In my previous posted essay, Elitism and Americans, I responded to an article by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought.. I largely agreed with Wasserman but went further in maintaining that higher literary pursuits make sense only in light of a greater understanding, one encapsulated perhaps in a Christian Creation or a pagan Cosmos. Let’s call that higher understanding a `worldview’, however much that term has been misused.
As Wasserman described matters, truly in my opinion, we have seen a specific decay process: public intellectuals writing for an audience of literate and intellectually curious high school teachers and insurance brokers and engineers and at least a few blue-collar craftsmen have disappeared. I’d say they disappeared as their existing audience put down their books and magazines and turned on the television and apparently Wasserman thinks something of the same. And, yet, this decay process was part of a network of decay processes, the highest of which is the decay of traditional Western worldview which is itself part of a decay of the processes which have educated and nurtured the creative thinkers who update worldviews or produce new ones.
We are talking about networks, correlations and complexes of causes-and-effects, typically at least nonlinear and perhaps even having recursive structures. There was no one worldview in the West and couldn’t possibly be any such unity in any complex civilization in this world of evolutionary and developmental processes; for convenience, I will sometimes write assuming that simplification and similar simplifications when necessary to avoid excessive verbiage. In fact, the term `West’ is problematic, especially when the reader isn’t (yet?) well enough read in history to appreciate the complexity underlying any large human community, especially when there are so many different languages and ethnic histories, so many political and cultural and economic systems which don’t quite correspond to even the ethnic populations.
It’s certainly clear that literary elites and serious creative writers and thinkers aren’t highly respected in the modern United States and perhaps not in much of the West. American public intellectuals were but one node in that complex network which is being destroyed by those various decay processes at work in the West. Without the guidance of an elite, politicians as well as the ordinary citizen are rapidly losing any clarity in the sorts of thinking processes used at more global levels and are also losing a respect for different viewpoints and for solid bodies of facts and knowledge as a foundation for opinions and attitudes, where I use knowledge as “facts at least partially and perhaps somewhat speculatively processed”. As a general rule, creative scientists retain some public respect though applied science and engineering are more deeply a part of the thinking of even most highly literate men and women of the West; we are curious about Einstein and his successors but better understand the work of that nephew who is helping to develop better a better carburetor. In some Western communities, such as the Western Catholic churches, scholars are respected; the underlying assumption, unconsciously held in nearly all cases, is that past creative thinkers told us everything God wants us to know and we just need to be reminded. If there is nothing new, there is no reason to have public intellectuals or even insightful novelists to help explore and evaluate this fascinating world. All the fascinating elements are either on the surface or supernatural mysteries. Against St Paul, most modern believers would leave themselves as slaves and not sons working with the Father, barbaric human animals watching God’s acts of magic as if they were some sort of fireworks display.
Reality is confusing, complicated and complex, and this is one reason some of us see a need for those Wasserman calls “public intellectuals.” However, the primary need is for creative thinkers to propose new thoughts and new ways of perceiving reality; then, the public intellectuals can get to work and so can the members of the general citizenry who are curious about reality, from any viewpoint pagan or Christian or…
There is, in fact, much new in recent centuries and we have done little to make greater sense of all that new stuff. Some of the new is pre-existing, discovered by wider or deeper explorations of reality, including those of mathematicians who work in abstract levels of created being. Some of the new is truly new, most of that is the new forms of human communal being which have evolved and developed as the human race has grown in size and has discovered a need for new forms of relationships.
All of this affects even such matters as Christian beliefs. I’m an empirically oriented Christian. This means I think it to be of the utmost importance for us to listen to God, not just in Holy Scripture or the words of extra-Scriptural prophets and saints, but also in His acts as Creator. God isn’t constrained by human ways of thought as they were as of 1800AD nor as they were as of 1300AD nor as they were during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth. Nor is God constrained by my provisional, but greatly updated and enriched, understanding of the human mind and of the reality which it deals with. Christian have been morally irresponsible in recent centuries—perhaps back to at least the time of Galileo; in particular,intellectuals and artists and other creative workers have retreated from their responsibility to make greater sense of all those facts and sets of knowledge gathered by modern explorers of this world and the abstract realms from which the world was shaped.
