The Cheap Trick of Whiteness

A half-truth, as John Lukacs is fond of saying, is more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth in it, speaking to our hearts and minds, can mask the accompanying falsehood. We see this in the current embrace of multiculturalism, which propagates the dangerous lie that a civilized human society can exist—whether at the level of the family, the city, or the nation—without a unifying culture.  (That, and not the claim that all cultures are equally “valid” or valuable, or even that all other cultures are more to be admired than ours, is the greatest danger posed by multiculturalism.) Despite the evident falsity of this claim (history presents no example of a lasting society without a dominant, unifying culture), the ideology of multiculturalism has flourished in the United States not because it has been imposed by political and cultural institutions, such as public schools and universities (though it has), nor because the former elites of the once-dominant culture in this country have been ill prepared to defend that culture as a unifying force (though they have), but because of the element of truth that the proponents of multiculturalism use like a katana to slice through any resistance to their destructive agenda: Diversity, like unity, is a positive good.

We do not have to draw on parallels from agriculture about the dangers of large-scale monoculture, or from genetics about the dead end of restrictive gene pools, to recognize this truth. It is not simply boredom that leads us to seek out new friends and to sample different cuisines, to learn languages other than the one we were born into and to study the history of other civilizations, or even the far-flung corners of our own. Russell Kirk argued that diversity—true diversity, not multiculturalism masquerading under that name—is a conservative principle, because (like all other true conservative principles) it is a reflection of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Christian God Himself is a diversity in unity.

The problem, as always, is one of balance. Unity is a positive good; diversity is a positive good; but either one, taken to the extreme, destroys the other. Variety (the saying goes) is the spice of life, and sometimes a dish can become unbalanced because too little salt has been added. Yet, as any good cook knows, it is easier to destroy a dish through an overabundance of spices. Multiculturalism, as practiced in the United States, isn’t a measured dose of garlic or cumin or harissa incorporated into a hearty beef stew; it’s a cup of MSG poured on top of a Big Mac. The initial dish is toxic enough without any help from the Orient’s secret salt.

If the half-truth of multiculturalism is that diversity is a positive good, the half-truth that some opponents of multiculturalism push beyond the limit is that unity is a positive good. When unity becomes the highest value, we end up not with, say, the vibrant yet diverse Christian civilization of Europe in the Middle Ages but with the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism and (as I discussed last month) the post-Christian hypermonotheism of Islam. And among the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism is found an obsession with race as a unifying principle, among both liberals who see “whiteness” as the root of all evil, and some of their opponents who increasingly see it as the sole source and foundation of everything worth preserving.

A.D. 2015 will long be remembered here in Rockford as the year when that great “white power” band Cheap Trick (“Mommy’s all white / Daddy’s all white / They just seem a little weird”) finally received the recognition that they deserve, with the announcement that they will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Bad puns aside, it is hard to imagine four men who are collectively more white than Rick Nielsen, Robin Zander, Tom Petersson, and Bun E. Carlos (Brad M. Carlson, who says that he chose his stage surname because “We sounded like a bunch of Swedes”).  Yet it is absurd to speak of Cheap Trick as a “white” band, even in the sense that it is legitimate to speak of their fellow 2016 inductees N.W.A. as a black one.  Cheap Trick’s music cannot be reduced to a product of their “genetic endowment,” or even to some generic “white culture.”  Nielsen, Zander, Petersson, and Carlos are men of a certain time and a certain place—the mid–20th to early 21st century Upper Midwest, and specifically Northern Illinois—and their music has its feeder roots here and now (and then), even if other roots run deeper. Their longevity is the result, in large part, of their continued connection to this place and to the people who make their home here. As my barber recently noted, Rockford has changed a lot since he was young, but if you’re trying to find out something about a fellow Rockfordian you’ve never met, chances are you know not just one but several people who have worked with him, eaten with him, had one too many drinks with him, or worshiped with him.

Too many use the terms patriotism and nationalism today as if they were interchangeable, but they mean radically different things, especially in the context of a nation spread across an entire continent. Patriotism not only implies a connection to a certain people but demands a mutual connection to a certain place. There may be reasons why it is hard for me, a native of West Michigan, to be a Rockford patriot even after 20 years of living here, but it is many orders of magnitude easier than being a generically American one. America is not a place; it is many places—thousands of towns and regions and 50 states, all within the bounds of a continental empire that even in its infancy was more political than cultural. (The cultural differences between the original states, and even within each state, are almost incomprehensible to those whose historical imaginations have been fed from infancy on a steady diet of Thanksgiving turkey.) This country has always had, by its very nature, an inherent diversity that nationalism at best glosses over and at worst, reflecting its roots in Enlightenment rationalism, seeks to destroy in favor of an artificial unity. The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Fame, alas, is fleeting, and the music of Cheap Trick may not be remembered outside of Rockford a century from now, much less four centuries, but what is true of Nielsen and Zander, Petersson and Carlos is just as true of Bach and Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. When the multiculturalists dismiss the latter as “Dead White European Males,” and some of their opponents respond by lumping them together as “White Western Christians,” both sides turn these great composers into abstractions, as if the works of each one were (absurdly) interchangeable with those of any of the others. Notre Dame de Paris, Hagia Sophia, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and Sagrada Família were all built by Christian men of varying shades of whiteness, but the individual beauty and majesty of each edifice arises from the differences between those men and their cultures as much as it does from their underlying unity. Those who look at these churches through a monochromatic lens will never experience their full beauty—much less the fullness of truth that each represents and was built to honor. That some of those people, in fact, celebrated the blasphemous suicide of Dominique Venner in Notre Dame de Paris in May 2013 speaks volumes about what they truly worship.

