On the Proposal That the Culture Is Not Collapsing, It Is Gone | Part 4

To judge from the way we discuss our troubles, it seems never to enter the mind of a person lamenting the collapse of tradition that the ‘cultural revolution’ he alludes to could be an actual revolution, and succeed. We seem not so much reluctant but unequipped to ask whether, or how, the demise of our culture could be accomplished. It would seem that we think this categorically impossible. But surely the way in which a new culture could triumph and take charge is quite clear in at least a general way.

This would be achieved if, in the domain in which culture operates (in the institutions and ways that make up a culture), there is a change of power, or a change of control, whereby the activity in this domain ceases to be governed by the thinking and categories of the tradition. Should it happen that a new map of the stars by which to navigate, showing entirely different stars, is used to govern people’s movements in this domain, the course charted by life would be entirely altered.

Every revolution has as its motivation the overthrow of a regime, and in a cultural revolution the ‘regime’ is the reign of a culture. We may think of this reign as the perpetuation of inherited ways, but in a culture worth maintaining these ways have a rationale. A people may behave in this way just by inheritance, not consciously on a journey to anywhere, but their adopted ways, themselves, have an orientation to ends. So the reign of a culture is in fact the orientation of the people to these ends: the successful navigation of the ocean of life, away from and to something.

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How do opponents of a culture, of some particular conception of life, overthrow it? By establishing new ends, certainly, but if all that is done is to set up rival points of reference that replace the old ones – new stars we are to consider in living our lives, marked out for any reason at all, even irrespective of ends – the regime, the old reign, could well come to an end if this becomes the map we employ. 

In a successful cultural revolution, then, the rival culture will first take control of the pivotal institutions of ‘our culture’ (a thing that sounds easier said than done).

Second, the old culture will be effectively shut down – partly by the action just noted, but it will also be necessary to deal with those who were untouched by that assault, who are still referencing the old charts. Every revolution that succeeds ends the regime it rose (in its necessary hatred) to overthrow. It does not dream of shared power but strips the despised culture of all effective influence – for instance, by criminalizing the reactionaries’ resistance to the new cultural ways, and by filling the cultural institutions ever more fully with adherents loyal to itself, effective agents of the new purposes.

This will have a profoundly destabilizing, perhaps even crippling effect on the old culture. Stripped of its institutions – which are a people’s means of survival, of perpetuating themselves: of passing on its understanding of things, imparting its ideals to new generations – the very products of the old tradition, which are actual members of that culture, begin to dwindle, buried and eclipsed by the ever larger rival output.

And third, the new culture does not just roll out its own methods (delivering its own goods, forming its own people in its own world, its own ‘sphere of influence’); because it is now the only effective culture it functions brashly. It is this boldness that we are witnessing when, for instance, we are aghast at how the news media can so openly, we say, ‘flout the very principles of journalism’. What we see as a baffling disregard of the ideals that once elevated this profession (reporters in the ’70s were left-wing heroes) is, in fact, the altogether rational adherence to a new cultural logic:

First projects, then principles.”

Richard Rorty, “First Projects, Then Principles,” The Nation (22 December 1997)

First we pick our projects, our issues, our fights; our principles follow, as those that serve these ends. It is obvious that these principles will fluctuated (now they are essential, now they are a barrier).

What need is there for the member of the replacement culture to abide by journalistic practices locked into the constellations of the old regime, rigidly defined by its fixed stars? The new-age journalist has no need to appear consistent to people from a foreign culture.

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We find certain kinds of behaviour that we witness today baffling because we do not understand that we are in a foreign culture. We repeatedly feel shock because we continue to imagine that we are at home, in ‘our country’ (a conclusion settled on the fact that ‘It is our culture that built this country’). But it was not our culture that drew up the new map of the stars.

Even as the rival culture was coming into being and taking shape, it was not our culture, because the contours it was giving itself were antithetical to our own. At that time we may not have understood this. – This is a possibility very much worth noting, as it may be that a culture comes to know itself not just by looking in the mirror. It may come to understand just what its inheritance is by the fate of the indifferent son who bargains it away. It may see what it must do only after losing a great deal – like the Prodigal Son, only on the verge of its own death.  

Yet we appear quite unable to see the past fifty years, or century, or two-hundred years as the term of an historical overturn. Because we have no grasp of cultural history (are insensitive to its string of losses, this insensitivity being one of the habits taught by the rival culture) we wax nostalgic for two weeks ago – for “Positive World” (i.e., the 1980s), as if that were still our time.

Writer Aaron Renn reports,

My three worlds of evangelicalism article was the no. 1 most popular article in First Things magazine this year. A who’s who of people have engaged with my three worlds framework, which is becoming the way evangelicals understand this cultural moment.