So it is that I expand Wasserman’s analysis of the loss of public intellectuals to one covering also the need for a creative elite, specifically will I deal with the Christian need for an elite. In fact, there is not usually a way to clearly categorize a substantial thinker as purely `creator’ or `commentator’. Despite his own occasional claims of limits to his work, Etienne Gilson creatively updated Thomistic philosophy in the very act of faithfully communicating what Aquinas said in the middle of the 13th century. Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy to a lesser extent, enriched Catholic philosophy and theology as they wrote fictions exploring traditional ideas in modern contexts.
We can learn from even public school textbooks that there was a time in the West when public men, politicians as well as any describable as `public intellectuals’, had minds formed by more disciplined study than has been common in recent generations. We can remember many, such as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and even the greatly underestimated man of fewer hours of formal education—George Washington. Whatever your opinions of the specific ideas and acts of these men, we can acknowledge that those old-timers had strong minds and those strong minds carried a wide and deep knowledge of classical literature, some more recent literature (such as Shakespeare), human history, some knowledge of then-current science and mathematics and technology, and even the non-believers knew a bit about the Bible and Christian creeds.
As surprising as it might seem in a world where so many men and women, boys and girls, of high intelligence have minds stocked with knowledge of pro sports and popular music and popular movies: in earlier times—as Wasserman points out, Colonial Americans gobbled up Paine’s pamphlets (and, a bit later, even The Federalist Papers which were far more sophisticated) and farmers in the Midwest in the 1850s stood for hours to listen to very complex debates between Lincoln and Douglas. Another writer of more radical tendencies than Wasserman or me, Garry Wills, once wrote that those farmers weren’t just being polite—they responded with clapping or laughing at the right times, showing they understood the allusions and could at least follow the rudiments of the arguments raised by each of the speakers. And Lincoln hadn’t yet adopted his later (probably overly) simplified style and was also not speaking in the folksy style in which he addressed juries. He spoke sentences taking up multiple pages in printed form. Along the same lines, Jacques Barzun claimed in From Dawn to Decadence that the 16th century French peasants who could read were devouring novels too complex for most late 20th century college professors.
The audience has decayed as much as the troupe of performers. While Washington as a young man was shaped by a near obsession with an idealized, but sophisticated and highly literate, play about the harsh but virtuous Roman, Cato, modern young men are more likely to be exposed to daily stories of rich young men who would be in jail if they weren’t NBA or NFL stars, movies such as Rambo or the more recent ones idealizing American operatives who are portrayed as sociopaths. Though it’s no longer a hobby of overly educated men of little understanding, those young men and the rest of us are still exposed on occasion to exercises in the debunking of legendary men, such as Washington, who had faults but were yet moral giants. Along similar lines, an American high school student is more likely to have the option of studying vampire literature than she is to have the option of studying Shakespeare or serious American novelists of the 19th century.
Again, this entire issue is of great importance to Christians and of interest to some others, such as Razib Khan, a geneticist, who blogs at Ron Unz’s website. Khan, raised a Muslim in Bangladesh and now an atheist, is very well-read in history and often produces intelligent analyses drawing upon both genetic and historical knowledge. In the article, Cuius Regio, Eius Religio, in Anglo-Saxon England , he blogged about British ancestry, an interesting and complex subject where historians and geneticists have cooperated in recent decades to produce a new understanding. A simple summary: the British, residents of Scotland and Wales as well as those of England, have a predominately ancient British ancestry; they share an ancestry from ancient farmers (described as “Spanish-like” in Khan’s article) closely related to ancient farmers from southern Europe but are also descended partly from ancient Celts, largely those whose culture and language developed some centuries before the Gaelic (Irish and Highland Scot) Celts arrived. In any case, the various pre-Roman residents of the British Isles seem to have had a predominately Celtic culture.
