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Suicide of the West: Ideas Are Not Enough
Jonah Goldberg summarizes the argument of his recent book this way:
It is my argument that capitalism and liberal democracy are unnatural. We stumbled into them in a process of trial and error but also blind luck, contingency, and happenstance a blink of an eye ago. The market system depends on bourgeois values, i.e. principles, ideas, habits, and sentiments that it did not create and cannot restore once lost. These values can only be transmitted two ways: showing and telling… Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude – and the effort that gratitude demands — all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. (p. 277)
Jonah wants to stay away from arguments about God — the very first sentence of the book is “There is no God in this book.” But he does spend considerable time acknowledging the extent to which Christianity is responsible for putting the circumstances in place that allowed the Miracle to occur. (“The Miracle” for Jonah is our modern systems of constitutional democracy and capitalism that have unleashed prosperity since the 18th century.) He even allows that Christianity was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the Miracle to happen:
Despite all this, the case is often made that Christianity gets the credit for the Miracle. And, in broad strokes, I am open to the idea that without Christianity, the Miracle may never have happened. But that is not quite the same argument as Christianity caused the Miracle (and it certainly did not intend it). However, the lesser claim, that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, certainly seems likely. (p. 109)
For Jonah, it is far more important that the Miracle happened than why it happened. But this inclination to avoid drawing conclusions concerning the causal origins of the Miracle has implications for his prescription for sustaining the Miracle. For then the only thing we can do is maintain those circumstances as best we can, as we have no way of knowing what other circumstances might also support the Miracle. That is the price of an ignorance of causal origins. (There is irony here insofar as the hallmark of Western civilization, and perhaps necessary to the Miracle itself, is the Western determination to not remain satisfied with material circumstance but seek and find the causal origins of those circumstances.)
Jonah’s solution for what ails us is:
Just as any civilization that was created by ideas can be destroyed by ideas, so can the conservative movement. That is why the cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment. (p. 344)
The problem is that, unlike our forebears, Jonah is a fideist with respect to liberal principles:
We tell ourselves that humans have natural or God-given rights. Where is the proof — the physical, tangible, visible proof? Don’t tell me a story; show me the evidence. The fact is we have rights because some believe they are in fact God-given, but far more people believe we should act as if they are God-given or in some other way “real.” (p. 83)
and
The simple fact is that the existence of natural rights, like the existence of God Himself, requires a leap of faith. (p. 142)
The Founders did not hold the existence of rights as a matter of faith. They either offered arguments for their existence (that’s the whole point of Locke’s exploration of the state of nature), or took those rights to be self-evidently true (as in the Declaration of Independence). To hold something self-evidently is not to hold it on faith; quite the opposite. It is to hold it as so obviously true that it is in no need of argumentation.
Jonah misunderstands the role of dogma. The object of dogma is not ideas but facts. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” are not proposed as useful ideas to support a liberal dispensation, but as significant facts about the world that must be respected – and from which various ideas about the proper relationship of man to his government may be drawn, among other ideas.
The point is that Jonah’s prescription does not recreate the circumstances under which the Miracle was born: Those circumstances involved holding things like natural rights as facts, not as the useful fictions Jonah proposes. Since Jonah denies knowledge of the causal origins of the Miracle, he owes us an explanation of why the circumstances he proposes will support the Miracle as well as did the original circumstances under which it occurred.
This question extends to the cultural background of the Miracle. Jonah lists many of the cultural legacies of Christianity that contributed to the Miracle:
I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can’t be removed from it. I start the story of the Miracle in the 1700s, because that is where prosperity started to take off like a rocket. But a rocket doesn’t materialize from thin air on a launchpad. The liftoff is actually the climax of a very long story. (p. 331)
Christianity, in other words, introduced the idea that we are born into a state of natural equality (p. 332)
Christianity performed another vital service. It created the idea of the secular. (p. 332)
But Christians do not hold natural equality and the division of the sacred from the secular on the grounds that they are really good ideas. They hold them because God Himself walked this Earth and showed that He is no respecter of persons, and this same God ordered us to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. How will those ideas be sustained absent the convictions that made them historically relevant? Jonah recounts the famous account of Henry IV and his penitential trek to Canossa, but would Henry have submitted if he thought the secular/sacred division merely an historically useful fiction rather than the command of the living God? Jonah calls on us to close our eyes, grit our teeth, and simply believe really hard in liberal principles. It’s unlikely such a will to believe can successfully replace historic Christian faith (or the Deistic faith of the Founders).