Ostensibly, one of the reasons Venner chose to commit his “eminently political” act in the sanctuary at Notre Dame was to awaken the people of Europe to the dangers of Islamic immigration—a real threat that he correctly understood might spell the death of Europe as we know it. But the nations of Europe have faced this threat before, and they did not repel it through individual or mass suicide. Jan Sobieski, Janos Hunyadi, and Giovanni da Capestrano were all Western white Christian men named John who fought Islam, but they did not do so on behalf of the abstractions of “Europe” or “the West,” much less of “whiteness.” Each fought for the truth incarnate in his native land and people, in “the ashes of his fathers / and the temples of his gods.”

Abstractions draw man away from reality and lead him to despair; a firm grounding in reality gives man hope—or at least something that he can fight for when the odds seem overwhelming. A man, history shows us, will fight for his wife and children; for his family and friends; for his home and native land. Given time, talent, and resources, he may build things that last for generations yet to come. He may go to his grave knowing that his name may be lost to the ages within a century or two, but his presence will still be felt.

If, however, he abjures all of this, cuts his ties to his native soil (and never puts down roots anywhere else), makes few lasting friendships, chooses not to marry (or, if he marries, refuses to have children), and devotes his life instead to battles that are so large they cannot be won on behalf of an abstraction spun out of centuries of mass delusion—then such a man has not fought the enemies of civilization; he has joined forces with them.       

First published in the February 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Physics and Philosophy: Or, How Stephen Hawking Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang

“[P]hilosophy,” Stephen Hawking famously claimed, “is dead.” “Philosophy,” he argued, “has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

Werner Heisenberg might well have agreed with Hawking, though again he might not have. We cannot be certain. After all, Heisenberg was himself both a physicist and a philosopher, though he was the former before he was the latter. In fact, the title of this article, “Physics and Philosophy,” was Heisenberg’s before it was mine. He used it 65 years ago as the title of his Gifford Lectures, in which he grappled with the philosophical implications of quantum theory, and especially of his eponymous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that (in Stephen Hawking’s words) “a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer.”

Classical physics was (and remains) deterministic; quantum physics, Heisenberg recognized, reintroduced something akin to free will, or at the very least acknowledged that the human action of observation has an effect on that which the observer has observed — a decidedly philosophical concept.

About 25 years after Heisenberg delivered his Gifford Lectures, the Reverend Richard Rehm delivered a sermon at Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan. I was sitting in the pews with my trombone — not because I was an odd teenager, but because our public high-school band had been invited to play hymns during a Christmas service. Christ Community was a congregation in the Reformed Church in America, and I was, then as now, a Catholic, but I sat in rapt fascination as the Reverend Rehm, a few years before Stephen Hawking declared philosophy dead, essentially proclaimed the death of theology (though he didn’t phrase it that way).

Physicists, the Reverend Rehm declared, were more likely to discover God than theologians were. As they pursued the holy grail of a grand unified theory of physics, they were, he argued, entering into the mind of the god who had created the universe that this grand unified theory would ultimately define.

To a bright young student who loved mathematics and science and was considering majoring in physics in college, the Reverend Rehm’s words were as tempting as the serpent’s were to Eve. No greater pride hath a teenager than this: to think that he might discover God Himself. In no small part because of this particular sermon, I entered Michigan State a few years later as a physics major, though I switched to political theory after a single term.

About five years after I took a bite out of the apple that the Reverend Rehm had offered me, Russell Kirk, the great conservative thinker who would, over the next half-decade, become one of my mentors, told me that he thought that we were about to enter a new age of faith that would be ushered in by scientists — and, in particular, by physicists — who would prove the existence of God. Since it was the first time we had ever met, I did not have the courage to tell him that I knew that he was wrong.

For by then — even at the still young age of 21 — I had realized that a god who could be summed up in equations would no god at all. “The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands” — but equating God with the laws that govern the world He has created ultimately subordinates Him to His creation.

Stephen Hawking, of course, was not a believer. In fact, in October 1981, at (of all places) a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he had introduced his “no boundary” hypothesis of the universe, which accepted the idea of the Big Bang but, he argued, removed the need for a Prime Mover to have set the Big Bang into motion. As he wrote seven years later in his most famous work, A Brief History of Time, in the “no boundary” hypothesis “The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would be neither created nor destroyed. It would just be. … What place then for a creator?”

And yet, as his former student and frequent collaborator Thomas Hertog shows in his recent book On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory, Hawking spent much of his life trying to discover the physical theories that the Reverend Rehm equated with the workings of the mind of God and that Russell Kirk thought might lead us to a new age of faith.

It is hard to overstate the enduring grip that the classical view of physics had on some of the greatest minds in physics even after the formulation of quantum mechanics. All too many Christian writers have misquoted Albert Einstein as saying that “God does not play dice with the universe” in an attempt to enlist his authority on behalf of belief in God. But what Einstein was actually expressing, in a letter to quantum theorist Max Born, was his resistance to quantum theory, because quantum theory undermines the determinism of classical physics (even as modified by Einstein’s own theory of relativity). Einstein used, not the word “God,” but the term “the Old One” as a metaphor for unchanging physical laws. Indeed, he had vehemently argued against Abbe Georges Lemaitre’s theory of the Big Bang because, as he told Lemaitre, “this reminds me too much of the Christian dogma of creation.” He preferred a universe with no beginning and no end, governed always by those same unchanging laws that, he was certain, physicists would one day fully discover.

