Modern Words

Downward Progress

We were intrigued the other day to read what was intended to be a damning criticism of a US politician.

The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.

 “More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said.  “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he’s saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing.”

Imagine we attended Harvard Law School as a tyro, but with a deep conviction that the world was over 70 percent ocean.  Now, years later, replete with a Harvard Law degree, years of life experience, and presumably wiser, we still hold the same view: that the earth’s surface is predominately water.  Critics could doubtless allege that we were closed minded, of “calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.” 

Whilst the slur would be expectorated full of sound and fury, it would signify precisely nothing.  Well, actually, it would signify something about the person doing the slurring.  Let’s deconstruct.
  Has the makeup of the earth’s crust changed?  Have the facts changed, such that what was once believed to be the case has now been demonstrated not to be so.  Have the fundamental realities of global geography changed?  Not at all.  So, to hold to what one believed thirty or forty years ago reveals not a man who is “dangerously impervious to the facts” but, on the contrary, someone rational and sane. 

Or, maybe the detractors believe that nothing in this life is certain and that the facts keep changing constantly. Who knows.  But if that were to be the case, then it is the animadverters who end up empty minded, for whatever they think and opine today we can be certain that tomorrow “it ain’t so”. 

Artfully suppressed behind all this, however, lies a deeper ideological and philosophical commitment–a belief in evolution, progress, pragmatism, and dialectical advance.  Mankind is moving forward and upward.  Darwin said it were so.  Progress is the one secular force of history that cannot be thwarted.  In this ideological framework one can understand why it is a damning indictment to be accused of still thinking the same things you thought as a teenage tyro.  It would indicate arrested development, a less-than-human state.  It would make you more like a tree than a human being, non? 

No-one contradicts the ideal of growing in wisdom and maturity as the years pass.  The Apostle Paul talked of doing childish things when he was a child, but when he grew to adulthood, he put away childish things.  One expects that an adult will think differently about many things than they did as a child.  One expects a person in the crowning glory of older-age wisdom to be much more advanced in their opinions and wisdom than a twenty year old something infatuated with celebritism, for instance. 

But where you draw the lines is critical.  Some “development” is devolvement.  When the Commentariat accuses a person of having a “calcified” mind, one suspects they are alleging the target is guilty of today’s ultimate ideological sin–to be a denier of modern verities such as evolutionism, or secularism, or dialecticism.  In which case the “wisdom” of age they are referring to–of which they seem themselves as avatars–is actually the devolved idiocy of dotage.  They are the ones showing themselves prematurely senile.
 Take, for example, some of the hot ideological lightning rods of our day.  Firstly, abortion.  If a person was once an agnostic on the matter of killing the unborn, but now holds the view that its the just and righteous thing to do, he has devolved.  He has become more animalistic, less human, less like God.  His mind has become calcified into a state of ignorance. On the contrary, if a person, as a young man, rejected abortion as a vile act of murder, and forty years later not only holds to the same view, but holds it more strongly with an entire lifestyle bent against it, then he is more enlightened than he was as a teenager. 

Or again, if a person as a young man held the view that theft was sinful and usually a criminal act, but now holds the view in later life that the state extracting from some to bestow upon others is likewise theft and sinfully criminal, his thinking has become developed, refined, purified and more advanced.  He has made progress, not just intellectually but spiritually.  But if a man as a teenager held to the view that theft was an evil act, but now as an adult advocates for government expropriating from some to distribute to others, his thinking has degenerated; he has ethically devolved.  Far from making progress, he has descended further into the abyss.  He is farther from the exit to the labyrinth in mature years than he was as a young man. 

Much of what the world calls progress is actually devolution and moral regression.  In the hands and minds of the morally degenerating, “progress” has instead become an idol of destruction, a deadly thing of worship.  Thus, President Woodrow Wilson:

Progress!  Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one?  No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself . . . . Progress, development,–those are modern words.  The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new.”  [Cited in Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.162.]

How prescient those words were.  How damning they have become.  The people have turned away from the Living God to something “new”.  Except, all they have done is turned back to the Baals, to the stupid, dumb gods of a former benighted era.  And they and their age have become like them, as stupid, as dumb, as benighted.  Progressive.  Enlightened. New.  These have become modern words to serve ancient dank, dark, and depraved deities.  No progress there.  Just calcified minds.

Hollow Progress

 In Need of Mercy

Christians believe in progress.  For good reason.  They believe in things getting better because they believe in God, Who is the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of all things.  In other words, the Christian view of progress is decidedly non-secular. 