There is evidence of this in Suicide of the West itself. Jonah recognizes the benefits of the traditional family:
Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude – and the effort that gratitude demands – all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. Few actually hate the traditional nuclear family or the role it plays. But many are indifferent to it. And indifference alone is enough to invite the rust of human nature back in. (p. 277)
But of what use is Jonah’s gratitude for the traditional nuclear family? His support for gay marriage — “marriage equality” — is well known. But if two mommies are as good as a mommy and a daddy, then fathers are dispensable to the family. And if they are, indifference to the traditional family structure seems entirely appropriate. Jonah’s gratitude for the traditional family offers no resistance to the most basic attacks on that family. How different it is for those who hold that the family, composed of a mother, father, and children, is an institution ordained by God, one that is prior to the state and that does not depend on the fickle will to believe of man for its existence.
Jonah ends the book with a declaration of the choice before us:
Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore. p. 351
I prefer: Principles die when no one believes anymore in the God who sustains them.
Published in General
I’m open to being convinced that perpetuating the Miracle does not require a cultural foundation in religion. I just haven’t heard that argument being made. Jonah doesn’t make it.
What we do know is that crucial cultural elements of the Miracle had their origin in Christianity and were sustained for centuries by Christianity. So we know Christianity can do it. Can secularism? Our culture is becoming increasingly irreligious and, simultaneously, critical cultural elements supporting the Miracle are disappearing. How will the rot be stopped?
Jonah’s answer is to write a book saying we should just try real hard to believe them absent any other cultural support. Is that even an answer? Conservatives have been doing that for decades and the cultural rot is only accelerating.
Jonah’s presciption is not to believe real hard, it is to teach gratitude. You can teach gratitude and values without teaching religion. We could simply mandate a series of courses on capitalism and classical liberalism in our education system and as part of the naturalization process.
But don’t ask me, I think this country is past the tipping point. I do believe some country will pick up the mantle of capitalism and classical liberalism we are rapidly shedding, I’m just not convinced it is necessary that country have an established religion of some variant of Christianity.
FWIW, one of the questions I submitted to Jonah at ConPodCon was, to paraphrase, what was his outlook on the prospects of teaching gratitude for the miracle in the West. I don’t recall his answer, but it might be worth a listen.
I do recall Jack Butler chastising the questioner (me) for not capitalizing the M in miracle.
It hasn’t been shown that the West can sustain them over the long term.
I agree. That is the challenge before us.
I don’t think there’s a causal relationship established between belief in God and the miracle. It is certainly correlated but that’s unsurprising as the vast majority of Europeans were theists. This is of course not meant to downplay the role the Church played in the development of Europe or the important work it did in preserving knowledge over the centuries.
I think that many of the critics of Jonah’s book misunderstand his intention in taking God out of the argument: he’s pitching this to people who aren’t necessarily theists. He wants to make this something we can all believe in regardless of our faith (or lack thereof). If your answer is that theism or Christian faith is necessary for the miracle to continue in the 21st century then maybe this argument doesn’t work for you. I don’t think faith is necessary to sustain the miracle and I’m glad for an argument that can be pitched beyond an ever diminishing base of believers.
I understand what Jonah is trying to do, and I have no objection to the attempt. I just think he hasn’t understood what is necessary to really make his case.
Basically, he wants to emphasize gratitude (as A-Squared has helpfully pointed out). Can an education in gratitude serve as a cultural substitute for the historic Christian faith that is (or was) the ultimate ground of Western civilization? Maybe. It’s not obvious (to me) that it can. Gratitude is an amiable virtue, but it seems wishful thinking to suppose that emphasizing a single virtue like gratitude can really stand in for the strong meat of historic Christian faith. (And, of course, there is the question of exactly whom to be grateful and exactly for what).
