Autumnal Reflections on America

Although Gnosticism has conditioned the American mind and dominated the American character, the United States itself, as we are once again discovering, is a historical, not a providential nation uniquely blessed of God. Nothing makes inevitable continued American prosperity or even American survival.

What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.  —Michel de Montaigne

“In heaven,” wrote John Donne, “it is always autumn.” I hope that Donne was right, although there is a good chance I shall never know. I do know that for me earthly autumns have long been pensive times of introspection and reassessment, a season in which to gather the intellectual harvest and to sample the fruits of my labors.

This fall I have been wondering what I would write if I knew the next essay would be my last. I have no wish to be maudlin. I don’t intend this essay to be my swan song. It’s possible, but I doubt it. Unlike Thomas Aquinas, I have not yet come to the end of my labors. All that I have written does not appear to me to be “as so much straw.” St. Thomas fell silent because he had only the words to say what he no longer wanted to say, what no longer needed to be said. He had experienced the ineffable. I have not. What I have to say is not beyond words. I still need them and I flatter myself that what I say may still matter, even if I have said some of it before.

In Defense of Pessimism

We live in an age of decline.

I am not a congenital pessimist, although I am often mistaken for, and dismissed as, one. I am in that long queue of thinkers, now extending at least to the early years of the last century and likely far beyond, who have written often about the decline of Western Civilization. In recent years, the idea that something is amiss has entered popular consciousness, though perhaps in frivolous, superficial, and misguided ways. Americans especially fear that the United States is losing its standing, wealth, power, and influence in the world. They have convinced themselves that all would be set right again if only these could be restored.

Yet, there is still resistance to the idea of decline. I am told variously that I fear change, that I lack courage, vision, or both, that I am apprehensive about the future, and that I long for a return to the simplicity of the past, as if the past could ever have been simple for those who resided there. I am informed that thinkers ancient and modern issued the same warning, and so my admonitions are not to be taken seriously. I ask rather that if, as alleged, thoughtful persons have been repeating themselves for hundreds and thousands of years, isn’t it time that we paid attention?

Those who argue that all is well and that the world is getting better refuse to think seriously about serious matters. The “optimists” have rhetoric on their side; they tell people what they want to hear. They endorse current assumptions and prejudices. Their evidence is commonly statistical and quantifiable, of the sort that would appeal to sociologists and political scientists, or experts in public relations and advertising. Such evidence, and the analysis that follows from it, is almost always superficial and easily manipulated. Such methods do not represent the advance of science but rather a response to the rise and expansion of democracy—the realization that the opinions of a large number and a wide variety of persons matter and must be taken into account. Those opinions must also be scrutinized, organized, arranged, and classified. Ironically, this requirement has led to dealing with persons not as individuals but in the aggregate. Individuals become the masses, and the masses, too, must be controlled.

A related but even greater irony is that the coming of democracy spawned the advent of bureaucracy. I am, of course, only echoing Tocqueville, who long ago understood these developments and lamented their consequences. Tocqueville anticipated the coming of democratic totalitarianism. Men living in such a world would be equal but restless, and indifferent to the welfare of all save themselves. Given to amusements that were dull, trivial, facile, and yet beguiling, they were likely to become pliant instruments in the hands of a benevolent but invincible state that managed every aspect of their lives. “Why,” Tocqueville, wondered, “should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?”

What seems to be missing from any optimistic outlook that anticipates continuing progress are questions about the nature and destiny of human beings. The real measure of progress and decline is the condition and purpose of life, the trajectory on which a society finds itself, an evaluation that it is beyond the capacity of statistical data to make. Only when we examine conditions and purposes can we discern whether a culture and a civilization are waning, or whether they are worth preserving at all.

The argument for optimism is also often uninformed by a sense of history. Those who have nurtured a historical consciousness recognize that novelty, which can appear to suggest vigor, does not always constitute fitness and health. The “good” is hard to identify and harder still to achieve. It is not subsumed automatically by the new. The temptation to circumvent this truth is ever-present, appealing and, at times, overwhelming. Those who refuse to succumb are rebuked for having failed to attain complacency. But only those capable of such discerning and critical judgments—and we have all but lost the ability, or perhaps it is better to say that we have lost the willingness, to make such distinctions–can safeguard culture and civilization.