Decades later, Hawking too had trouble shaking loose from the mindset imparted by classical physics. The “no boundary” hypothesis emerged from Hawking’s attempt to extend quantum theory to the macro world of phenomena described by the laws of classical physics. And from that emerged the view of the universe as a quantum wave function, a superposition of every possible state of every particle in the universe that extended the uncertainty principle to a macro level.

Yet even so, for another 20 years, Hawking clung to what he would eventually call a “God’s eye view” of cosmology, which assumed, Hertog writes, “that the mathematical laws of physics had some sort of existence that superseded the physical reality they governed.” It wasn’t until August 2002 that Hawking finally broke through the remaining grip of classical physics once and for all. “Time to stop playing God,” he told Hertog. “We need a new philosophy for cosmology.”

Over the course of two decades, the “no boundaries” hypothesis had revolutionized physics, leading to, among other things, a multitude of theories of the multiverse, all of which Hawking adamantly rejected. He had intuited all along that there was something wrong with those theories, but only now could he fully articulate the problem. “The universe as we observe it,” he told Hertog, “is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology.” But that has, Hawking realized, serious philosophical implications. “We are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. We and our theories are part of the universe we are describing.” As Hertog writes, in this view, “cosmology is laboratory science inside out — we are within the system, looking up and looking out.”

In one sense, we might say that Hawking was late to the game. Heisenberg had already pointed in this direction in Physics and Philosophy, and two decades later (and 23 years before Hawking) the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler had laid bare the philosophical implications of quantum theory:

We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron we have to shatter the plate glass; we have to reach in there …

The physicist, Wheeler pointed out,

must install his chosen measuring equipment. It is up to him to decide whether he shall measure position or momentum. To install the equipment to measure the one prevents and excludes his installing the equipment to measure the other. Moreover, the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterward be the same.

“To describe what has happened,” Wheeler concluded, “one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator.’ In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.”

Indeed, as early as the 1950’s and 1960’s some nonphysicists had taken note of, and expounded upon, the philosophical implications of a participatory universe, including C.S. Lewis’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend Owen Barfield (most famously in Saving the Appearances) and my mentor and friend John Lukacs, in Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past. Both had pointed out that we are not only part of the universe; the universe, as we experience and understand it, is inseparable from our human consciousness. It is this philosophical insight that Hawking imported back into cosmology when he noted to Hertog that “Our theories are never fully decoupled from us.”

If Heisenberg and Wheeler and Barfield and Lukacs and Hawking were right, Albert Einstein’s argument against quantum theory — that “Physics is an attempt to grasp reality as it is, independently of its being observed” — was wrong because it describes something that simply is not possible. As Niels Bohr had put it, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

For decades, cosmological theorizing had started at the Big Bang and moved forward (a “bottom-up” view that Hawking himself had previously embraced, including in his “no boundary” hypothesis). But the bottom-up view had led to the maddening confusion of multiverse theory: If the universe can be described as a quantum wave function in which every possible outcome exists simultaneously until an act of observation causes a branching and the creation of another effectively infinite set of multiverses, how are we ever to find the universe that we actually inhabit?

Recognizing now that “The universe as we observe it is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology,” Hawking proposed a “top-down” view that moves backward in time from what we currently observe. As novel as this view was in cosmology, it is not, Hertog notes, without precedent in science: This is how evolutionary history is determined in the biological sciences.

But as we move backward in time, history becomes in some fundamental sense contingent on us. As Hawking told Hertog, “The history of the universe depends on the questions you ask.” History, like our theories, is “never fully decoupled from us,” because it is, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past.” “Any kind of tangible past in top-down cosmology,” Hertog writes, “is always an observer’s past.” And thus, Hertog argues, “In a quantum universe — our universe — a tangible physical reality emerges from a wide horizon of possibilities by means of a continual process of questioning and observing.” “This observership, the interactive process at the heart of quantum theory that transforms what might be into what does happen, constantly draws the universe more firmly into existence.” Or, as Hertog sums up Hawking’s top-down view, “We create the universe as much as the universe creates us.”

The scientific revolution, it has often been said, removed man from the center of the universe. Five hundred years later, his top-down cosmology, Hawking realized, “put humankind back in the center.” Yet in doing so, it also puts us in our proper place, ontologically speaking. In adopting a God’s eye view of the universe, mankind had attempted to usurp the place of our Creator, to subordinate Him to the grand unified theory we were convinced that we would one day create. Restored to our proper place, we can see ourselves as Saint Augustine saw us: as co-creators with God of the universe He created for us.

Stephen Hawking never became a Christian, but after he proposed his top-down cosmology, he took Thomas Hertog to a production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at the Royal Opera House to mark, as he told Hertog, “the end of my battles with God.” And 35 years after he unveiled his “no boundary” hypothesis at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he returned to the Vatican to announce that “The universe may have a boundary after all.” In November 2016, Hertog writes, “there were no more battles with God or the pope to be fought. Quite on the contrary, Stephen found a strong and moving resonance with Pope Francis in their shared goal of protecting our common home in the cosmos for the benefit of humanity today and tomorrow.”

The death of philosophy, it appears, has been greatly exaggerated. And even the most prominent scientist of recent decades may have found a place for a creator, beyond mankind’s laws of space and time.

First delivered as a paper to the Cosmopolitan Club of Huntington County, Indiana, on October 17, 2023.

Credo: Or, A Tree Is a Tree Because of You and Me

“A man may swear to tell the truth, but it is not in his power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth.”

— Pierre Duhem

The author of these words, the late 19th and early 20th century physicist and philosopher Pierre Duhem, is not as well known today as Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, but in both his physics and his philosophical thought, Duhem anticipated Heisenberg. While I began my college studies as a physics major, I came to know the work of both men through my graduate studies in political theory, where I encountered the writings of the Catholic historian John Lukacs, and later the man himself.