That’s why I talked about Jonah’s views on gay marriage. He wants us to be grateful for the traditional nuclear family, but as far as I can tell, his own gratitude has issued in no defense of the family of any significance. In fact, he supports gay marriage, the logic of which undermines any special significance one would give to the traditional family. People might organize marches on Washington in defense of a family structure they think is divinely ordained, but when they feel simply a mild gratitude for the history of the traditional family, they don’t seem to be inspired to do much to defend it. Or, in Jonah’s case, they actively support policies that undermine it despite their gratitude.
By the way, it’s not just that Jonah doesn’t give a good answer as to how his approach can substitute for historic Christianity. It also doesn’t give an answer as to how his approach can substitute for the approach of our Founders.
There is irony in Jonah’s emphasis on gratitude. He criticizes the tribal instinct taking over our culture because it is based on feelings. But what else is gratitude than a feeling? The Founders did not base our nation on any feeling, but what they supposed to be facts about natural rights based on the state of nature and/or the Creator.
But Jonah does not accept that reason can establish either the existence of God or the existence of natural rights. This puts him at odds not just with Christianity but with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. His substitute for these historical foundations is the feeling of gratitude nurtured by a consideration of the historically fruitful consequences of the rights Christians and Patriots took to be part of the fabric of Creation, but that we can now only treat as useful fictions.
Powerful cultural currents are not created by self-consciously understood useful fictions. At least I know of no examples of such. In fact, at the point that people are arguing that we can’t believe in this stuff anymore, but we must do so anyway to keep going, we have a pretty good clue we are at cultural exhaustion.
Afternoon Climacus,
As cultures become more secular they have less children. So it does not matter if the secular world raises an army of Jonahs, if a society does not reproduce at greater than replacement levels, it will fade away, or be replaced by people whose culture fosters reasons for having children.
I’ve just started the book, but my initial reaction is that Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko is onto something when he writes that liberalism is not interesting:
I highly recommend two books as contrary to Goldberg: Why Liberalism Failed, by Nortre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen, and The Demon in Democracy by Professor Legutko.
I don’t think you have the factual context right. Manual labor was regarded as degrading (at least by elites who didn’t do it) and the distinction between secular and sacred emerged with the Miracle, it didn’t cause it. It might even be the result of it. Yes, “give unto Ceasar” has always been in the book, but medieval Europe didn’t have a strong separation between church and state. They were separate, but symbiotic power centers that reinforced each other and relied on each other for their existence (in the times and places where they weren’t literally one and the same).
Like as not it will be China, a country with no history of Christianity but a long history of trade and entrepreneurship,
I doubt Jonah agrees with you that gay marriage undermines opposite sex marriage. I don’t believe that. Most Americans don’t believe that. And so far the evidence doesn’t support it. It’s early days as they say, so maybe you’ll turn out to be right. But so far there’s no reason to think so.
Oh, no, Mr. Bill.
I haven’t read Jonah’s book yet, but it is on my reading list.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive of gratitude as a motivating force. Our modern world and conveniences are so amazing and work so amazingly well, that even people who should know better (because of their age) tend to forget that the small miracles of the internet, refrigeration, electricity, indoor plumbing, etc. are only the result of the Miracle. Too many young people these days are attracted to illiberal ideas like Socialism, Marxism, and identitarianism because they don’t understand how quickly the Miracle can turn into hell. Case in point: Venezuela. Richest country in South America 15 years ago, now Venezuela is starving because they didn’t have the proper gratitude for what modern capitalism delivers.
Who’s advocating that?
Sure. This would seem to imply some dispute with Climacus, so far as I can tell.
(His # 18 disputes your premises, however.)
Yes, one does need to do more to establish causality between Christian belief and the so-called “miracle.”
The method here would be pretty easy: Study the principles and see where they come from. See how they might have been learned, and see what sort of logical support would be sufficient to justify them.
The only bit of this history I’ve properly studied is Locke. In Locke, it works: His classical liberal principles have a religious foundation.
That’s at most only part of the story.
It leaves out the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation, which rediscovered separation of church and state. Locke’s advocacy of the doctrine plainly relies on some theology from the Reformation (broadly) and has vivid links to Anabaptist ideas.
The American founding largely followed Locke, and many countries with religious liberty followed America.
(You might say that what I’m talking about is at most only part of the story. That might be right!)
Ok, but wasn’t Climacus’ point that Goldberg didn’t say that?