After the conquest by the Romans of part of what is now England, the native population was Latinized in culture, which meant that they were baptized into what is now known as the Roman Catholic Church—at a somewhat later time than the original conquest. From a very early stage, the Sacramental Christian churches, including the diocese in Rome which became the Roman Catholic Church, had rites and creeds which both symbolized and manifested a very complex understanding of this world and its relationship to its Creator. Moreover, they had a worldview which was rich and complex, though not plausible in its entirety to us in this post-Copernican and post-Darwinian era. That worldview drew upon the Bible, Judaism as practiced by the various groups in the Near East at the time of Christ’s life on Earth, Greek philosophy, Roman law, Roman politics, and more; much of that worldview is foundational to my updated Christian worldview. The underground Church of the early years had an elite represented by St Paul and other men highly educated in Jewish or Greek knowledge or both. The Church became very visible even before Romans accepted it as their official religion and it was visible partly because of the accomplishments of St Paul and his many worthy successors. It became more visible when altars in underground grottoes were replaced by altars in magnificent basilicas in which buildings were celebrated the elaborate rites of Sacraments as well as many lesser rites. The very effort which these noble and accomplished elites put into celebrating the Eucharistic Rite if they were priests, the pious attitudes of noble and accomplished elites as they knelt and bowed their heads and as they accepted Communion, the money and artistic talent which went into the buildings and vestments and altar vessels, would have been more than enough to awe the Catholics who could make no sense of Trinitarian doctrines or of the concept of a Creator.
In his article, Khan puts it this way:
[T]he Christian Church collapsed in eastern and southern Britain, only to reappear around the year 600 under both Brythonic and Continental missions. Despite the influence of the Celtic Church in the early decades, English Christianity was not an organic outgrowth of a religion which was submerged in the intervening century. Rather, it was a fresh planting of what had died. I have made an analogy before of what happened to Christianity in Britain to what happened to Christianity in the Balkans. While a regression occurred in post-Roman Gaul, what became Francia, it pales in comparison to the cultural devolution and atavism in Britain and the Latin-speaking world of the Balkans. It is fashionable in some quarters to declare that the Christian Church saved European civilization after the collapse of Rome, that the Church was the ghost of Rome. There is some truth in this, but, the example of Britain and the Balkans suggests to me that institutional and formal religion of the sort which we see in Christianity necessarily needs a minimal level of social and economic complexity, and concomitant “buy in” from the elites. Without the support of the powerful these sorts of institutional religions decay rapidly back toward primal animism and folk paganism. The old gods of the Celts and Romans were memories, but the new gods of the Germans were living and vital. It was a natural fit for the small scale economies which arose in the post-Roman landscape of proto-England.
Simple religion is folk religion, animistic paganism. It is likely many Christians could be described as animistic pagans, having a piety more like that of, as some have said, an Italian peasant from pre-modern times. Many devout Catholic Christians, in particular, can relate better to demons or Satan himself than they can to the Trinitarian God; something similar could also be said of many Protestants. After all, Trinitarian doctrine is an ever provisional understanding of claims in the Bible. God can’t be `reproduced’ by proper application of humanly derived axioms or other basic rules; God has to be understood on His own terms and some of us have faith that we can find enough of those in Creation as well as in the Bible that we can speak rationally of the Trinitarian God and it will make sense in terms of our own mortal lives and our hopes for salvation. Again, our knowledge is provisional and needs to be refreshed as we learn more about created being. We will never complete this process in this mortal realm.
Most of the more advanced levels of human knowledge and creative skills are a mystery to most human beings and so it is that they tend toward that simple faith of animistic paganism in which things move because there are unseen spirits moving them. After all, the internal power to move is something belonging to living creatures. A rock will simply sit there on the ground unless thrown by a young boy or tossed into the air by an earthquake which must surely be caused by some spirit or god or even the Father-God usually so distant from his pagan children. This goes deeper than a wrong or right understanding of the physics of projectiles. It is a matter of basic understanding of reality. Paganism, usually a variety of animistic paganism, is the natural state of mind for a human being; simple forms of pagan belief and seemingly most forms of higher pagan belief are brutally reductionistic in assuming direct cause-and-effect relationships, seemingly as a result of very basic human ways of perceiving and thinking. Even great physicists and philosophers have problems with quantum theory for exactly the same reason that the simple in heart will exercise their faith in cause-and-effect and look for spirits behind the events for which there is no simple or direct cause. See my essay, Shaping Our Minds to Reality, for a discussion of the problems we have in doing that, shaping our minds to reality, which discussion was a response to an analysis by John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest who’d had a first career as a highly-regarded theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Cambridge University.