In Praise of Skepticism

At the same time, belief in inevitable decline is as misleading and wrong as the mindless embrace of progress. There must be a third way between the assurance of inescapable decay and the affirmation of certain improvement. In the United States the critic who seeks that alternative is an outsider, cast beyond the pale for having the audacity to question ideas, values, and beliefs to which all must give evangelical consent. Either you are with us or you are against us. That attitude, which is nearly ubiquitous and intractable now, suggests the critic is somehow an intellectual and moral traitor, always and only to be jeered, mistrusted, and dismissed. But is it not our obligation to be skeptical, to refuse to accept assertions without examining the premises, evidence, and motives that underlie them? Is it not the right of a free people to ask questions? Is it not the responsibility of educated persons to know the right questions to ask?

Through study, habit, and reflection, a critic may have estranged himself from the other members of his society and culture. He is not thereby an alien, a foreigner, of the type that the Greeks called barbaroi—outsiders who spoke a different language. He has added knowledge and perspective to the intuitive understanding of the society and culture to which he belongs. He is at once preoccupied with, and aliened from, both. He is skeptical about what others take for granted. He is a dissident. A radical he may also be, though not an insurgent or a rebel. Instead, he is emotionally disfigured by his withdrawal. But only such isolation (intellectual and perhaps physical) offers the critic the freedom and the discipline needed to look upon the world with a cold eye and to diagnose the crisis at hand.

Nowadays such questions as “Whose culture and civilization are being defended and is it worth the effort?” are almost certain to be misunderstood and rejected, and the questioner likely vilified for asking. Yet, these are fair and fundamental inquiries. The extent to which we ignore or recoil from them is further evidence of our decadence. We lack the confidence to undertake a forthright exploration of the past, to examine the muddled and chaotic sources of our culture and civilization, to investigate its complexities, its inconsistencies, its contradictions, its crimes, and its sins. We long for, and go to great lengths to impose, a unitary vision that accommodates our present sensibilities. It is a Procrustean exercise.

By contrast, the alternate response is to denounce the past, the United States, and the West as racist, sexist, xenophobic, oppressive, and evil: another unitary and, if not a completely false, then certainly a misleading and one-dimensional, perspective. “The worst, the most corrupting of lies,” said Georges Bernanos, “are problems poorly stated.”

The truth is almost always multiple, except when it is not. We must learn to appreciate that duality, that multiplicity, which amounts to the recognition that in human thought and human affairs no one has a monopoly on truth. We must be as prepared to see the truth in our opponent’s views as readily as we must see the error and falsehood in our own. Skepticism properly understood breeds neither arrogance nor contempt, but humility and, I hope, a little compassion.

Truth & Falsehood

I have for many years relied on one of Napoleon’s aphorisms to guide my thought and conduct: “You commit yourself, and then–you see.” I do not know whether Napoleon intended the double meaning, but with his orderly and meticulous soldier’s mind, I suspect that he knew exactly what he was saying.

Given the state of the country and the world, I am at the moment more concerned with how and why we commit to a particular idea, belief, or course of action without knowing the basis of that commitment. Faith, I suppose, is the ultimate answer. In any event it is the answer that Kierkegaard gave, but only with “fear and trembling.” Kierkegaard knew that any commitment, any action, however well conceived and well intentioned, carried with it the unintended possibility of error, failure, and even sin. The consequences of being wrong are dire. Yet, we are all of us called upon to think, believe, and act.

Based on the best evidence you have, based on your most complete and honest understanding of the truth, “you commit yourself, and then—you see.” It is a mistake to think that we change our minds—that is, that we revise our ideas, beliefs, and conclusions—when we encounter new evidence that challenges or discredits them. People are in the habit of sticking to what they think, know, and believe even in the face of damning evidence to the contrary. Instead, we change our minds when we re-examine and reconfigure the evidence that has long been before our eyes. “. . . Then, you see.” It is another lesson in humility to know that even our best judgments and finest insights are contingent, partial, and incomplete. But they are all we have, and all that we shall ever have.