It diminishes religion’s role in some respects, not necessarily in others. In classical separation of church and state–Locke and the American founding–it means that the government does not prefer one church to another, while government is explicitly based on a religious principle.
Well, there’s a bit of the history I haven’t studied!
When I say “separation of church and state” I mean what I said in the comment just before. That did have an effect, and made it into the Bill of Rights!
Is it even possible?
Incidentally, Locke says no, which is why G-d’s favor cannot be won by force. And, since the only spiritual good sought by the church is G-d’s favor, this is why the church has no business using the state to accomplish its spiritual ends, which is why we need separation of church and state.
Anyone spot how his whole argument depends on Reformation theology?
The sociological data has been clear for decades that children, all else being equal, do better with a mother and a father than when either one of them is missing. There was a brief, glorious moment in the latter nineties, I remember, when a broad consensus was achieved on this. It was acknowledged, in particular, that the absence of fathers in black inner city families was a major reason (perhaps the major reason) that so many young black men ended up on the wrong side of the law.
This consensus abruptly ended in the 00’s. Suddenly no one could talk about the need for fathers. Today, you never hear anyone talk about it, and even to voice the opinion that children need both a mother and a father is a social faux pas and risks being denounced as a bigot. Why? Because gay marriage is now an unchallengeable cultural dogma, and to imply that fathers are indispensable is an implicit challenge to the belief that two mommies (or just one mommy) are just as good as a mommy and a daddy. So gay marriage doesn’t challenge or undermine traditional marriage directly. It just chokes out any cultural impetus to defend traditional marriage as a uniquely vital institution before it can get started.
That’s why Jonah’s gratitude for traditional marriage is impotent. He’s willing to pass on warm feelings about the family, but does nothing more than that to try to arrest its collapse. Why should he? Other family forms are just as good, so why bother?
The fact that children need both a mother and a father was, until very recently, a bit of common sense – self-evident if you will. Even Barack Obama was against gay marriage until 2012. You are right that most Americans now don’t believe it. That’s a reason to shudder rather than otherwise, for it shows just how quickly a culture can lose sight of the obvious. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that Americans are now rapidly questioning the value of things like free speech, which is an abstraction compared to the concrete reality of mothers and fathers.
I’m all for gratitude. I’m just not convinced that it can fill in for authentic belief. There is a big difference between believing in natural rights (like the Founders did) and believing in the idea of belief in natural rights (like Jonah does). I can see a soldier sticking with Washington through Valley Forge because he believes he is defending the rights he has by nature or nature’s God. I can’t see him sticking through that winter based on the idea that although natural rights are a fiction, a general belief in them tends to produce superior cultural outcomes. In my opinion, the flaccid cultural reaction we are seeing to the increasingly gross violations of civil rights (especially free speech) is simply because people don’t anymore believe we really have them. Yes, some eggheads can argue that liberal beliefs produce better historical outcomes, but what’s that to me (so they think)?
The logic here seems to be something like this:
I don’t think this is correct J Climacus. My recollection is that when this issue was under debate, Jonah supported civil unions as opposed to marriage for same sex couples. As to what his views are now, after the Supreme Court decreed same sex marriage the law of the land in all 50 states, I know not.
I’m too tired to try to remember what Goldberg’s views might have been last time this came up on his podcast. Maybe Climacus remembers.
More importantly, let’s talk about Bigfoot erotica.
When gay marriage was initially proposed, it was insisted that it had nothing to do with the traditional family structure as normative for raising children. But as soon as gay marriage began to become accepted, that insistence changed to an insistence that any hint that a gay couple wasn’t as ideal as a straight couple for family structure treated gays as second-class, and was therefore unacceptable.
Here’s a column by him that contradicts my understanding of his opinion (Jonah defends traditional family structure here):
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1027-goldberg-family-structure-20151027-column.html
There’s also one from this Feb. where he indicates his support long ago for civil unions (which are gay marriage in all but name):
http://www.morningjournal.com/article/MJ/20180202/FEATURES/180209839
I recently heard him on a podcast mention gay marriage in passing and indicated he had no problem with it (I can’t remember which podcast. I think it was Remnant).
I suspect Jonah doesn’t see the implications for the traditional family of affirming gay marriage.