Today American Greatness presented as its long weekend read an essay by Roger Kimball,:
Humanity is at the crossroads of an awesome moral divide.
Embedded within this essay are links to two other pieces that work together to place our current crisis within an historical context that stretches back to the days of the Roman Empire. Taken together they also help explain why I regularly maintain that individual conversion followed by conversion of society is the only solution that has a chance of overcoming the forces that are bringing our constitutional order and way of life to ruin.
The first of these pieces happens to be the very first published article by Christopher Dawson. It appeared in the January to March issue of The Catholic Review in 1915/1916. The date is important because Dawson was writing on the fate of the West toward the beginning of WW1. Dawson attempts, in just 12 pages, to sketch out what could be characterized as a theory of European or Western European history, to account for the rise of the modern State in opposition to the Christian past of Europe. I’m a big fan of Dawson—I grew up reading his books and readers of the old blog will be familiar with my regard for him. I highly recommend the entire article, which I excerpt below. You’ll need to make allowance for the fact that much has happened in the 100 years that have gone by, but I hope you’ll be struck by his insights and their relevance for our times. Obviously, Kimball was of the same mind.
The Catholic Tradition and the Modern State
The changes that have come over Europe in the last century are too great to be ignored by anyone, but their very greatness and nearness to us prevent their being really understood. They have been admired blindly and enthusiastically as the dawn of a humanitarian millennium or they have been condemned by the traditionalists for undermining authority and order. By both parties, however, the fundamental characteristic of the new age has been misconceived. It is not liberty, but power which is the true note of our modern civilisation. Man has gained infinitely in his control over Nature, but he has lost the control over his own individual life. This may seem a paradox in face of the claims of an age which prides itself above everything on its democracy and liberalism, but the latter really means only the substitution of a new ideal of social obligation for the old principles of authority and divine right. The executive has perhaps lost much of the arbitrary power that it possessed under the old regime, but there is no lightening of the pressure exercised by society as a whole on the individual.
The present war must make clear to everybody the enormous increase of power in the modern State--power not only in the matter of material resources, but also in the complete subordination of the individual to the society.
...
... In the modern State ... every man has his allotted place, and when society needs it he must give his life in its service. An official touches the handle of a great machine, and from every corner of an empire millions of men move automatically, with an utter suppression of their own individualities, to the fulfilment of one gigantic task--a task that will bring wounds and death to millions, suffering and privation to all. ... While men were talking of democracy and liberty, there has grown up a vast secular power like nothing that has existed since the Roman Empire. That power is the modern State. It has an influence over men's souls that formerly only religion possessed, and its claims are almost unlimited. ...
I suggest we should view the pressure for conformity to the Covid Regime in this light. The social controls that were imposed were unprecedented, and without scientific justification. Indeed, the regime contradicted basic principles of public health. And yet not only did the government exert enormous pressure on the subject population to conform, so too did individual zealots, possessed by a quasi-religious zeal for conformity to the rules based regime imposed from on high. The judiciary, too, by and large failed to challenge the lack of a rational basis for all the abuses.
The eighteenth century witnesses a new outburst of Humanism of a definitely anti-Christian kind. The free thought of the Encyclopaedists becomes the dominant intellectual force in Europe. The prevalent ideal is to to pull down everything and to re-erect an edifice of a new society based on principles of obvious utility. The weapon of ridicule is used against Faith with tremendous effect.
In other words, the range of human experience was increasingly narrowed—at least for purposes of public discourse. This speech regime is becoming ever more aggressive in our own day.
... In the wars of the Revolution France becomes the crusader of this new order, and in the course of the nineteenth century the same movement, united with the spirit of nationality, makes a triumphant reappearance in country after country on the Continent. This movement still survives as Continental Liberalism. It is of course a mistake to think that this movement was primarily a popular one. Its main strength was always in the bourgeoisie. ...
... The freedom that [the new oligarchic republics] had vindicated against the Crown was not, as is popularly taught, the freedom of the individual against arbitrary power, for the poor man was better protected under the old order; it was, on the contrary, the security of the de facto social powers in the nation from interference by a de jure authority.
... the spirit of Humanism and faith in the possibilities of science have given to the whole complex a culture and almost a religion of its own.
We’ve certainly seen that under the Covid Regime. It’s almost as if people believe that science can come up with an injection to free us from disease and, who knows, death. Amazing.
... Socialism was weakened by the Utopian character of its aims and hopes; it underestimated the hold of the plutocracy on that system of representative government which had been the great creation of the nineteenth century revolutions ... Nevertheless it has had a most powerful influence on the mind of the age, and ... the march of events can hardly fail to fulfil its essential idea ... most probabl[y] ... by the plutocracy converting itself into a bureaucracy and thus making itself a necessary part of the Great State.