When I was an undergraduate I wrote a senior thesis for my minor in philosophy on Plato’s Theatetus. I was proud of it. I thought I had been clever, perhaps even original. My professor was not as favorably disposed. He thought I had missed the obvious lesson that Plato was trying to impart: how difficult, even impossible, it is to utter a true statement. I agree now. Not only is the truth multiple and often momentary. It is, as a result, also elusive. In my lazy and undisciplined (to say nothing of over-confident and self-assured) undergraduate mind, I wanted and needed there to be a truth to which I could adhere, if only to relieve myself from the burden of additional thinking. I wanted something of which I was certain, something I knew, something in which that I could believe.

I did learn something of value from my project, which my professor may have missed, or that he at least deemphasized. In the Theatetus Plato sets out to define error. He and his interlocutors fail, since every example of error that they introduce and discuss turns out itself to be erroneous. That was the insight at which I was so pleased to have arrived. Plato could not define error and, strictly speaking, could not prove its existence. He developed no theory of falsehood, no model of error. Instead, he described and dramatized it. Like truth, it seems, falsehood, too, is elusive.

I suppose here was planted the seed of an insight that came many years later. Definitions of any sort are of limited utility while descriptions often yielded much richer insight, and are more discerning, if more difficult to pinpoint.

In addition, my study of the Theateus also introduced me to the problem of untruth that I didn’t know what to do with until, as a graduate student, I began to read the work of John Lukacs.  Characterizing the historian’s task, Lukacs made it clear that it may be a more important intellectual and moral responsibility to eliminate untruth than it is to discover and confirm the truth. In a world where untruth abounds, Lukacs’s observation strikes me as especially profound. “Lying is an ugly vice,” Montaigne declared. “Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society.” If I have not discerned the whole truth, and perhaps never will, I have tried always to tell as much of the truth as I know. I can be more assured that I have at least devoted myself to eliminating as much untruth as possible.

Why?

“Why?” is the essential question.

“This is the great `How’ age,” wrote Malcolm Muggeridge. “But the `Why’ remains unanswered, and will doubtless in due course again claim attention.” Muggeridge was right, but I hope that his second sentence turns out to be as true as his first.

Human beings are the only species that asks “Why?” and not all of them do so. At their finest, human beings have a yearning to know and to understand. They are inherently dissatisfied with themselves, as they ought to be, and wish to be more than what they are. The more they know, the more dissatisfied they become and the more they want to know. This condition is both apposite and painful, at times agonizingly so. Human beings wish to represent and interpret the meaning of life, and are frustrated when they cannot find the answers they seek. They want to know “why.” Their continued ignorance is part of the human tragedy as much as their accomplishments are a triumph of mind and spirit.

Even more tragic is to end the quest. “The road is better than the inn,” said Cervantes. In Goethe’s version of the Faust story, Faust at last finds meaning, and steps back from the brink of hell, only by embracing the ceaseless but imaginative struggle of life—the struggle to know and to understand rather than to conquer and to dominate. Illumination is of a higher order than power.

The Tyranny of Culture

There is, nonetheless, a tyrannical force at the core of human life. We call it culture.

Culture is a form of tyranny. I say this with approbation, or at least with a full acceptance of the reality that such tyranny is indispensible to the cohesion of society and to the conduct of human life. Boundless freedom is as undesirable as it is impossible if human life is to continue—if, that is, human beings are not to surrender to their animal instincts and their material needs. Here we discover the genesis of the perennial problem of freedom and order.

We are often mistaken about culture. Culture is inward looking, or to use a once popular sociological phrase “inner directed.” Although it’s likely impossible to trace the origins of any culture, my supposition as a historian has long been that cultures began as efforts to solve problems. They then proceeded to commemorate the solution in custom and ritual and thereby to remind a people who they are and how they came to be. From hence arises the strong gravitational pull toward the center, moving ever and always in the orbit of original intentions. From hence, too, arise the cries of decadence when the gravitational force weakens or disappears.

One of the mistakes we routinely make is to think our culture is innately superior to others when, in reality, it is merely different. Such pride is understandable and even acceptable as long as it does not turn malignant. This is not to say that all cultures are the equal, or that all customs and practices are worthy of respect and adoption. It is to caution that difference does not imply relations of superiority and inferiority. To the extent that we do not distinguish between “different” and “better,” our thinking will be confused, our conclusions flawed, and our actions potentially dangerous.