John passed away three years ago this month at the age of 95. He was best known for his work on the Second World War, including profiles of Hitler and of Churchill and detailed histories of brief turning points in the war that will long remain standard works. I didn’t come to know him through those works, however, but through books that have never received the attention that they should have, and that are already becoming harder to find: The Passing of the Modern Age; Confessions of an Original Sinner, his first memoir (or more precisely, as he called it, “auto-history”); and his masterwork, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past, the third edition of which owes its publication to a phone call I made in 1992 to the father of modern American conservatism, Russell Kirk. In those days before the World Wide Web, I scoured countless used book stores but could not find a copy of the first or second edition to purchase. Dr. Kirk, whom I had met three years before and who would pass away just two years later, was the general editor of a line of conservative classics published by Transaction Press. Would he be interested in bringing out a new edition of a work that he, too, considered one of the most important of the 20th century? He would indeed, and the rest, as they say, is history (no pun intended).

But this paper is not about me, except in the sense that everything we write or say or do is inevitably bound to the writer or the speaker or the doer as much as it is to the subject of his writing or speaking or action. The distinction between subject and object, between mind and matter, between thought and extension that Descartes so firmly implanted in the philosophical presuppositions of Western man began to crumble in the last years of the 19th century, and has since been completely demolished through the work of Duhem and Heisenberg and Lukacs and Ortega y Gasset and, perhaps most importantly, Owen Barfield.

And yet the rubble of Cartesianism continues to clutter our minds and to keep us from being conscious at all times that we see the world not as an external observer but from the inside out. In the language of Barfield, an accomplished linguist and philosopher and close friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, our knowledge is participatory. Heisenberg demonstrated that the act of our observation of a subatomic particle changes the state of that particle, but something similar happens every waking moment of our lives. The world in which we are participants is one that we constantly construct through the activity of our imagination.

This is not to say that everything which we perceive as external to us has no reality outside of our consciousness. In his greatest work, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Barfield referred to that reality as the “unrepresented.” Because our imagination is constantly engaged in actively transforming the unrepresented into meaningful representations without our conscious recognition of that activity, we perceive a world fully formed through our imaginative conception of it. In other words, we don’t consciously know the unrepresented except through those representations—representations that are the product of our mental activity, both personal and communal (through the medium of language). But that means that the represented—the world as we know it—is in every meaningful way something that each of us has helped bring into existence.

To put it in terms that could be taken from a child’s book of rhymes: A tree is a tree because of you and me. To the bird that builds a nest in its branches or the grubs that wriggle through its roots, the unrepresented reality that we conceive as a tree is something rather different. In a lecture on “Evolution” collected in his book History, Guilt and Habit, Barfield quotes from “Our ‘Polar Partnership’ with the World Around Us,” a 1977 Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, in which Edwin H. Land, cofounder of the Polaroid Corporation, noted that

In many ways the tree certainly does not exist in the physical sense without the observer. The tree does not exist for radio waves of a certain wavelength, nor does it exist for neutrinos. The tree exists as part and parcel of the interaction between that part of the cosmos and our part of the cosmos, namely the “We” that has evolved over many centuries to be a partner with the tree.

Or to put it another way (again, quoting Land), “There really is no outside world and no inside world; there is just one world.” For each of us, the totality of our representation at any moment comprises that world.

I would expect, then, that when I go to sleep, the material world would continue to exist (as it obviously does), but my participation in it would change. And indeed, while we may not always realize we are dreaming while we are dreaming, we very quickly recognize that we were dreaming once we awake, because in our dreams, our imagination is not transforming the unrepresented into representations but transforming memories of representations into new representations and, in the process, often becoming unmoored from the reality of the unrepresented. In our dreams, we, like the neutrino, may be able to fly through a tree, because in our dreamscape both that tree and our body are representations of representations, and not of the unrepresented. But having flown through a tree in a dream, should we try to do so in our waking life, we are most likely to end up with a knot on our head.

If I haven’t yet caused you to wish that my delivery of this paper were a dream from which you could awake, you may be starting to formulate objections to this post-Cartesian understanding of reality. Chief among them, I suspect — because it was the objection with which I struggled for some time — is the thought that the philosophical arguments advanced by Barfield, Lukacs, Ortega, and Heisenberg represent a sort of relativism that threatens to shatter the very concept of truth. If, as I said a little while ago, for each of us the totality of our representation of the unrepresented at any moment comprises our world, wouldn’t that mean that each of us is living in at least a slightly different world?

Yes, and not just in the sense that my imaginative vision of this room and this gathering is different from yours because you’re sitting over there looking at me, and I’m sitting over here looking at you. Our imaginations are colored and shaped by our histories, both personal and communal. That Brooks has spent decades of his life with Barb means that he will understand the words that I am saying somewhat differently than he would have if he had remained a bachelor. That Amy has been married to me for 30 years means that she will understand these words somewhat differently from Barb, even though she and Barb are both hearing them tonight for the first time.

Man doesn’t have a nature, he has a history, John Lukacs often wrote; though to square those words with his Catholic faith and mine, I might say that man’s nature is his history. The difference between Adam’s nature before he took a bite out of the apple and his nature immediately afterward is the history of his (original) sin.

Even when we try to see the world through the eyes of others, we cannot set our history aside. Still, our shared language and our shared history together shape our personal imaginations in powerful ways, so that my representation and yours are close enough that we can easily fall back unthinkingly into believing that Descartes was right. In fact, were that not true, Cartesian dualism could never have taken the firm hold that it did for four centuries upon the Western mind.

