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1989 – not "The End of History"

We have been facing and are facing a huge social vacuum which is a spiritual vacuum. Every society is like a three legged stool. One leg is the political order, the other is the economic order, and the third is the spiritual order. Take one of those legs away and the stool crashes. That is certainly true of countries in the West. And the utter folly of the post 1989 world and the end of the Cold War (against the Soviet Union and its Marxist allies) was this: the belief, by emerging global elites, that we had reached the end of history – the evolutionary eschaton had arrived – in 1989. That - The End of History - was the title of an article for the journal The National Interest, in the summer of 1989, by Francis Fukuyama. He writes:

in it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the 'end point of mankind's ideological evolution' and the 'final form of human government,' and as such constituted the 'end of history' … While some present-day countries might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.

That article then became the book published in 1992 as The End of History and the Last Man and was reissued in 2012 in a celebratory 20th anniversary edition.

That essay and the ideas in that book, I fear may have been a factor in Hilary Clinton's promotion of the Arab Spring and with the support for liberal (or libertarian) democracy in Egypt. That, we now know, inevitably resulted, after the uprising and the removal of President Mubarak, in the election of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mr Morsi; and that, we now know, inevitably resulted in the military government of Mr el-Sisi and the imprisonment of Mr Morsi. Tragically all this has resulted in more repression, division and death in the country, than under Mr Mubarak's original presidency. Mubarak recently, in February 2020, died with an announcement of three days national mourning – such is the reversal in Egypt!

The Arab Spring and democracy without Christianity

The Arab Spring supported by the West has resulted in 100,000s of deaths in the Middle East. Of course, most of those are, and have been in, and related, to Syria which is in an utterly tragic situation. But is it not all partly because of the idolizing of liberal democracy in unstable societies and a failure to distinguish between authoritarian and totalitarian dictators by Western progressive thinkers, like Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton in the US and David Cameron and, then, Theresa May in the UK? We now can see that at this time those four were in the grip of secular libertarianism, with Cameron and May's imposing homosexual marriage at home (and seeking to export it – certainly to Kenya), while Obama and Clinton were attempting to impose secular libertarian democracy abroad. Thank God, the UK Parliament by a whisker vote, prevented Cameron endorsing the policy of Western missiles raining down on Damascus in support of such libertarian democracy. More importantly those four were failing to get back to the drawing board and doing some hard thinking about the inherited tradition of Christian political philosophy and ethics which, at this very time, was having a resurgence in the United States and led by Roman Catholics but supported by a significant number of Evangelicals.

Years before, a warning of a blind acceptance of democracy without the Christian tradition was given by Lord Selborne in the House of Lords in 1944. With Hitler still undefeated, Lord Selborne was speaking in the debate on the famous 1944 Education Bill – I mentioned this once before at a Jesmond Conference. Lord Selborne said that Anglo-Saxon democracy cannot function – listen -

unless it is based on the Christian Ethic; and if it is transplanted to a country where that ethic is rejected, it would wither and die amid great human suffering.

But what about the Anglo-Saxon world itself now? The answer is, "it is creaking" for the problem with the West is with that third leg of the national three legged stool – the spiritual leg.

Liberal democracy, as it has evolved and become libertarian, has (to continue the analogy) been shaving the wood off the third leg until it is pencil thin and about to snap.

The Naked Public Square

In 1984 (forty years after Lord Selborne's speech, and an iconic year after George Orwell's book of that title) Richard Neuhaus wrote The Naked Public Square. It was arguing, to quote one commentator, that "politics" …

… had lost religious and ethical substance, partly by Christianity's increasing tendency to play down its claims to proclaim public truth and its willingness to be confined to the domestic and individual sphere; [and] partly by secular, pluralist society's inability to assert agreed goals and values, a 'public philosophy', or a 'public theology'. As Neuhaus points out, a public square from which the demon of an official orthodoxy has been expelled may be swept and garnished ready for seven devils each worse than the first to enter.

Neuhaus was writing from America. The philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, and an Englishman, had actually seen warning signs in 1956 in a broadcast entitled A Society without a Metaphysic. He then, in 1967 wrote Secularization and Moral Change and in 1981 he then wrote his famous study, After Virtue.

In 1956 he argued we had a traditional morality (a hang-over from Christian belief) to which people could appeal. But the underlying philosophy or theology was absent. In 1967 he argued that Christianity was still there but by a slender thread. By 1981 the thread had snapped and by 2009 in his book God, Philosophy and the Universities he argues that the result now is incoherence. The Financial Times' review of this 21st century book said that MacIntyre argues …

… that philosophy, and its close ally, theology, make a university what it should be – a 'universe' of knowledge. [But] universities today, MacIntyre complains, keep their disciplines separate. Hence, students are being trained up for specialized job opportunities rather than for life, while research programmes fail to make connections across the broad span of neighbouring subjects. He advocates that theology should listen to, and be in constant conversation with, every other academic discipline if universities are to fulfil their function as places where students and teachers explore what it means to be human.

