Is Civilization Deteriorating?

--This is the complete text of a lecture I delivered at the King's College during Interregnum 2008. As it was spoken, the text includes only "verbal" citatations; thus, I would like straightaway to acknowledge my immense debt to David Bentley Hart, Leo Strauss, Dr. David Innes, and Dr. David Corbin--you may consider this piece a disjointed eavesdropping on their thoughts.--

We cannot doubt that Western culture is in flux. However, whether that tumult is the descent into depravity, or the birth pangs of Utopia depends on whom you ask. Progressives insist that we modern Westerners live in the summertime of history: 200 years of explosive growth in technological innovation, and material wealth have driven disease, poverty, and violence to the fringes of our civilization. We are the richest society ever, by more significant measurements than per capita income—surely even the lavish Henry VIII would have traded one of his palaces for indoor plumbing, or refrigeration, something even our “poor” almost universally enjoy. However, traditionalist conservatives present a second account, a morbid tale of rampant individualism; of the marginalizing of religion; the decay of marriage and the family; and the rise of trivial materialism, or, consumerism.

I feel certain that evaluating the true nature of our society, and its probable future will require our unifying these two narratives; we rugged individualists must learn the genealogy of our age. This epic begins in the grey half-light of the late Renaissance; its original patriarch is a sly—even sinister—Italian bureaucrat named Niccolo Machiavelli. His slim volume of political pragmatics is the corner around which Europe rushed headlong, finding on the other side the modern era. A bitter coup rages throughout The Prince, culminating in the overthrow of classical philosophy, with its “imagined republics,” its insistence on telos, or a final end, its stern commands of virtue. Machiavelli sought instead a political philosophy whose highest good is “security and well-being”, ordered by “effectual truth.” Already we can discern the features of gestating modernity: materialism, utilitarianism, and the exaltation of survival.

The Renaissance rolled northward, and Machiavelli begat Thomas Hobbes, the dour Monster of Maumsbury, who in turn begat the monstrous Leviathan. What lies half-buried in Machiavelli comes to full light in Hobbes (perhaps the reason that the mischievous Prince reads more enjoyably than the pontifical Leviathan): he spurns the classical dreams of a summum bonum, envisions humanity as a warring mob dominated first by a fear of death, and then a lust for power, and crafts a political philosophy designed to assuage the fear, and curb the lust. Hobbes fancied himself a scientist discovering the law of human nature, namely, a command to self-preservation; thus, for him liberty is essentially license, “the absence of external impediment,” the freedom to secure that life as he sees fit. Nevertheless, security compels him to seek community, and in this respect, Hobbes legitimately founds modern liberalism: his concept of the social contract spelled the end of hereditary monarchy, if not of authoritarianism. Indeed, it is precisely his ability to cast the human life in terms of crass materialism that allowed him to devise a state so brutally effective at achieving its limited ends: in Leviathan, Hobbes’ aim is low and steady; it finds its mark of self-preservation.

Machiavelli styled himself conqueror of the classics; Hobbes believed himself the founder of the true science of human nature; if it is possible, John Locke may have surpassed both in ambition: he seems to style himself a primordial demiurge, remaking the natural order, humanity, and even God in his own image. Locke ennobles Machiavelli’s pragmatism and Hobbes’ base materialism, exalting them to religion as he presents what I will tremulously name an ontology of ownership, in which being itself is a matter of property. He envisions God as a cosmic proprietor, and finds a theological grounding for Hobbes’ call to self-preservation in the fact that “we are God’s workmanship.”Locke directs the government to “the regulating and preserving of property,” by which it may protect and encourage a flourishing economy, and thus become great in the world. Locke stands firmly in the tradition of Machiavelli in encouraging a politics of realism, grounded in each man’s quest for self-aggrandizement, and in the tradition of Hobbes, in rooting his political aims in self-preservation, but he found an innovative way to unify these in an entirely economic conception of life.