Redemptive history reveals at the earliest beginnings that without God, human history becomes a maelstrom of self-destructive evil.  The covenant God subsequently made with Noah assures us that never again would He permit evil to become universally regnant upon the earth.  Progress becomes at least possible in a world where evil is constantly being restrained from its worst excesses.

Secondly, the Bible declares God’s providential control and sustenance of His creation.  He loves what He has made, and hates the despoilation wrought by wickedness.  He feeds the animals and cares for them.  He sets boundaries for the sea.  He brings the life-giving sequence of the seasons. 

Thirdly, He has settled the reign over all things upon His Son, Who has come into human history to cast out the Devil and destroy all his works.  This gives a certain assurance of historical progress.
  In the end, the entirety of creation will be released from the burden that sin has placed upon it.  There is absolutely no doubt that this is happening and will continue happen.  It is as certain and rock-solid as God Himself and His oaths and covenant.  The only doubts about this come from our sinful impatience.  Things are not improving as fast as we would like–therefore, maybe, progress is chimerical, or so we are tempted to think from time to time. 

The ancient world had no belief in progress.  It was a distinctly Christian doctrine. This, from

Robert W. Merry’s review of John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

. . . the power of the progress idea stems in part from the fact that it derives from a fundamental Christian doctrine—the idea of providence, of redemption. Gray notes in The Silence of Animals that no other civilization conceived any such phenomenon as the end of time, a concept given to the world by Jesus and St. Paul. Classical thinking, as well as the thinking of the ancient Egyptians and later of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Shintoism and early Judaism, saw humanity as reflecting the rest of the natural world—essentially unchanging but subject to cycles of improvement and deterioration, rather like the seasons. “By creating the expectation of a radical alteration in human affairs,” writes Gray, “Christianity . . . founded the modern world.”

The modern world secularized this doctrine of  progress, stripping out all its Christian underpinnings.   The engine of progress was to be Man, freed from the constraints of religious myths and superstitions, cool, calm, calculating–above all, rational.  The humanist utopia beckoned.  Many in the nineteenth century believed fervently that it was almost upon them.  But now only fools and horses now still cling to the idea of secular progress.  A rising living standard and material progress does not a utopia make.

The apostles of secular humanism assured us all that progress included human nature.  By reason we would all be redeemed and human nature would be perfected.  We would evolve to a new order.

The noted British historian J. B. Bury (1861–1927) captured the power of this intellectual development when he wrote, “This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and institutions . . . laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.”

We must pause here over this doctrine of progress. It may be the most powerful idea ever conceived in Western thought—emphasizing Western thought because the idea has had little resonance in other cultures or civilizations. It is the thesis that mankind has advanced slowly but inexorably over the centuries from a state of cultural backwardness, blindness and folly to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and civilization—and that this human progression will continue indefinitely into the future. “No single idea,” wrote the American intellectual Robert Nisbet in 1980, “has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western civilization.” The U.S. historian Charles A. Beard once wrote that the emergence of the progress idea constituted “a discovery as important as the human mind has ever made, with implications for mankind that almost transcend imagination.” And Bury, who wrote a book on the subject, called it “the great transforming conception, which enables history to define her scope.”

To which we respond with a Chestertonian belly laugh.

The Christian view of history to this point has the course of the world fundamentally changing with the resurrection and ascension and session of our Lord Jesus Christ.  From that time onwards all would belong to Him and would answer to Him.  Under His aegis the West saw the emergence of the first Christendom.  It has broken down now, riven with apostasy and defalcation.  Thus, we see illustrated that the Christian doctrine of progress, whilst believing in its ultimate inevitability, does not make it automatic.  Human progress depends upon fidelity to Christ and faithfulness to His covenant.  When men come to see themselves as smarter, not just than the average bear, but of Christ Himself, consequences follow.  Judicial consequences.  We begin to taste the bitter fruits of the curses of the divine covenants, which are as certain and sure as their blessings.

So passes the West today.  Its ideologies have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of human souls; it literally tears apart the bodies of its own children; unable now to replace its dying populations; it has become its own Black Death–a plague spread not by literal rats, but by ideological rodents of its own making.    

What will take the curse from us?  Or, more accurately, who will remove it?  There is only One given amongst men to do this thing.  Only the Lord Himself can remove this curse we have brought upon ourselves.  It is to Him that the West must turn, in humility and repentance and simple child-like belief. His invitation and command remains true: “come unto me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)

May the Lord have mercy upon us all.