As Catholics, John Lukacs and I understand that truth is not relative; all truth belongs to the Truth; and the Truth is a Person. But because the Truth is a Person, and we are people, too, our relation to the Truth (and thus to all truth) is personal. And precisely because we are not God, everything that is personal for us is, by definition, limited—at least until such time as, like John the Evangelist, we see “a new heaven and a new earth,” for “The former heaven and the former earth had passed away” (Rev 21:1).

And that brings us back to Pierre Duhem, and the quotation with which I began this paper. I set out to tell the truth, even though it is not in my power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth. And I firmly believe that this is the truth: In moving beyond the error of Descartes, in recognizing that the world in which we live is not wholly external to us but is one that each of us has helped bring into existence, and in humbly acknowledging that it is not in our power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth, we do not deny the reality of truth but prepare ourselves to enter into a more personal relationship with the truth—and ultimately with the Person Who is Truth Himself.

First delivered as a paper to the Cosmopolitan Club of Huntington County, Indiana, on May 24, 2022. The text has been slightly modified from the version delivered.

Christ and History

In theory, it seems like a good idea.  The corpus of historian John Lukacs’s work is so rich and has grown so large that those who have just discovered it may be uncertain where to start.  His magnum opus, Historical Consciousness, alone has gone through three editions, all of which are worth reading as separate works.  Combine that with the regrettable condition that some of his more accessible works—Outgrowing Democracy and The Passing of the Modern Age, for instance—are out of print (and used copies are very hard to find), and the need for a compact introduction to Lukacs’s thought seems obvious.  Unfortunately, for all of its virtues, At the End of an Age is not that book.

Lukacs would be the first to admit—or, rather, insist—that theory and reality do not always mesh.  Ideas develop in an historical context, but they are also shaped by the actions of men as much as (indeed, perhaps more so than) they shape those actions.  As Lukacs is fond of saying, writing of the half-truths of historian E.H. Carr’s analysis, “the important question is ‘What is Carr driving at?’ and not ‘What is the make of this Carr?’”  But that is precisely why, in order to understand an historian’s work, it is essential to have some knowledge of the historian.  Lukacs is correct when he writes that

The recognition that different persons see the past (and also the present) differently, and that thus every historian is different, does not mean that because he is the product of his past he cannot do otherwise.

To claim that would be to deny free will.  But to understand the choices that an historian makes—and, more importantly, his purposes (not his motives, which are deterministic) in making them—we cannot view his work as something separate from—abstracted from—his life.

A case in point: The Passing of the Modern Age, a thin, prophetic volume that is still among my favorite of Lukacs’s works, is, as Lukacs describes it in Confessions of an Original Sinner, “a summation of the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age.”  I read it first in 1990, before reading Confessions, and it profoundly influenced the choices I made as I began my graduate studies that year.  Still, I approached The Passing of the Modern Age somewhat differently when I reread it a year or two later, having read Confessions in the meantime.  Knowing that The Passing of the Modern Age was published on November 15, 1970, the day that Lukacs’s first wife died, and recognizing the extent to which her passing was bound up in his thought with “the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age,” helps reveal additional nuances and complexities in the work and, of course, in the underlying thoughts that the text expresses.  Similarly, knowing that the structure of the volume is shaped by a hierarchy of historical factors, “applicable, by and large, to the history of modern nations,” that Lukacs had sketched out in Historical Consciousness, and being familiar with that hierarchy from reading the latter work, is bound to influence the reader’s appreciation of The Passing of the Modern Age.  None of that distracts from the reader’s free will or his ability to apply (and develop, and distort) Lukacs’s ideas as he sees fit.  However, just as our appreciation of a novel changes as we grow older (and, indeed, the novel’s meaning for us changes as well), so, too, our understanding of an historian’s work changes as, broadly, we change and, particularly, as our understanding of the historian’s purposes change.

Which brings us back to At the End of an Age.  This really is two books, roughly divided into the first two chapters (“At the End of an Age” and “The Presence of Historical Thinking”) and the last two chapters (“An Illustration” and “At the Center of the Universe”), with the middle chapter (“The Question of Scientific Knowledge”) acting as a bridge.  In the first “book,” Lukacs provides a sketch of the evolution of his own thought and presents a condensation of themes developed in Historical Consciousness and elsewhere.  The reader familiar with Lukacs’s work is likely to find these chapters somewhat repetitive.  Lukacs revisits many examples from previous works (such as the remarks about E.H. Carr quoted above), often even employing very similar phrasing.  All of that would be understandable (and longtime readers could skip ahead) if these chapters provided a quick introduction for those unfamiliar with Lukacs’s thought.  For that purpose, however, these chapters are somewhat too distilled.  The new reader is likely to be left (incorrectly) with a sense of superficiality.  At best, he may be hungry for a more detailed treatment, but then he is quickly thrust into the second “book,” which (it seems to me) can be read most profitably only after having digested Historical Consciousness, because the illustration provided in Chapter Four, and the final philosophical ruminations about man’s position at the center of the universe in Chapter Five, are really an extension of the final chapter, “History and Physics,” of that earlier work.