Well, how does all this relate to the modern secular pluralistic world of 21st century Britain?

Pluralism

But what is "pluralism"? Let me give you the late Peter Berger's definition:

It is a social situation in which people with different ethnicities, worldviews, and moralities live together peacefully and interact with each other amicably. The last phrase is important. It makes little sense to speak of pluralism if people do not talk with each other – for instance, where people do interact but only as masters and slaves, or where they live in sharply segregated communities and only interact in exclusively economic relations. For pluralism to unleash its full dynamic, there must be sustained conversation, not necessarily between equals, but extended in time and covering a broad range of subjects.

What is the result of this? Inevitably what Berger elsewhere calls cognitive contamination.

[By the way, this is all so relevant for the discussions going on in the General Synod, under the title "Living in Love and Faith" with the aim of "good disagreement" – Berger's "amicable interaction"; and it is relevant for our entire educational system not least including relationships education].

Such cognitive contamination means compromise and dilution; and pluralism produces such contamination as an ongoing condition. There are, therefore, ethnic, worldview and moral compromises and deconstruction all around. The least problematic are ethnic compromises; the more, or very, serious compromises are worldview or moral compromises.

However, playing with a straight bat, for the Christian, pluralism can be a good thing for evangelism. Paul discovered that in Athens. Greco-Roman Hellenism (anathema to Judas Maccabaeus and which still flourished in the urban centres of the Roman Empire in New Testament times) was a very distinctive form of pluralism and very important for the course of European civilization. For it enabled the spread of the Christian Faith from its tiny beginnings in Palestine. This was Paul's experience on his second missionary journey that took in the ancient city of Athens where he addressed this very issue of pluralism in his sermon there to the city elders (Acts 17.22-23):

Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects [plural] of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

Paul preaches the gospel

Then after allusions to Greek literature and God as our creator, whose power and deity, Paul believed, like the basic moral law could be known generally through the fact of the created order (Romans 1.19-20), he preached the gospel. He spoke about God's creation, and, importantly, of his creation of the nation state so that somehow people would have yearnings for God and his nearness to every person. Then he explained how everyone needed to repent,

because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

And he had different reactions. Some mocked him. Others wanted to hear more. But some come to faith in Christ –

some men joined him and believed, among whom was Dionysus the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with him" (Acts 17.34)

Well, we now live in a "modern" pluralistic world but with few admitting, like those Athenians, their "many objects of worship." How does that affect our Christian life in the public square?

Being modern, because of changes brought about by science and technology, we experience accelerating changes affecting more and more areas of human life requiring more human choices – regarding marriage, children, work, entertainment. domicile and so on.

But at a certain point multiplying choices is unbearable. We cannot live with every action taken needing a choice. So to make life bearable, institutions are developed. They can be defined as …

… providing the programmes of action that instincts fail to provide. They provide areas of stability, where the individual can act almost automatically and without much reflection, and at the same time they make possible another area in which the individual is free to make choices.

Deinstitutionalization

Arnold Gehlen, the social theorist of institutions called those two areas, the "background" and the "foreground" of human social life. The background is heavily institutionalized, the foreground is deinstitutionalized. And this is needed for social life to continue.

Pluralism, of course, leads to the expansion of "foreground" at the expense of the "background" and institutions, particularly in the area of religion. And for many free spirits the first deinstitutionalizing of any area of life may seem exhilarating. But it doesn't last. In time it can bring mounting anxiety (we know this happens when young people come to our Universities).

And by multi-faith teaching in our schools, children, unless from Christian homes or at Christian schools (of which faithful ones are less and less), are destabilized as the Christian faith is deinstitutionalized. That is why we don't have atheists, but we have "none's" by the million in the opinion polls. They don't know what to believe with any confidence.

So pluralism undermines many of the certainties by which human beings used to live. And in the West, at the moment, there is a massive deinstitutionalization of the Christian faith that has left us with the vacuum that Richard Neuhaus drew to our attention in 1986.

However, this is an invitation to various Fundamentalisms to fill the gap and not Christian ones.