Animistic pagans follow what seem to be inborn responses in conjecturing, or maybe just assuming, that the world is made of inert matter and living creatures, material or spiritual. Modern non-believers tend to reduce reality to dynamic matter which forms relationships; the magic of cause-and-effect having been transferred to formal mathematical descriptions—often by those of partial or no understanding of that underlying mathematics. I’ve argued in a number of places that Christians have to begin with relationships, rather than assuming stuff or entities come into being and then form relationships. The mathematics describing much of this world, including the formalisms of quantum mechanics, is one type of relationship. To a Christian, this idea of relationships having primacy over stuff comes from the Gospel of St John where the world came to exist because God first loved it; God didn’t create the world and then choose to love.
I’ve explored this issue elsewhere; my current purpose is to point out the complexities of a Christian worldview as opposed to the simplicities of animistic paganism. If we really want simplicity then we should choose animistic paganism and I suspect many modern Christians will do that as their leaders fail to even move toward a worldview which makes sense of medical miracles and the Apostles’ Creed.
Yet, some of those who hold a form of simple religion are Sacramental Christians who take seriously the celebration of the Sacraments. As an example, the Eucharist was subject in the past to very sophisticated analyses in efforts to understand the matter (bread and wine), the way in which God effects some sort of change in that matter, and the relationships between the human parties and the matter and God. A man such as St Thomas Aquinas didn’t just sigh and say the Eucharist is such a mystery. He rolled up his sleeves and set to work to produce a way of speaking coherently about the Eucharist in the best terms he had. Six centuries before John Dalton, the father of modern atomic theory, and another century before Niels Bohr and other quantum theorists of atomic structure, Aquinas worked with what he had: disciplined philosophical contemplations of the nature of material stuff, which contemplations were shaped by the philosophers’ own experiences of the world and its stuff.
If some, probably most, of the great Christian thinkers have considered it necessary to understand the Eucharist rather than just accept it as a mystery and if those great thinkers have found only provisional understandings, how is it possible for simple believers, often men and women of a robust earthiness and skepticism of a healthy common-sense variety, to believe and to receive communion so piously? Is it just coincidence that faith is weakening, outright dying in the younger generations of even some families of great devotion, at a time when we have not even a weakly plausible understanding of the Eucharist in terms of modern knowledge of the world and its matter? There are some who, perhaps in good faith, recite the words of Medieval Scholastics as if the assumed Aristotelian understandings of matter and human being can be carried forward into this world of Einstein and Darwin. The simple often just receive the Lord’s Body and Blood but more often in recent generations will lose their faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine. After that loss of faith, one generation and maybe even two, will continue to practice their faith as if believing but the grandchildren have a sort of hardheaded common sense that sees the holes in what they are taught.
Christian communities haven’t made it possible for even the more literate of members to retain a faith which makes sense in light of modern knowledge of this world. Children, young adults, and those of simple faith are vulnerable to the calls of a more or less pure secularism, or to some form of paganism, or perhaps to an unreasonably and unsustainably simple form of Christianity.
For the situation to change, Christians have to first understand they need to develop and support creative elites who can develop a Christian worldview and other elites who can teach the new understandings and make them accessible to still others. There might well be multiple levels such as: creative thinkers inspiring high-level scholars who begin to teach high school teachers and future artists and novelists.
Human understandings of reality, however limited or expansive we think reality to be, are what I call worldviews and we should always remember they are provisional but they are also real. In fact, they become the ways in which we perceive and understand reality and that is why they can endanger faith when we don’t have elites to update or occasionally replace them with better ways of perceiving and understanding. Christian leaders are trying the impossible task of holding together or re-forming churches from human beings whose most fundamental beliefs about reality are non-Christian, inconsistent with the Bible and the Creeds and most Christian practices.