I also want to emphasize that cultures are not interchangeable. The members of one culture are justified, perhaps we may even say that they are obliged, to reject another culture that is as good as theirs just because it is different. The grounds for this rejection are cultural not rational. A different culture does not meet the needs, address the problems, or clarify the collective identity of a people. The choices a people have made over the long course of time preclude other choices now. Our current embrace of plurality may arise from humane motives (even if it does not always lead to humane ends), or it may simply be the result of a misplaced sense of guilt.[1] Either way, pluralism ignores the need for unity in any culture. Again, it is important to make distinctions and not to equate unity with uniformity  Cultures may admit, and will likely benefit from, variations, but not from eclecticism.

Although their views often originate in racism, xenophobia, and hatred, the critics of immigration have a point. No culture can be all things to all people, or welcome all customs and practices. Some must perforce be excluded. This is so because cultures are hierarchical. There can be no democratic or egalitarian culture, which in no way is to suggest that a democratic politics is impossible or repugnant.

On these points, we commonly make another error in judgment. To say that culture is hierarchical is not to suppose that we are speaking about a hierarchy of peoples, which, I am sad to say, is the habitual assumption. Rather, what we really mean is that cultures present a hierarchy of values. They indicate what is important to a people and what is not. I also do not mean to propose that there exists a hierarchy among cultures. I have already qualified, if not entirely dismissed, that assumption. I do mean to suggest that there is a hierarchy of values within cultures that at once discipline, elucidate, and satisfy.

There can and should be fruitful dialogue between the representatives of different cultures, those who emphasize different values and who organize and make sense of experience in different ways. We must admit, at the same time, that every culture asserts pressure, whether subtle or overt, to conform and to resist all that is unsettling or destructive. Culture functions both as the proverbial sword and the proverbial shield. Culture establishes ideals toward which to aspire—images of goodness and perfection. Unless, like ours, it has become decadent, that is, it has lost its purpose, culture never rests content with the lowest common denominator. In a word, culture inspires, or it should. Only thus can it both cohere and endure.

In our haste to condemn the tyranny of culture and to promote liberation, to prove ourselves tolerant of every difference, and to deny any hint of cultural bias, we miss the irony that culture is the human protest against uniformity itself. It is the effort to hold at bay the purely natural (culture is the opposite of nature), the declaration of independence from determinism of any sort, whether material, spiritual, or environmental. The irony: the tyranny of culture affords human beings the only real freedom they will ever possess. Operating through preference, selection, and discrimination, culture enables human beings to escape the forces of nature and to become active agents in shaping their world. It is a spiritual and imaginative creation, an artificial construct to be sure, but an artificial construct that in dress and cuisine, in manners and the arts, in political and social institutions, in religion and play, provides a sanctuary for living and erects a defense against chaos.

Democracy, Difference, & Tolerance

For all the increasingly vicious differences that separate American politicians, those men and women share one common assumption. They all believe, or speak as if they believe, that Americans enter the public arena as adversaries to press their own interests, often at the expense of others. Such actions, we are assured, constitute the essence of democracy, which guarantees that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, which they must perforce assert if they do not wish to have them taken away. We are, I fear, again mistaken in our thinking.

There is every reason to welcome and sustain a democratic political culture if it acknowledges that every individual life is inviolate, that every person has a voice in government and is equal before the law, and that all are ensured just treatment. Democracy thereby promotes, or at least approximates, equity, although not full equality, among citizens. Genuine equality in all aspects of life would require that all people be the same.

In our time, the advocates of democracy have promoted this kind of uniformity with disastrous consequences. They have thereby given rise to envy, hatred, and fear of all difference—emotions that politicians then readily exploit. Difference suggests either an unacceptable inequality or an intolerable advantage that must be eradicated.

During much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans slaughtered each other because they could not tolerate even the smallest religious differences. The same thing is threatening to take place today in the sectarian and political conflicts that have erupted in the United States and around the world. Such antagonisms are not easily quieted. Although none of these conflicts originated from a misunderstanding and misapplication of democratic principles, democracy is leading to the similar conclusion that all difference, that all distinction, is evil. Those who are different are increasingly characterized as a toxin or a contagion that must be eliminated lest it destroy our social purity and our political health.

Ours is a fanatic age of extremes. Various absolutisms, in politics, in religion, in thought, in opinion, predominate. The reemergence and triumph of absolutism has brought strife, violence, intolerance, and oppression, the imprint of which will touch every aspect of life for a long time to come. The irony is that the embrace of democracy has led to a very undemocratic world—a world in which security and peace are, or seem to be, in constant peril.