With regard to the other question of the opposition between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism [read: Globalism] we seem, as I write, to be assisting at the dying struggles of the Balance of Power, and it is difficult not to believe that sooner or later the world-civilisation of our age will develop an international organisation capable of being its political embodiment.
And here we are! The plutocracy is in charge of the bureaucracy as well as the political classes—who exist to do the bidding of the plutocracy. Moreover, we are on the verge of seeing the ruling class actually institute Global government. In fact, the war on Russia is part of the effort to accomplish exactly that.
Compare what Dawson was saying a hundred years ago with what John Marini (also linked by Kimball) was saying in 2018—notably, even before the watershed 2020 election. Whatever else anybody wants to say about Trump, it’s beyond dispute that Trump revealed the essence of the American state—brought the swamp denizens and their thinking to the surface. Even while Trump was still president Marini was looking beyond and questioning what sort of political legitimacy we could expect going forward.
The difficult in preserving what remains of traditional human society is that the spiritual dissolution of Western civilization has proceeded so far that there is little in the way of organized resistance that is possible. To oppose the secular progressive ruling classes requires a critique from without—an appeal to the order of a God created universe. Few people any longer have a conscious understanding of what that entails, and the very mention of such ideas has been effectively banned from polite, let alone political, discourse. This is “the real American crisis.” Dawson saw all this coming, and Marini documents it:
What Trump and COVID Revealed
After Trump: The Political and Moral Legitimacy of American Government.
My lengthy excerpt is from the second half of the article. Note as we begin that Marini references the “rationalism” of the elites. This claim to rationality is a polemical use of the word. It’s intended to relegate opponents—specifically Christians—to the realm of irrationality, virtually to a subhuman status. We see this appropriation of language for polemical use constantly now. First they change the language … And so we see that the first use of this appropriated term is to support a strictly non-rational claim—that they can grasp the meaning of history as if history were an object of observation, rather than a process of events that stretches into a future that always extends further and is never complete.
“Rational” Legitimacy versus Political Legitimacy
The intellectual elite claim to understand the direction of history, as well as the scientific workings of the world, and thus feel authorized to impose their rationality on all aspects of society—including areas that had traditionally been regarded as private. This new scientific morality made it possible to present the bureaucracy’s policy preferences as moral justifications for progressivism and administrative rule. There was no limit to the power that could be used to make sure that everyone gets on “the right side of history,” as then-president Obama used to say. But that new morality and those policies could never be made compatible with limited constitutionalism and the rule of law. That is the root of the political crisis we face today.
“Limited constitutionalism” and “the rule of law” are based on the fundamental understanding that human beings are imperfect by their very nature. The point is to induce human beings to enter into a reasonable modus vivendi so that society can function within acceptable limits. Any attempt to construct a utopia will, in principle, lead to a dystopian outcome. But try to tell that to the expert class.
It has become almost impossible to reconcile administrative rule with self-government. The morality mandated intellectually by our elites has destabilized traditional social institutions and produced a chaotic civil society, undermining any public deliberation and authentic public opinion capable of reconciling morality with the consent of the governed. The technical rule of experts downplayed the role of popular deliberation and public opinion, and also made it harder for any public debate to occur in an intelligent and effective way. Although self-government depends on public opinion to determine what can be done politically, that opinion cannot legitimately be mandated or controlled from the center. It must arise deliberatively from the people in the country at large, and should originate in civil society.
Rule by experts is, in principle, hostile to a constitutional, participatory republic. Experts should not be constrained by rules formulated by non-experts. Written constitutions are a roadblock to the rule of experts, who should be allowed to change or adapt such symbols of a benighted past to suit their expert ideas.
This may help explain why so many people acquiesced in shutting down schools to protect children from a virus that overwhelming affects the elderly. In deference to the claims of scientific expertise by the federal bureaucracy, many Americans ignored their common sense understanding. But the immense and often unnecessary costs of the COVID mandates and lockdowns are now becoming clearer, and more citizens are coming to question elite claims to superior knowledge.
The Rebellion
At every important juncture in the growth of the modern state, there have been those who have questioned the expansion of the powers of the administrative or bureaucratic state.
In recent American politics, the 2008 election established what appeared to be the high point of twenty-first century progressivism. But its very success produced a crisis of liberalism that threatened the progressive legacy established over much of the prior century. ...
In his first term, Obama sought to achieve the dream of every progressive president since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson: to make it possible and even necessary for government to secure universal economic, social, and personal well-being without any principled limits. ...
Obama staked his reputation on universal health care, an expanded regulatory apparatus, and greater control of the financial markets. ...
The permanent government’s extreme reaction to the COVID pandemic must be seen in part as an attempt to vindicate Obama’s promise: the limitless power of government could “guarantee” public health. ...
