On the Proposal That the Culture Is Not Collapsing, It Is Gone

 When Carl Trueman, professor of biblical studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, writes that

evangelical elites will prove unreliable and compromised as the cultural revolution rolls on,

Carl R. Trueman, “David French and the Future of Orthodox Protestantism,” First Things (25 November 2022)

we might for once pause to ask, at what stage is this on-rolling revolution, at present? Is this a thing that just goes on and on and on, or do we mean by revolution something that could succeed, since it has an objective to succeed at (like the American and Russian revolutions)?

I have the impression that we believe our culture, decade in and decade out, is being systematically wrecked without ever being destroyed, as the destruction simply continues – which conjures up the odd picture of an indestructible culture under permanent threat.

I think we should take our language seriously and ask what a ‘cultural revolution’ actually is. Presumably, it is the ‘overthrow of a culture’, but what is that? Can this be accomplished; has it ever happened? I propose that it can and it has. A culture is overthrown when it is no longer able to function, to do what it is for.

Culture is indeed for something: it cultivates; it brings to fruition a ‘people’ whose behaviour perpetuates certain goods, as these people both wish to do this and know how it is done. In fact this dedication and this culture is what forms that people, human beings who have elected to sustain, in their society, specific goods achieved in specific ways, a ‘human nourishment’ that they understand can be harvested only by passing these practices (and the commitments that bind people to them) on to new generations. These goods and ideals and these ways of perpetuating and sustaining them define this people.

We should also take seriously the hypothesis that our culture is actually in ruins: it is important to do so, as, should this be the case, should the revolution have succeeded, the complexion of our situation will be vastly different than we have supposed. That hardly anyone ever makes this claim tells us virtually nothing if that is a verdict innocent of attention to the actual evidence, the evidence as to what a functional culture is. We appear to be oblivious, however, not just to that question but even to the question of what the ‘cultural revolutionaries’ want and whether they might get or have got it.  

I propose to do here – in a set of posts and in the fashion that I can – what it appears we truly must do at some point:

not just reference the ongoing cultural revolution but assess the condition of that specific thing – ‘our culture’ – whose fate we profess to be so concerned about in decrying the ‘revolution’.

I will do what I can, at least, to take the task on and answer the questions that accord the most attention to its fate.

To anticipate, on the evidence that I have seen (and will present) I will propose that ‘our culture’ has already been demolished: the culture we persist in calling endangered lies in ruins beneath our feet, and if it is truly our concern to keep it, then all the spotlights now turn on us: we are the protagonists of the drama, not the revolutionaries.

(All of our shouting about their destruction has been a smokescreen obscuring our own lack of concern to keep and pass on what defines our people.

And to say that is to imply that this destruction that we believe has begun in our lifetime, or with postmodernism, or in the ’60s began long before us and shaped us as people who would not ‘tradition’ – the word comes from the Latin verb tradere, to transmit – the tradition they professed to venerate.)

When I say that our culture is in ruins I do not mean that everything ours is razed (that is never necessary) but that the tipping point in the demolition of Western culture was reached some time ago.

(A footnote: I am accepting from common usage the term ‘our culture’, and will leave for later discussion the separate matter of who, in this expression, ‘we’ are – but both are terms that beg for clarification.

What exactly is this culture? I am happy to go along with its usual specification as ‘Western culture’ but this does not take us very much further. If I am going to call ‘our culture’ gone I will have to do more than that to say what we have lost. In the mean time these labels are as good as any, but they are just place-holders for a content that is not yet, but must be, filled in.)

My suggestion, then, is both that our culture is gone (and another has replaced it) and that we do not know this. It is not that we have glimpsed the reality and cannot face it but that we cannot even see it. We know there is a crisis (have heard the disturbing crash) but turn our heads in the wrong direction. We imagine that things are falling apart when the thing that we should cherish – the thing actually placed in conservative hands to be conserved – is rubble we are crunching underfoot.

The literal ruins of a building are heaps of masonry; the literal ruins of a culture are … – for all our preoccupation with the decay of Western civilization we do not even know how to complete this sentence.

Part 2 on 1 January 2023