The world has always been a rough place. But our minds are now suffused with a sense of danger at the exclusion of almost every other thought. Add to this unthinking intellectual and spiritual rigidity, and the secular and religious conflicts that have emerged from it, the growing disparity between not only the property but also the influence of rich and poor. Division between rich and poo—indeed, between the rich and everyone else—are hardly a new phenomenon in history. Yet, as was the case in earlier periods, the rich now live so differently from all others that they appear a different species. Recognition of this development, too, calls into question the very foundations of democracy.

Real democracy requires devotion to a hierarchy of purpose. (I wish again to point out that I mean neither a hierarchy of peoples nor a hierarchy of rights. I am enough of an heir of the Enlightenment to believe that some rights are not particular but universal.) People simply cannot press their own interests or demand equality and rights for themselves and their kind. If they wish to achieve and maintain democracy, they cannot suppress differences in others, including the right to question and protest, in other words, the right of dissent. They must come together to serve a higher purpose that is common to all. Only thus will everyone be respected for the work they do and the contribution they make, without distinguishing or disparaging their status. Were such a purpose to be withdrawn, a community would quickly degenerate into competitive, and inherently unequal, individuals and groups battling over the spoils. That prospect is now real and ought to concern all of us.

To return to an earlier observation, it is culture that provides the identity and purpose to unite a society and to diminish the significance of the differences that do exist among its individual members, each of whom has an office to perform. Under such circumstances, differences do not excite resentment, assuming, of course, that everyone has the opportunity to live a decent life, to care for their family, and to perform meaningful work.

Contrary to the American myth of “rugged individualism,” societies thrive on mutual dependence. It cannot be otherwise. Difference is a source of strength, but only if there is some common purpose to hold the discrete elements together. Destroy the cultural foundation of any society, and the emergent differences become intractable. Centrifugal force takes over.

This recognition is what I suspect George Orwell had in mind when he distinguished between nationalism and patriotism. A patriot is devoted to a particular people, place, and history, to particular habits, customs, and cuisine, which “he may regard as the best in the world but which he has no wish to export or to impose on others,” whom he understands hold their way of life in equally high esteem. Like culture, patriotism as Orwell described it, is inward looking. It can tolerate, even savor, difference, because and only because it has a common substance and a common purpose.

Nationalism, by contrast, is outward looking. The nationalist seeks to exalt the power of his nation, and to impose its will on others. Nationalism quickly degenerates into a substitute religion, which requires unquestioning devotion from its adherents and may call upon them to sacrifice all that they have, including their lives, in its service. You can kill a people, you can wipe out entire generations, and a remnant of that people will survive to begin again. But if you destroy their history and their culture, or if internal pressures and contradictions bring them to ruin, that same people is finished. It is then as if they never were.

Some American Myths

Many have argued that America has no culture but only an economy. Although that observation is incomplete, such critics have a point. Americans prefer efficiency. Culture is notoriously inefficient and useless in any practical endeavor. John Crowe Ransom once remarked that culture “butters no bread,” and Americans are interested in both the butter and the bread. Americans are or, as their material prosperity has grown, have become an impatient and immature people. They want what they want when they want it, and will brook no delay in their gratification. This unfortunate impatience, the adjunct to the haste that governs much of contemporary life, manifests itself more fully in the young than in the old, but it is not the exclusive folly of youth. Culture, by contrast, takes time and requires effort and attention to cultivate, sustain, and understand. That perspective is now ever more inimical to Americans.

But even more important to Americans than their economic welfare are certain myths to which Americans cling as if their lives depended on them. In a way, they do. Integral to the human condition, myths, like the poor, will be with us always. “Depend upon it,” explained Max Müller in Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873), “there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth.” Myths pervade a culture and defy rational analysis. They are not logical but mythological, lacking factual basis or historical validity. Because the United States is still a comparatively young nation with a brief past, many Americans have yet to separate their identity and their history from the national mythology. In many respects, Americans continue to think of themselves as a new people living in the New World. Instead of repudiating their myths, they try to embody them in an effort to win an election, to get a job, to sell a product, or simply to get along with their neighbors.

