How the West was lost
Is the world getting
better or worse? It is a perennial question.
To take one
example, in 1616 Godfrey Goodman (an Englishman, and secretly a Catholic) wrote
"The Fall of Man, Or the Corruption of Nature Proved by the Light of our
Natural Reason". In 1627 he was answered by the optimist George
Hakewill’s "Apology of the Power and Providence of God in the Government
of the World. Or an Examination and Censure of the Common Error Touching
Nature’s Perpetual and Universal Decay". The world has moved on since
these two gentlemen put pen to paper, but the debate continues.
Arthur Herman
thinks he has the answer to this age-old debate in his The Idea of
Decline in Western History. Although he has
also written a sympathetic biography of Senator Joe McCarthy, I think it is fair
to describe Herman as a "modern liberal", subscribing to "the
liberal humanist image of man and society". He concludes that there have
always been prophets of decline and that they have mostly been wrong, and often
they have done actual damage. But he has a faith in the creativity of liberalism
that transcends fears of decline.
We may turn to
Herman’s work in an attempt to understand the history of the Catholic Church,
including her recent apparent decline. But we immediately strike a theological
objection. If, believing as we do that the Church is a divine institution,
guided by the Holy Spirit, it cannot simply obey any "laws of
history". Indeed, the remarkable survival of the Church over two millennia
has often been seen as a great miracle in itself and proof that the Church is
not subject to the ordinary processes of human decline. Like the body of Our
Lady it will never experience final decay.
Can society relapse?
But while
remembering that "the gates of hell shall not prevail", we may still
derive benefit from an essentially secular work like Herman’s. In fact, we can
critique it from a privileged position as contemporary Catholics. When he quotes
Edward Gibbon, writing in his Decline and Fall of the
Herman does not
discuss religious traditionalism, but I imagine that he would be unsympathetic,
given that he can only see the Gothic Revival in architecture as a
"melancholy obsession.” Are Catholic Traditionalists merely reacting
against progress, indulging in "reactionary chic" or what Herman would
call conservative romanticism? He refers to Romanticism’s reaction against the
Enlightenment and its new respect for the Catholic Church, and to how its
"loss of confidence in the future was matched by a growing nostalgia for
the premodern past." He also writes of "Romanticism’s most enduring
legacy: its alienation from its own time and era.” But what the Traditionalist
seeks is not old or new, but timeless and eternal. Whatever is timeless will
necessarily be alienated from its own time and era. And retaining the best from
the past is not mere nostalgia. Mr Herman presumably has no elegiac moments.
Cycles and recurrence
Arnold Toynbee, a philosopher of history to whom
Herman gives a lot of negative attention, wrote of the "spiritual
inadequacies of the Enlightenment". He also concluded that "it looks
as if the movement of civilizations may be cyclic and recurrent, while the
movement of religion may be on a single continuous upward line." There are
actually some hard data that support this claim. Referring to the construction
of Gothic cathedrals, the systems analyst Cesare Marchetti recently concluded
"it is remarkable how such a process remained self-consistent over such a
long period of time, with wars, pestilences, and political reorganizations
taking place. It seems clear that the mechanisms of the system dominate over
historical contingency …”
But Herman relies on man to
ensure society’s well-being, having demoted God. He is a man of the
Enlightenment, applauding the abolition of the natural order upheld by the
Church. So he can have no answer to the most radical advocate of women’s or
children’s rights. Nor has he any final answer to the radical
environmentalist’s question as to why animals or trees should not have rights
equal to humans. And yet he sees doctrinaire feminism and environmentalism as
unhealthy "cultural pessimism".
Perhaps even worse for his
argument, he has forgotten an essential feature of the West – its continuing
Christianity. His own "Enlightenment” civilisation,
The great sadness
Herman frets about the current
pervasiveness of what he calls "pop pessimism". He accuses both the
Left and the Right of indulging in "declinism", writing that
"perhaps the most salient feature of the twentieth century has been the
tremendous upsurge of … cultural pessimism …” But he also contends that
"the most characteristic product of the Western humanist tradition … the
free and autonomous individual … is also the cultural pessimist’s worst
enemy". But, if this is true, why do these free individuals continue to
succumb to pessimism? Why are today’s young people, with more riches and
freedom than ever before, so miserable?
In an irony that Herman fails
to analyse, it is precisely liberalism and modernity that have given birth to
the post-modern world. Enlightenment values have not proved palatable. The
better off people are, the worse they seem to feel. Rather than enjoying their
freedom and enlightenment, they adopt post-modern attitudes of alienation; they
celebrate irrationality and illiberalism.
The prophet of post-modernism,
Nietzsche, identified a central "will to power" in human affairs.
Herman quotes him thus: "life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien
and weaker". For Nietzsche, morality is merely an invention of the weak.
The Catholic Church is in the curious position of seeking to prevail through
weakness, of using a "will to love" instead of a "will to
power". This is especially the case in the modern Church, which is inclined
to apologise for its past Crusades against its world-historical rival, Islam. It
will be instructive to see how successful Herman’s liberal
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