...
What Trump Revealed
Partly because of Trump, and partly because of the increasing recognition of its missteps in handling the COVID pandemic, the ruling class now feels deeply threatened. All the organized forces within society and government who have a stake in centralized administration are likely to defend the use of administrative power against political opponents who deny its moral authority or legitimacy.
The permanent government is a powerful force. It has established its own legitimacy apart from its political or constitutional authority, within the ranks of both political parties and the courts. Bureaucratic rule is defended as essential to solving, in a non-partisan way, the problems of modern government and society. But the bureaucracy has become a political faction on behalf of its own interests. ...
... It is no longer clear that the bureaucracy understands itself as the willing servant of its political masters, when the “masters” are perceived as a threat to the administrative state.
In other words—as we see in prog calls for court packing, for abolishing the electoral college, for enacting electoral rules that undermine democratic processes—the ruling class has become openly antagonistic to the very notion of constitutional government and impugns appeals to justice as mere hypocritical power plays intended to protect vested interests—their own interests excluded, of course.
The Real American Crisis
Is it possible to revive the political conditions necessary to make the separation of powers work on behalf of constitutional government? That depends in part on whether anyone is able and willing to mount a theoretical and practical defense of constitutional government and strategically challenge the authority of the intellectual elites.
Such a defense will not be sufficient to recover self-government without a political majority committed to common-sense morality over scientific authority. Yet what is left of public morality is now understood in terms of “values,” or subjective preferences based only on individual will. Even in the small handful of healthy institutions in civil society, the political and civil rights of the ordinary citizen rest upon a precarious foundation, threatened and undermined by the powerful claims of social progress.
Whether it is possible to restore political rule, or even defend the nation in a world established by such “rational” authority, is a question that can no longer be avoided. Technology has universalized the reach of science and social science in a manner that, for many, makes a global order both possible and desirable. Moreover, since rational and intellectual knowledge is itself universal, it seems almost irrational not to seek global uniformity—the rule of rationality at the highest level. For those who think this way, a universal homogenous state is understood to be historically inevitable.
The crisis in legitimacy exposed by Trump and exacerbated by COVID must be understood as a crisis of the sovereignty of the American nation and its people. It was the authority of the people that justified the political order created by the founders—a constitutional order grounded in non-scientific morality. Is that order still defensible?
That political order was founded on the basis of certain self evident truths. The first and most important of those truths is that human beings are natured beings created by God, and the good of human being is to live in accordance with the nature that God has given us. Not any anti-nature that we would choose for ourselves.
The restoration of political rule is an almost impossible task considering the great power of those rationalist structures that now order our world. But many Americans still believe in the freedom of moral choice and deny that history is determined. It is not yet clear what forces—intellectual, economic, social, and political—will shape the world in the remainder of the twenty-first century. But Trump’s political appeal and the failures of our scientific ruling class have revealed a difficulty that is likely to persist: the tension between technical and political rule.
It remains to be seen if the American people understand or will come to understand themselves as political citizens of the nation-state, or as administrative subjects of a scientific global order. Much depends upon whether the American people have become so dependent upon the administrative state that the overthrow of the established order is not merely difficult, but undesirable. In that case, political self-government, and individual freedom, will cease to be important elements of the American regime.
One sign of hope is that the SCOTUS will, once again this term, take up cases that appear to be direct attacks on the administrative state’s claims to supremacy in the name of expert rule. The other hope is that the war on Russia by the collective and globalist West will backfire to such a degree that the Globalist masters will be discredited, that the hardships they force upon their subjects will cause a rejection of their rule.
As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.
— C.H. Dawson
Mark, I consider this one of your very best and most important posts. This is cartography showing us where we are today as a society and a civilization and how we got here. I greatly appreciate your introduction of and endorsement of Dawson, whose ability to see and project the civilizational "big picture" is amazing and prophetic. I also appreciate that Milan is a great observer of the Trump phenomenon and I agree with his statements and conclusions. Finally, thank you for all your thoughts and observations, including:
"That political order was founded on the basis of certain self evident truths. The first and most important of those truths is that human beings are natured beings created by God, and the good of human being is to live in accordance with the nature that God has given us."
I actually wrote about this in an e-mail to a friend last week. Recognition of God-given (a priori) human nature and its common attributes is not just a prerequisite for the success of OUR political order but for ANY political order. That is why in our time political theories as Conservativism, Socialism, and Liberalism seem so anachronistic and inapplicable - indeed without power against the chaos. I believe the "elites" are grappling with this deficit now. Perhaps this is why according to them we need a new "Transhuman" nature to replace the old "Human Nature." No God necessary when they themselves want to be the Gods and take over his role of engineering the world and all that is in it.