Myths enable a people to reconcile inconsistent and even contradictory ideas and beliefs. A reasoned critique exposing the inherent paradox of myth does nothing to diminish its hold on the imagination. Understanding will not break the spell. Thus enthralled, people insist that myth describes reality, and they hold the truth of myth to be self-evident. Many Americans, for example, continue to regard the United States—or at least their vision of the United States—as “the last, best hope of man on earth.” Many others who believe the United States is no such place continue to wish that it were and to believe that it ought to be. Even for those who doubt, the imperative of the myth remains potent and compelling. (I stand guilty as charged.) This supposition has given rise to the tendency to exaggerate American crimes and sins among critics disappointed in the failure of the United States to complete its mission to redeem the world. They still see America as exceptional and unique not now for the goodness it represents but for the evil it has done.

But the myth asserts that the very purpose of America, its sole raison d’etre, is to confront, not to perpetuate, evil. From the Pilgrims’ first steps onto Plymouth Rock to the abolition of slavery, from the entry into the world wars of the twentieth century to the invasion of Vietnam and Afghanistan, every action the United States has undertaken throughout its history has been for the benefit of humanity. Such big-hearted largess is the moral obligation that justifies freedom and independence, fulfillment of which is the American destiny. To a greater extent than the American War for Independence itself—the so-called American Revolution—American wars have been revolutions, a continuation of the errand into the wilderness. The debate about the recent withdraw from Afghanistan has brought that myth-as-reality to the forefront of American national consciousness. Liberals and conservatives alike have perforce had to acknowledge that the war in Afghanistan has belied the myth that Americans can do anything they have a mind to accomplish. They cannot always establish more perfect unions. They cannot always fashion effective governments. They cannot always build nations. They cannot always reconstruct societies. They cannot always ensure progress, freedom, justice, and democracy for all.

The other, equally powerful, American myth, which the apparent failure in Afghanistan has also reinforced, is the persistent fear that the United States is under siege and that the world Americans have made is in danger of falling apart. The condemnation of the past and the misgivings about the future help to enliven such apprehensions. The often strident critique of America seems to violate the pristine ideals enshrined in the myth. Similarly, for those who occupy the other end of the political spectrum, the ascent of Donald Trump has marked the collapse of democracy for which America has stood since it came into being. It is an understatement to say that the results of these confrontations with the limits of myth have been disorienting for everyone, and are likely to continue to be so for a long time to come.

History & the Search for Meaning

Our myths offer hope that we can right the wrongs of the past, however we may define them, and to restore life to its original purity. Reality isn’t so generous. “Myth may teach man many things,” wrote the German historian and philosopher Ernst Cassirer in The Myth of the State (1946), “but it has no answer for the question which . . . is really relevant: to the question of good and evil.” Neither do myths help us to solve the problems of the present. Instead, they bring comfort by enabling us to ignore or deny those problems in the expectation that things will work out right in the end, that is, that they will work out as we want them to, just as they always have. Myths blind as much as they fortify. They can beguile us into thinking that we have chosen rectitude when, in fact, we have chosen self-interest or expedience. Can we face reality? Can we cope with the difficult and often stubborn problems of our time? Can we create a more equitable and just world even if it means giving some of what we have to others, even if it means acknowledging the part we have played in bringing about inequality and injustice in the first place? Can we at last resolve the debates about guns, abortion, and immigration? Can we better husband our essential resources so that future generations will not be deprived? Can we protect the environment and repair at least some of the damage we have done to it so that future generations may actually have a future? Can we restrain tyranny and prevent oppression even if it means giving a voice to those with whom we disagree? Or will we continue to rally around what have become our tribal myths and use them to batter our opponents into submission until there is nothing much worth saving?

I am more and more haunted by T.S. Eliot’s observation in “The Hollow Men” that the world ends with a whimper and not a bang. Instead of a nihilistic Götterdammerung, which has a certain appeal to those who prefer to destroy the world rather than to give up their sense of privilege and entitlement, or even the descent into a Hobbesian state of nature, humanity may sink into a bland, colorless, but inhuman, future. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man in which he imagined and extolled just such a barren utopia. According to Fukuyama, authoritarianism failed and liberal democracy triumphed. Capitalism came to dominate the global economy. Reason and science provided a cogent world view to which all, at least those living in the developed world, gave their unconditional assent. These developments were guaranteed to satisfy all material desires, with human beings poised on the threshold of ultimate but unthinking bliss. [2]  Fukuyama’s vision amounts to little more than a naïve restatement of the myth that heaven can be made immanent on earth. In the paradise he envisioned, which he argued would culminate in the end of history, only the animal part of human nature survives in a homogenous world forever devoid of surprises. There human beings would reside, contented but soulless.