The British propounded the theory, but it was the Americans—a people sprung full grown and armed, as it were, from the brains of these early moderns—who first explored the world created for them by Locke. The Federalist Papers are in some respects a primer in Lockean philosophy, particularly those texts most central to the Framing, numbers Ten and Fifty-One. Ten envisions an American political order largely rooted in an economic view of existence, in which the government circumvents the dangerous factions of religion and ideology by “regulating” the faction of economic interest. It thus derives its stability from the guarantee that its citizens will care more about stock prices and car models than about the troublesome but enduring ideas that foment revolution.
Fifty-One applies this materialist principle to the machinery of government itself, contending, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interests of the man must be connected to the constitutional rights of the place.” In its essence, the American political experience is the application of the two most crucial Enlightenment tenets: the self-interested individual seeking to enlarge an existence that has diminished to the merely material.

This particular strand of the Enlightenment—what Strauss called “the first wave of modernity”—created (or perhaps articulated or disseminated) the culture that launched the Industrial Revolution. This is no accident of history, but a natural consequence: given a conception of the self as an autonomous individual with the sacred duty of extending the sphere of his existence, and given a view of existence as essentially material, it is small wonder that the modern man—and particularly that super-modern, the American—would develop so homogeneously into what Walter McDougall termed “the hustler,” a creature bent on exploiting every scrap of knowledge to his practical advantage.

This wholly new conception of life—this proprietary worldview, this Market Earth—unleashed possibilities never before imagined: the ability to stamp out disease, to fly to the moon, to converse instantly across continents, even to blot a city from the map in a maelstrom of radioactive flame. In but a century, we save 100 million lives from polio, and then murder or starve 100 million more with industrial efficiency, all in the name of Progress.

However, the Enlightenment fertilized the bloom of Industry at the expense of the old growth of the West—the institutions and values inherited from Christ and Aristotle. It is absolutely telling that Locke spends an entire chapter in the Second Treatise redefining familial relations in terms of self-interest. This new political philosophy requires new men to practice it, men who see their lives in terms of self-interest (“enlightened” though it may be) rather than in terms of submission to faith, hope, and charity, or the fearful strictures of honor and shame.

Perhaps the best exposition of this problem comes from the simple dilemma posed by Jesus: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” The modern age has been an experiment—so far wildly successful—in unlocking man’s vast potential to exploit and utilize Mammon. From the beginning, the social consequences of that partnership have revealed themselves, but many critics of modernity insist we have only begun to taste the bitter fruit that it may bear.

Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart insists, “We live in an age whose chief moral value is the absolute liberty of personal volition,” and whose “religion” is thus “one of very comfortable nihilism”—nihilism precisely because it denies “any ‘value’ higher than choice.” Thus, for all their talk of the public good, the moderns, with their will-centered philosophies, placed themselves on a slippery slope that led inevitably to Nietzsche. Hart’s observations bring to mind Israel’s social free-fall recorded in the Book of Judges, whose author belabors this criticism: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

An observer of Western culture in 2008 cannot help but feel a measure of ambivalence: this is a culture that, to some extent, has traded virtue, a quality that for Christ and Aristotle meant “man as he ought to be,” for bread. However, there is no simple stance from which to criticize our individualism and triviality: we wear Industry’s clothing, eat its food, live in its houses. We write our books of communitarian virtue on Industry’s laptops.

Without slipping into determinism—I still hope that we might find a route back to virtue that will not tear us from the providential blessings of abundance—we must face this knotty problem: if we fear social disintegration, we must treat it in relation to the TVs and suburbs that isolate us, the food that renders us obese, and the cult of the Dollar that has stolen the hearts of the church.

This prompt sought to discern whether our civilization is deteriorating: in a sense, we cannot even ask that question from within modernity, for modern man has rejected those standards and values that make such a critique meaningful. In asking the question, we pass judgment on modernity, stepping off our culture’s rigidly base foundation. From the vantage of the ancients, we have fallen far, indeed. Still, we hear the new man asking softly, in all seriousness: “Could you bear the cost of return?”

Finally, a word to Christians: it certainly may be that Western civilization will not stand under the weight of its shortcomings—only the Lord knows what is to come. Regardless, the truth remains that we are citizens not only of the Earthly City, but of the Kingdom of the Beloved Son: we hope not in whirling and rickety Progress, but in the One Who was, and is, and is to come.