Here, longtime readers of Lukacs will find what they have been thirsting for, as Lukacs’s continued investigations over the last 30 years have broken new ground.  He has taken the scientific theories of theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and woven them together with his own expansion of linguist Owen Barfield’s insights into the increasing intrusion of man’s consciousness into the material world.  The result is an advance in how we think about thinking itself.  And that advance is not merely historical or philosophical but religious.  While Lukacs is not exactly one to wear his Christianity on his sleeve, the Christian implications of his work (and Barfield’s before him, particularly the latter’s Saving the Appearances) are obvious.  As I have argued elsewhere, the development of historical consciousness itself is inextricably bound up with the Incarnation of Christ, the meeting of Divine and human, the point at which the Timeless intersects His timebound Creation.  “And now—especially, but perhaps not exclusively for Christians—I must argue,” Lukacs writes,

for the recognition of our central situation not only in space but also in time. In sum, that the coming of Christ to this earth may have been? no, that it was, the central event of the universe; that the greatest, the most consequential event in the entire universe has occurred here, on this earth.

That God became a man and walked this earth demonstrates the centrality of history to man’s nature—and it should give pause to post-Christian “Christians” (whether evangelical, fundamentalist, mainline Protestant, or even neo-Thomist) whose vision of Christ has degenerated into an ahistorical set of platitudes and “universal” principles.  As Lukacs writes,

All of us have known many non-Christians who have acted in Christian ways, thus being animae naturaliter cristianae; and we also know many sincerely believing Christians whose expressions may show alarmingly non-Christian thoughts in their minds. . . . [W]hat we think we believe is not always what we really believe. Our thinking—our ideas—will necessarily have their consequences. Some of our beliefs ought to.

By becoming a man, Christ redeemed history; in our post-Christian age, perhaps history—for some, at least—can redeem man, by leading him back to Christ.  That may not have John Lukacs’s purpose in writing At the End of an Age; it might, however, be one result.

[At the End of an Age, by John Lukacs (New Haven: Yale University Press) 230 pp., $22.95]

First published in the August 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Power to the People!

The world is broken.

There was a time when those words would have been considered unremarkable—a truism, even.  Of course the world is broken: Our first parents, Adam and Eve, broke it.  They did so by their sin.  They had everything that any man or woman could ever reasonably want: a paradise to live in, all the food they would ever need, the ultimate healthcare plan (that is, no need for one), human companionship and the company of animals, leisure.  The God Who had given them life had blessed them and given them a mission, too: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”  Their leisure was meant to be the basis of a true culture.  They had no need of faith, as Hebrews 11 defines it: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  They could see everything they needed to see—not through a glass darkly, as we do now, but face to face.  They walked with God.  Had they kept to their mission, had they used their leisure properly, their children would have walked with God, too.

But they didn’t keep to their mission.  They didn’t use their leisure properly.  They broke the world.  And their children kept on breaking and breaking and breaking, starting with Cain, and continuing down to this very day.

Leo Strauss said that Eve was the first philosopher, because she valued the pursuit of knowledge above “tradition”—that is, above her love for, and her duty to, the God Who had created her.  Now, I do not agree with the Straussian conception of philosophy as atheism, of Athens as the enemy of Jerusalem.  Strauss’s conception is a subversion of the classical and Christian conception of philosophy as the love of the good, the true, and the beautiful; and of theology not as the enemy of philosophy but as the completion of it.  But I do think there’s a lesson in political theory to be learned by analogy in the story of the Fall.  Rather than seeing Eve as the first philosopher, I see the serpent as the first politician.  We might even say he’s the first populist politician.  While Christ tells Pilate that he would have no power over Him were that power not given to him by God above, and Saint Paul tells us that all true authority—including political authority—comes from God, the serpent spins a different story to Eve.  It’s a tale of a corrupt elite—God Himself—ruling capriciously over His creation, making laws and even environmental regulations (do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!) designed to keep Adam and Eve from rising up and taking full advantage of their rightful place at the top of the order of creation.  “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  All of that flowery language can be summed up in modern terms in a phrase that would fit in a tweet, with 120 characters left over for a string of hashtags and a clenched-fist emoji: “Power to the People!”

And yet, when Eve fell for the rhetoric of the serpent, and Adam, like a dutiful husband, followed suit, they didn’t become as gods.  Their power didn’t increase; worse yet, they forfeited much of the authority that God had given them, as the pinnacle of His Creation, on the sixth day.  They broke the world, and they broke themselves.  They had been meant to live forever; now, they would grow old, and frail, and die as a result of their sin.

The serpent had accused God of lying, of trying to keep the man down, but when Adam and Eve fell, the serpent was revealed as the liar.  For his lie, the serpent was punished, but like so many politicians, he was never much more than an empty snakeskin.  Only one creature emerged from the Garden of Eden more powerful than he had been when he entered it: Satan was now the ruler of this world, and his rule would continue unchallenged and unbroken until Christ conquered death by death.  But even in the wake of Christ’s Resurrection—indeed, even 2,000 years later—the Devil has made it clear that he has no intention of giving up power without a fight.

And that should come as no surprise.  First, because Satan is Satan.  Unlike Adam and Eve, when Satan fell, he fell completely; there was no good left in him, no matter what such diverse sources as Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Book of Mormon and NBC’s Lucifer would like you to believe.  And second, because the nature of Power (with a capital P), as opposed to authority (with a lower-case a), is such that those who have it always want more of it, as such diverse men as Lord Acton and Bertrand de Jouvenal and J.R.R. Tolkien understood.

Which brings us to the obvious question, back here in the “real world” (that is, the world broken by sin): Who, in this little tale, is Satan, exactly?  Is he Barack Obama or Donald Trump?  Hillary Clinton or Steve Bannon?  Is he a Democrat or a Republican?  A liberal or a conservative?  A nationalist or a socialist?