Fukuyama’s conclusions represented an expression of “impermissible Gnostic speculations” that Karl Jaspers denounced almost thirty years earlier in The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man (1963). The Gnostic imagination disdains the persistent realities of history in order to confirm the old lie that men, through their own agency, can alter the terms of existence and transform the very nature of being, whether through the use of bombs or the accumulation of things. Assuming the inevitability of secular progress, as Fuykuyama did, American Gnostics have typically projected the image of millennial perfection onto the national existence of the United States. They have ignored or diminished the evil inherent in the history of the United States and conceived of American history itself as the source of redemption. The rational, beneficent social and political order of the United States, they suppose, will rescue the individual from the uncertainties of history and the vicissitudes of nature. History thereby becomes for them the means not only of understanding but also of completing human destiny.

I wish to propose an alternate vision of order, drawn from American experience and Christian theology. Recognizing the calamity that messianic passions have time and again visited upon men and women in their quest to achieve universal happiness, I suggest that human life is incontrovertibly historical and, as such, is given neither to fulfillment nor perfection. In other words, history does not and cannot solve the basic problems of human existence. The future does not promise greater security, happiness, or virtue. Evil never disappears and, in fact, may grow bolder and more widespread as individuals and societies move from innocence to experience, from simplicity to sophistication, from weakness to strength. The illusion of progress may obscure decadence, corruption, and immorality as human power, arrogance, and self-absorption evolve and mature.

Although Gnosticism has conditioned the American mind and dominated the American character, the United States itself, as we are once again discovering, is a historical, not a providential nation uniquely blessed of God. Nothing makes inevitable continued American prosperity or even American survival. Americans thus have every reason to fear the consequences of undertaking future providential missions. A bewildering array of tensions, conflicts, disparities, and contradictions has marked the history of the United States. It is the human condition to live amid such tumult, and it is folly or worse to seek redemption from history within history itself.

Contrary to Gnostic assumptions, the future does not ensure relief from the ambiguities and dangers of historical existence. New tyrannies often prove more brutal than the old ones they replaced. Even the achievement of freedom has engendered unforeseen perils, as men and women fall prey to isolation, fear, anxiety, resentment, and hatred, becoming ready instruments in the hands of charlatans and demagogues. Without a contrite awareness and a pious acceptance of human limits, there will be no order either in society or the soul and no history that can be written without a shudder.

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[1]  “Misplaced sense of guilt:” When individuals, societies, or governments make mistakes, carry out misdeeds, or commit atrocities they ought to feel guilty, express regret and remorse, and make amends. The guilty should also be punished according to the nature of their crimes. Yet, it seems to me that we are content always to feel guilty about the wrong things. Instead of examining our souls and repenting our own crimes and sins, we revel in guilt about the sins of others, for which we are eager to apologize since it costs us nothing to do so and makes us feel moral and righteous. The cheap apologies for slavery illustrate what I have in mind. Permit me ceremoniously to apologize to you for a wrong I didn’t commit and a wrong you didn’t suffer. Afterward we can congratulate each other that we are splendid people. We need not give much thought to those, black and white, who are today mired in poverty and condemned to a violent existence devoid of purpose and hope. That problem seems intractable. Better and easier to solve a problem that no longer exists. Like love, apologies ought to be meaningful and directed toward their proper object. And they ought to bring recompense to the aggrieved.

[2] It is of no passing interest that Alexandre Kojève, the great expositor of Hegel’s thought, believed that the end of history and the coming of the “posthistorical” age corresponded with the conditions that he ascribed primarily to the modern “American way of life:” society becomes stagnant and calcified, freedom and meaning disappear, but human beings continue to enjoy a rich material existence in which all of their biological needs are satisfied. See Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. by Allan Bloom, trans. by James H. Nichols Jr. (New York, 1969). See also Lutz Niethammer, Posthistorie, trans. by Patrick Camiller (London, 1992), 143.

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