Mortal Follies. William Murchison
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relationship.
I need, before going further, to say a word about culture generally and its effects on those fish swimming daily in its depths. The mistake I want earnestly to avoid is that of implying that over here is something called “culture” and over there something called “church,” and that the latter lives under some sublime obligation to keep the former always at arm’s length. That would be nonsense. Life has never worked that way, for all the occasional efforts of good Christian folk to isolate themselves from grossness and corruption: the desert anchorites, for instance, or the Amish, or even those who merely cultivate stricter standards of personal behavior (e.g., avoidance of “bad language”) than the larger society tolerates.
In practice, the church is forever rubbing elbows with, bumping up against, “the culture,” striving to infuse it with appreciation of duties and possibilities whose source is other than human will and intellect. Often the endeavor works, the church having the better of such disputes as may follow. In the early twenty-first century, human intellect and, especially, human will seem often to enjoy the upper hand.
Why? I contend we need, for the sake of social and moral stability, to seek an answer too long deferred. We need to seek it likewise for the sake of possibly imperiled souls. The place to start is, I think, with some account of the culture to which Christianity addresses itself, the culture all around us, the ocean in which we swim—or flounder.
If asked to assign our times a hallmark, I would answer by fusing two characteristics.
Characteristic 1. Personal autonomy.
Characteristic 2. Moral fragmentation, if not actual disintegration.
What we want to do we jolly well ought to be able to do, with no one to deny us. That seems, broadly speaking, and with room for numerous exceptions and variations, the nub of the matter. As the journalist David Brooks has limned the attitude: “[T]he core mission of life is to throw off the shackles of social convention and to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Behavior is not wrong if it feels good and doesn’t hurt anybody else. Sex is not wrong so long as it is done by mutual consent.” This is a picture of life lived without moral structure or all-encompassing purpose, life as we see it all around us.
We are by now deeply “into”—one more post-1960s expression—autonomy and leave-me-aloneness. Autonomy is independence of others and of claims imposed from the outside: by religion, by family, by social code, by almost any institution seeming to communicate preferences of one kind or another. Fine that someone else should prefer a thing. To require of others that same preference—no, no. Not any more. The commercial freedom of the marketplace and the political freedom of the polling place have subtly shaped and formed us.
So have historical events and occasions. The Protestant Reformation, which chopped up western Christianity into discrete fragments, including Anglicanism, gave religious proclaimers of all sorts—some wise and devout, others addle-brained and noxious—title to say whatever they liked to whomever they liked. The scientific achievements of the seventeenth-century could be read as further celebrating individual vision as over against the all-seeing-ness, all-providingness of God. A century later, the thinkers of the French Enlightenment began to heckle and jeer the claims both of church and of state. To the jeering and heckling the French Revolution, which began in 1789, added guillotining. The old regime was not much of a regime: lazy, self-satisfied, open to imputations of corruption and tyranny. It may have deserved strong rebuke. What followed was out of all proportion to offenses rightly or wrongly imputed. For the authority of crown and church the revolution substituted the authority of the mob: loud, bloodthirsty, easy for orators and agitators to manipulate. Appropriating Notre Dame Cathedral to its own purposes, the mob elevated to preeminence the newly created goddess of Reason. It was not precisely what France’s own Martyrs of Lyons, in Roman times, had willingly surrendered their lives to affirm—the triumph of human passion over the solemn prescriptions of God.
That which Edmund Burke had called “the red fool fury of the Seine” receded during and after the Napoleonic wars, though not to its former banks. In Britain and America, Victorianism reclaimed some lost ground for Authority. All the same, Victorianism probably encouraged more liberation of one kind and another than it shooed away. That was thanks partly to the romantic movement in art and literature but more particularly to capitalism—the economic handmaiden of democracy—and a scientism (especially Darwinism) that came over time to disdain many of religion’s putatively ignorant claims. The unseen God of the Christians took up less and less of modern folks’ time and interest. A new form of “critical” biblical scholarship asked questions about the authority of those Scriptures that Christians had seen as reflecting the mind, if not recording the actual words, of the Lord God Almighty.
Still, at the start of the last century, and for some time afterwards, Authority was vertical and top-down in a way that can amaze us when we look back, provided we remember to look back. Tradition, meaning the distilled experience of the past, held considerable sway; so, in greater or lesser degree, did notions of self-denial. Common forms of address (“Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am”) and gestures of deference (“Ladies first”) told their own story. It was a story of cultural gradients. Everyone had the right to an opinion, but some opinions were more sensible than others—were, in fact, not mere opinions but, rather, well-settled statements about the world and its operations; also about the obligations that daily life entailed. It seemed—yes, really—there were duties that particular people owed to other people. One performed those duties because—well, because it was the right thing to do: “right” being a reality, just like the obverse reality of “wrong.”
I interrupt these remarks to flush from his Florentine tomb the philosopher-statesman Machiavelli, so that he may give fair warning about nostalgic delusions. “Men ever praise the past,” wrote Niccolo, in his Discourses, “and find fault with the present.” We have to be perpetually cautious, in other words, about unflattering comparisons of present times to past times. All I suggest here is, I think, empirically verifiable. Verticality and top-down-ness in culture gave way slowly but inexorably to horizontality—a side-by-sideness of ideas, outlooks, postures, assumptions, and beliefs, especially moral and social beliefs. (Disputes over distribution of power and property naturally went on, as irresolvable in the twenty-first century as in the first.) That an idea was old or venerable created no presumption in its favor. To the contrary, age darkened the filaments of the brightest ideas. The new culture read by different lights entirely.
Well before the turn of the present century, democracy, meaning voter sovereignty, passed over from the realm of political theory into daily life. Whatever you wanted, maybe that was after all your right, your entitlement. Not to the point of anarchy, perhaps, but farther in that tipsy direction than society had ventured before. Counsels of caution, and of respect for the wisdom of the past, got barely a nod from activists laboring at their separate, often uncoordinated, projects. What if, after all, there was no abstract right and wrong? What if there were multiple ways of understanding and embracing truth? What if truth itself was just a conceit invented to keep down the town rowdies? Or perhaps over time we came to see things in a clearer light than our ancestors had done. Bless their hearts, they may have had good cause to believe thus-and-so was right and authoritative, but times changed, information accumulated, new insights formed. The past had no hammerlock on our brains. Thus the periodic duty to sweep from our cultural closets those notions and practices unsuited to a new age. Out came the brooms, and up from different sides of the cultural spectrum went the respective yells of delight and horror.
If the 1950s were far more dynamic and less “conformist” than legend maintains, still it was the decade of the 1960s—hippies, Woodstock, Eastern religions, incinerated draft cards, “Make Love Not War,” marijuana and LSD, Black Panthers, the Age of Aquarius—that smashed up older concepts of authority and left them writhing in the street. No longer, it seemed, were particular ideas, particular modes, inherently “better” than others, and therefore more deserving of respect. Shelby Steele has rightly called the 1960s “a time when seemingly every long-simmering conflict, every long-standing moral contradiction in American history, presented itself to be made right even as an ill-conceived war raged on. And the resulting loss of moral authority was the great vacuum that literally called the counterculture