The answer, as Aaron Wolf reminded us in his column for the April 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture (“K Is for Vendetta”), is none of the above.  The Devil is the devil; and Obama and Trump, and Clinton and Bannon, and all of the Democrats and all of the Republicans, and all of the liberals and all of the conservatives, and even all of the nationalists and all of the socialists, are just men and women.  They aren’t demons, devoid of any good; but like Adam and Eve—because of Adam and Eve—they are all fallen creatures.  Like us, they are broken.  And they are living broken lives in a broken world.

But that means that all of these men and women have something in common with Adam and Eve, and with Satan, too: the desire to be as gods.  And in those moments when we set aside the constant distractions of the modern world and are brutally honest with ourselves, when we pause to look into our own hearts, we know that the same desire resides there.  And that desire manifests itself in a lust for power.

Indeed, the lust for power is so much a part of fallen man that Satan himself has found it useful, and not just in attempting to lead us astray.  Most Christians today assume that, when Satan was tempting Jesus in the desert, he knew exactly Who and what Jesus was, and that his sole purpose in putting Jesus to the test was to get the new Adam to fall, as he had the old Adam.  But many of the Fathers of the Church read this text differently: When Satan addressed Jesus, saying, “If thou be the Son of God,” he was, those Fathers said, uncertain.  The trial was the Devil’s attempt to determine whether Jesus was indeed Who Satan suspected He was.  Read in that manner, Luke’s account of the trial takes on a different light:

And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

That Jesus was able to resist the temptation of unlimited worldly power was not only a reversal of Adam’s sin but the proof the Devil needed that Jesus, unlike all other children of Adam, was not fallen: He was indeed the Son of God.  Only an unbroken man could resist Satan’s offer of unlimited power on this earth.

The term Deep State has recently begun to pop up in mainstream political reporting.  Like fake news, it has different meanings, depending on who uses it.  It seems to have originated in Turkey; but here in the United States, it was first used by the radical left as shorthand for a conspiracy theory that argued that popular government was a sham; a cabal of unelected intelligence officials and longtime military men, not the president and Congress, were really calling the shots (quite literally, it was alleged, in the case of the assassination of JFK), using the immense power of the U.S. government for their nefarious purposes.

Over time, the term was adopted by more mainstream political analysts to signify something less ominous, though still troubling to those who prefer limited government and a representative democracy—what we used to call a republic.  In this view, the Deep State was the governmental wing of what James Burnham called the “Managerial Revolution.”  The Deep State wasn’t actively nefarious; it was composed of unelected bureaucrats, in both the executive and legislative branches, who technically answered to elected officials, but were concerned, in a rather mundane way, with maintaining and expanding the power of their various agencies.

Now the term has come full-circle, and once again is being used to signify a cabal of unelected intelligence officials (though perhaps no longer of military men) who are actively working to undermine popular government.  The twist is that the Deep State is no longer a left-wing conspiracy theory, but a right-wing one.

I have never believed in conspiracy theories of any kind, not because I don’t believe that human beings attempt to engage in conspiracies—any father of more than one child has witnessed conspiracies unfolding in his own household—but because those who engage in conspiracies are, in the end, people just like us.  By definition, they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and no amount of power or technical expertise can change that fact.  They are incapable of the degree of control that every conspiracy theory assumes they must have.  They act on incomplete knowledge; they make mistakes.  They are prideful and capricious and impulsive.  They are, in a word, broken, just like we are.

But since that brokenness manifests itself in all of us in a lust for power, the more mainstream, non-conspiracy-theory use of the term Deep State simply describes the effects of fallen human nature in our modern bureaucratic age.  Those who have power desire to maintain it, and to expand it when they can.  And, as Lord Acton reminds us, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Acton said a lot of other things about power, but most of them are not as well known.  For instance: “Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance”; “Bureaucracy is undoubtedly the weapon and sign of a despotic government, inasmuch as it gives whatever government it serves, despotic power”; and “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”  Acton was a man who seldom hedged his judgments, but in his various discussions of power, there was never a need to do so.

Tolkien was a rather different man from Lord Acton, but he shared with Acton the Catholic understanding of Original Sin, of the brokenness of man and the world, and of the corruption of morality that goes hand in hand with the lust for, and concentration of, power.  There are many layers to The Lord of the Rings, but at its center lies a cautionary tale of the danger of Power and the way in which Power, left unchecked, always becomes more concentrated and leads not to the restoration of culture and the world, but to its destruction.

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”  Taken by itself, the line engraved on the One Ring, forged in the fires of Mordor by Sauron, is easy to misinterpret.  The pronoun them seems to refer to all of the creatures of Middle Earth—the men, the elves, the dwarves, the hobbits—and on one level, it does.  But that line is taken from a longer verse:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all,

One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

The pronoun them refers first to the 19 other rings, collectively known as the Rings of Power.  The One Ring, the most powerful of them all, was meant to draw all of the other Rings of Power to itself, to centralize power in the hands of the tyrant Sauron, who had set himself up as ruler of Middle Earth, as Satan rules our world.  Tolkien shows us the horrifying effect that the nine Rings of Power which were given to men had on those who wore them; they were so corrupted that they became the Nazgûl, the Ring Wraiths.  Sauron promised “Power to the People,” but like Satan, only Sauron gained more power when the men put on the rings.

Tolkien was always adamant that The Lord of the Rings was not to be read as an allegory, but taken on its own terms; yet he did address the question of power in our world, and the corruption that accompanies it, in a discussion of the enigmatic character of Tom Bombadil.  Unlike all of the others who wore the One Ring (or even spent time in close proximity to it, in the case of Boromir), Tom Bombadil was not corrupted by it; in fact, the One Ring had no effect on him whatsoever—it did not make him invisible, and even when Frodo was wearing the One Ring and was invisible to everyone else, Tom Bombadil could see him.  Tolkien explained this mystery thusly:

The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken “a vow of poverty,” renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless . . .

Tolkien goes on to describe this “vow of poverty” as “a natural pacifist view,” but to those familiar with Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, “renounc[ing] control, and tak[ing] your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing” sounds a lot like the classical and Christian conception of philosophy as the contemplation of goodness, beauty, and truth.

Whether we call it pacifism or philosophy, how Tom Bombadil can renounce the lust for power is, Tolkien admits, an intentional enigma.  Even the elves, angelic creatures that they are, avoided the fate of the men who became Ring Wraiths only by refusing to wear their three Rings of Power, and hiding them to avoid the temptation.  And if others were capable of imitating Bombadil and gaining an immunity to the corruption of power, that could not, Tolkien indicates, be the basis for a lasting, desirable political order: “Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive.  Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”

In other words, men must take other measures if they desire to resist the centralization of power and the corruption that inevitably accompanies it.  If Power becomes too concentrated, something like the War of the Ring may be the only way to destroy it, but victory in such a struggle always comes at the expense of great loss, as Frodo discovers.  The best defense—the only defense—against the inevitable corruption that flows from the concentration of power is to prevent the concentration of power in the first place.

Lord Acton understood this; Tolkien did as well.  So did the advocates of republicanism, both classical and modern, including the Framers of the U.S. Constitution.  So did the Twelve Southerners who wrote I’ll Take My Stand, and G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and the Distributists who joined the Agrarians in Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, the lesser-known but just as important sequel to I’ll Take My Stand.  So, too, did Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum novarum, and Pope Pius XI, in Quadragesimo anno, and even John Paul II in Centesimus annus, despite the best attempts by certain partisans of power to distort that encyclical into an endorsement of a centralized “democratic capitalism.”

All of these men had the same fundamental insight, expressed with characteristic pithiness by Lord Acton: “Liberty consists in the division of power.  Absolutism, in concentration of power.”  Or, to look at it from a different direction: “It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.”

Republicanism, federalism, decentralism, distributism, agrarianism, subsidiarity—the fundamental insight of each of these political theories is that the only way to preserve liberty, confine politics to its proper sphere, and provide a world in which a true culture and morality can flourish is to prevent the inordinate concentration of power.  One cannot be a classical republican and believe that an emperor or a tyrant is fine, so long as he professes to believe in classical republican principles; one cannot be a federalist and believe that it is all right to tip the balance of power between the states and the national government in favor of the national government because “our” party now controls the latter.  One cannot espouse the principle of subsidiarity while turning it on its head, and insisting that the proper flow of authority is downward from a central government, rather than outward from the family.

And yet, as power becomes more concentrated over time, and the corruption of morality that accompanies the centralization of power increases, the temptation to use that power for our own purposes increases as well.  Rather than reasserting the proper authority of the family, of the Church, of local and state governments, and of a thousand other intermediary institutions, we start thinking about the good that we could do, if only the One Ring were to pass to us.  Why put ourselves through the monumental effort required to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, in which it was forged, when we are certain that we, alone among all men, are immune to its corrupting force?

Why, indeed?  Because, as Lord Acton writes, “Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad.”  Or, in the words of the principle that has guided our work at Chronicles for the last 40 years, “There are no political solutions to cultural problems.”

At the very beginning of the American republic, another man expressed this reality with the clarity of a prophet.  Edmund Burke had supported the American Revolution, and he had high hopes that the federalist system enshrined in our Constitution would diffuse power, and thus preserve liberty.  But Burke was a Christian, and he understood that we are broken, and he knew that the ultimate battle lies not in the halls of Congress or in Parliament, but in the souls of men:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites . . . Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Their passions: such as the pride which cries out that others may be broken, but we are not; and the rage against external corruption that all too often is no more than a fig leaf masking our own moral nakedness.  But pride and rage are revolutionary impulses, not conservative (much less traditional) ones: As Satan did in the Garden of Eden, these passions promise “Power to the People!” but lead only to slavery.

But the converse, as Burke saw so clearly, is true: When we give up the sin of pride and embrace the virtue of humility, we break the chains we have wrapped around our own souls and can build a culture that will sustain true liberty.  Humility is not simply a Christian virtue; it is, as John Lukacs writes, “a recognition of the inevitable limitations of mankind.”  The world is broken; we are broken; and the first step in rebuilding anything is realizing that we cannot rebuild everything, no matter how much power we arrogate to ourselves.

That is why the real division today is not between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, nationalists and socialists; it is, rather, what it has always been: between the partisans of power who work endlessly for its centralization, and those who realize that true political, economic, and even moral freedom in a broken world requires the diffusion of power and the reassertion of proper authority at every level, starting with our control over our passions and the restoration of the family as the fundamental unit of culture and society.  Charmed by the snake, we have tried to become as gods; we have cried “Power to the People!” while forging the very chains that keep us in bondage.

The centralization of power has gone hand in hand with the decline of Christian belief, each fueling the other in an unbroken cycle of death and destruction.  Yet as Christians, we know that the restoration of our broken world began with the ultimate act of humility, the triumph of Powerlessness over Power, in the death of Christ on the Cross.  In our baptismal vows, we reject the empty promises of Satan, because we know that God is faithful, and He has promised true “Power to the People!”—the power of His grace, offered freely to the people of God, if only we will humble ourselves enough to admit that we need it.

If we desire any kind of freedom in our life on this earth—moral, cultural, economic, political—we have to fight to prevent the centralization of power.  Struggle is our lot in life; that die was cast long ago, by Adam and Eve in the Garden.  The world is broken.

But not forever.       

First published in the May 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.