sparked, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine were the leading protagonists. Yuval Levin in his masterful book, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, shows how the issue of tradition, its value and relevance, became the hinge on which the future character of our society and our world was going to turn – and is still turning.

Paine was a man who clearly believed, as he wrote in Common Sense, one of the seminal texts inspiring the American Revolution, that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

For Burke such an idea was a dangerous anathema, because it ignored all the essential realities of our human nature. For him history was a process of clarification through experience, and political change is among its constant features. But if ignorance of history and tradition prevail in a society then such change is at a terrible risk of being chaotic and human suffering will be the consequence.

Yuval Levin sums up: “Paine seeks to understand man apart from his social setting, while Burke thinks man is incomprehensible apart from the circumstances into which he is born—circumstances largely the making of prior generations.”

“Burke expressly denies that we can look out for the needs of the future even as we reject the lessons and achievements of the past. Access to those lessons and achievements is one of the most crucial needs of the future, as he sees it, so the present-centered vision of the revolutionaries must involve betraying the future as much as the past: ‘People will not look forward to posterity, who never  look backward to their ancestors’”

“If ‘the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken and no one generation could link with the other,’ Burke worries, then ‘men would become little better than the flies of a summer.’”

For Burke our links to our ancestors – through our knowledge of their history and the traditions which have come down to us from them – are “capital” to which the present and the future are entitled, the accumulated knowledge and practice of our forefathers. The radicals, Burke argues, seek “to deprive men of the benefit of the collected wisdom of mankind, and to make them blind disciples of their own particular presumption.” He therefore sees himself, Levin explains, as a defender of the present, not the past, and sees the revolutionaries as a threat to present happiness as well as to future order.

The radicals of the Eighteenth century, like Paine, wanted to start the world anew. The gender-bending radicals of our day, driven by the ideology of radical individualism are going even further. They, ignoring the wealth of human experience evident in the history of mankind, want to take our very nature and fashion it in the image of their own strange fantasies.

We might borrow a thought from Burke’s contemporary and fellow alumnus of Trinity College Dublin, Oliver Goldsmith, reading the concepts of history and tradition into his word, “pride”.

“Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade:

A breath can make them, as a breath has made;

but a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,

When once destroyed can never be supplied.”

We live dangerously when we live without the benefit of the wisdom of our forebears, despite all their flaws and failures.

Spurious Apologies and False Guilt

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

Last week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement notes the comments of British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott on how Alex Haley’s book Roots was such a curative agent in helping African Americans cope with the lingering trauma of slavery. Mr. Prescott was speaking to The Guardian newspaper and the TLS goes on to quote the paper telling us that members of the evangelical Christian group Lifeline have been touring the globe in chains, wearing T-shirts with the logo “So sorry”. Lifeline members have “apologized to the vice-president of the Gambia and to a descendant of Kunta Kinte, the slave made famous in the Alex Haley epic Roots” (Guardian, March 24). 

The TLS finds it all a bit dodgy and not really serving anybody’s interests that a book like Haley’s should be used as a basis for anything. “Haley’s non-fiction saga, at the end of which the author travels to the Gambian village of Juffure to be reunited in spirit with Kunta Kinte, has long since been exposed as fraudulent. In 1978, Haley paid $650,000 in damages to Harold Courlander, having admitted that large passages of Roots were copied from his book, The African. Allegations that the genealogy linking him to Kunta Kinte was false were never rebutted by Haley, who died in 1992, nor were suggestions that the African griot who outlined the family tree had been coached.”“The case for a retrospective ‘apology’ for an abhorrent trade that ended 200 years ago is not bolstered by being backed up by a dodgy book,” the TLS commentator concludes. 

 Indeed. What we need is good history and with the honesty which good history will reveal in all of us there will be no need for these spurious apologies. However, there is a bigger problem here than a dodgy book. We regret the sins of our fathers but we are not responsible for them. We should learn from them – as we have – but to apologise for them is meaningless. This year in Ireland we commemorate an event in 1607 known as the Flight of the Earls, when some of my ancestors, having been defeated in the war they launched against the English to try to preserve their Gaelic culture, fled to the continent to avoid their final humiliation. We are not looking for any apologies – I hope. It is sufficient that the truth be recalled.

Today’s New York Times carries a feature on what it calls “the climate divide” in which it observes that there is a growing consensus that the first world owes the third world a climate debt. Of course it does. But it owes it on the basis of our common humanity. To seek to generate this sense of indebtedness on the basis of a guilt which all do not accept in the first place is to undermine the truth which should be the basis for the powerful actions we need to take.

These two examples of guilt-inducement – one using a dodgy book, the other using a shaky scientific theory on the causes of global warming – will do nothing to restore the balance which humanity needs. Spurious apologies and false guilt will only blunt true consicence and dull the motives for right action.