Fundamentalism

Now, Fundamentalism is by no means an exclusively religious category. With the demise of religion, in the conventional sense, there are various secular fundamentalisms seeking to fill the gap. Peter Berger writes:

Just about any idea or practice can become the foundation of a fundamentalist project … What all these projects have in common is a promise to the potential convert: 'Come join us, and you will have the certainty you have long desired. You will understand the world, you will know who you are and you will know how to live.' Of course an observer may think that this or that project is based on illusion, but this is neither here nor there. If the invitation to join is accepted, the promise of redemptive certainty is likely to be fulfilled. If you are willing to accept the cognitive and normative assumptions of the project, and if you can continue to do so over time, you will indeed live with a new sense of conviction. But this sense will be vulnerable, as compared to the tranquil conviction of pre-modern humanity.A closer look at reactionary fundamentalism will make this clearer. There is a great difference between the tradition [in the West the Christian tradition] and any neo-traditionalisms. For pre-modern human beings, worldview and value-system are taken for granted, and no reflection or decision is necessary. Of course, there may be strictures directed against outsiders, but people firmly rooted in a tradition can afford a certain amount of tolerance to those who don't share the tradition. Neo-traditionalists cannot afford such tolerance. For them the tradition is not simply given, they have chosen it – and they cannot forget this. Consequently they may loudly affirm the[ir new] tradition, just as the genuine pre-modern person once did, but there will be an undertone of uncertainty that makes for a very different situation. [Such] Fundamentalists are aggressive in the same measure as they are vulnerable.

This is so true of the ideology that is homosexual Fundamentalism and, sadly, the ideology that is climate change Fundamentalism too, both of which seem to have become new religions for too many people. Of course, many people with homosexual temptations need help and, of course, there is climate change; the genuine debate aggressively denied is over carbon, which the Club of Rome in 1989 needed as a human cause – and the one thing necessary.

The Club of Rome and secularism

The Club of Rome, of course, is a symptom of our problems. In 1968, a group of thirty individuals from ten countries, scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists and national and international civil servants – gathered in Rome. I quote from the forward to their report of 1972, The Limits to Growth:

They met at the instigation of Dr Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrial manager, economist, and man of vision, to discuss a subject of staggering scope – the present and future predicament of man.

Out of this meeting grew the Club of Rome – an "invisible college" some called it. Its purposes, I quote:

… are to foster understanding of the varied but interdependent components – economic, political, natural, and social – that make up the global system in which we all live.

Notice, no mention of Christianity or religion or spirituality. Yet the object to be studied was "the present and future predicament of man"!

The "predicament" among other things, they said, was the population explosion. So the message coming from the report was "don't have children." This has been disastrous for Japan and Europe especially, but also Russia, China and, even, Singapore among others. There seems to have been a failure to foresee the issue of "demographic momentum" with that message. "Demographic momentum" means the population level will increase until the last replacement generation dies off, then chaos. For example, in China it will mean for one-child-families, one person being economically responsible for seven people – him or herself, two parents and four grandparents.

Climate Change

However, of significance to us is that in 1991 the Club of Rome met again and published The First Global Revolution. This was dealing with the modern world in the light of the Berlin Wall coming down and all else that took place in 1989. There is much good in the report. It went wrong when the need was seen for a new project to unite the world, with the end of the Cold War and no longer a common enemy to unite everyone. The Club of Rome decided that the defeat of Global Warming was such a project; but, of course, it had to have a human cause. I quote (page 85) and under the heading The Common Enemy of Humanity is Man.

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we suggested that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions, these phenomena constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

Jesus Christ and human sin as such never appear in the book. What has happened? Why are there almost no references to God? Why has Climate Science become a new Fundamentalism and taken over publicly for many, not least the young, the place of religion? And like a religion its "priesthood" forbids "blasphemy"; so scientists, while admitting Climate Change, cannot even question the issue of carbon dioxide being the major cause. They are no-platformed and banned from the BBC.

Why is this? It is to do with a fantasy, that has bewitched educated people in the English speaking world for over 100 years.

Max Weber and Science as a Vocation

One of the most significant occasion in the modern-age was just at the end of the first world-war. It was a lecture by Max Weber entitled "Science as a Vocation" delivered at the University of Munich in December 1918. It was a time of much political, social and religious confusion. The distinguished French philosopher, Pierre Manent, says this, together with the subsequent lecture, I quote,

are among the most impressive and influential writings of the twentieth century".

And for our purposes this first lecture is by far the most important. Speaking to students and colleagues in the University, Weber asks himself what his duty is as a professor and what his students and others can demand of him. He answers as follows:

One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems.

This, of course, is the origin of the famous distinction between "facts" and "values" with facts being able to be discussed in public because all are agreed on "facts" with science, so it is said, being the most factual of all things. And these facts are public truths. But values are what we think about facts - whether they are good or bad, desirable or undesirable and so on. Therefore, it is said, these depend on our judgements which are not provable; so need to be private truths. Take the fact of a water-fall – is it beautiful or not? Do we not say, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". So its beauty can't be a "public" truth in the same way we can say that the composition of a waterfall being of H2O is a public truth. Its beauty is a private truth and the result of the subjective view of an individual. And Pierre Manent, in a 2006 publication says, now "this constitutes in some way our official doctrine."

And this is why fundamentally "God", in any meaningful sense, has now been excluded from the Public Square in the West as a reason for any public action or policy. Only utilitarian arguments are felt to be legitimate. These issues will be addressed in the next session. How we respond is for the next session.