Aaron Renn, Newsletter, Aaronrenn.substack.com (30 December 2022)

Renn’s thesis, that in much of America Christianity is now negatively perceived (seen as a bad force), is perfectly compatible with the hypothesis that I am proposing. This unwanted shift in its significance (from invisibility to problem) is hardly proof that a cultural revolution is occurring, but if it did this is just what would likely occur; the evidence Renn presents is worthy of our attention. But if ‘the way evangelicals understand this cultural moment’ is focused on how the opposition thinks – on how the barbarian thinks of the Athenian (!) – then a much more serious message is being missed. (What is the matter with this Athenian, whose life is so dependent on the attitude of the barbarian?)

This may be one of the key knots of our current trouble, a true thing that we have difficulty acknowledging: the verdict of the outsider on the culture of a people does not matter, not so long as the terms of that verdict remain foreign. Any objection that is fundamentally out of step with the culture, any principle that is contradicted by its own, is precisely irrelevant because ‘foreign’ (a word we seem to have lost the understanding of). 

(To give a perhaps oblique example, if Christianity is not a contradiction of Mohawk culture, is not foreign/antithetical to that culture, then Mohawks could become Christians without ceasing to be Mohawks. But a practice actually foreign to Mohawk culture would be rejected by a Mohawk – or, if embraced, would involve an injury to that person’s culture.)

The peoples of the ancient world were highly successful at being peoples and show us how this is done: the verdict of the Persian on the culture of the Greek does not matter, and vice versa. The Persian adheres to his culture unaffected by the Greek charge that Persian violence (the slaughter of all the males at Miletus) makes Persian culture low and animalistic.

(It is interesting that liberals appear quite conflicted on this point – they cannot meet the challenge and untie the knot. On the one hand they call this deafness to the outsider a sin, and it is vehemently condemned by the multiculturalist (who says diversity is our strength). But on the other hand the wisdom the liberal champions in the native has exactly this kind of untouchable integrity that makes the categories of ‘outsiders’ [read colonials] intrusions from another world.) 

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The way to understand this cultural moment (where ‘moment’ is a phase, a few decades in length) may involve registering a change of attitude toward Christianity. There is hardly anything wrong with giving Christianity such dedicated attention, but you cannot understand what is going on in this ‘negative’ attention unless you pull back and consider a wider moment in a broader expanse of time. That view  clearly puts before us more people than Christians.

“Roger Williams Bringing the Charter”

Does the ‘we’ implicit in ‘our culture’ not include Jews? Muslims? Even native peoples?

The 17th-C writer Roger Williams believed that the native Narragansett people, whom he had lived among long enough to learn their language and study their ways (which he wrote about in A Key Into the Language of America, 1643), showed greater character than the English in his own Massachusetts colony (theft, murder, gluttony, and adultery being largely absent among them). 

James Calvin Davis, On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 10–11 

What would have been the cause of this except the Narragansett culture, as yet uninfluenced by ‘the West’. (Williams and his associates went on to write a Constitution for a new colony in Rhode Island, one that might be home not only to Christians but even, as he had once written, to “paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian” members, to whom Christ had accorded the right to live unmolested by any governor, if they kept its laws (laws that did not govern their conscience). 

Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), excerpted in Davis, On Religious Liberty, 86

Relative to this, here are two closing remarks of correction.

It is obvious at this point that the one culture at issue in ‘our culture’ is not one culture at the micro level. The ‘melting pot’ language that is sometimes heard in talk about the culture that we fear to lose is the wrong image (in it all difference is destroyed in the crucible of ‘our culture’, which gives us one refined way of life purged of all variety). We realize now that we have not been talking about the whole of culture but about something else; the culture that is targeted by the cultural revolution is one at the macro level.

What we have been calling ‘our culture’ does not fix, in its map of the sky, the position of every star that people are to consider in living their lives. It is, in the manner of all maps, a selective map that marks the place of a set of absolute points of reference that unites different micro cultures as cultures of one kind. The thing we are losing we are losing together; it is not, say, a distinctly Reformed conception of culture, because it is not a Reformed conception of culture that is under attack, but something at a higher level of generality.

‘Our culture’ is a culture defined and limited by a set of beacons in the sky that different peoples navigate by (‘peoples’, likewise, can be given two definitions). What makes this an historical revolution is that all the conceptions faithful to this understanding of things (Reformed among them) are rejected together.

The second point is that advocates of the new culture have spread among us the conviction that the pole stars and constellations of indigenous American cultures (for example; their full claim takes in all non-Western peoples) are missing from the West’s map but are all found on the liberal’s map of the sky. Should anyone believe this? Is this true? 

It is not difficult to imagine that convincing a people to rethink their culture in light of your newly drawn map of reality would constitute a fine means of undermining that culture and moulding it into your own.

Part 5 coming on 4 January

Image of Roger Williams: The New York Public Library