Is There a Future for the West?
In Conscience and Power: The Contest for Civilization in the West, Richard Bishirjian offers an account of “the toxicity of modern social existence” in the United States and Western Europe. He argues that a tension between “a desire of citizens… for justice and the necessities of political order,” between “Western man’s sense of justice and the rule of nation states,” has led us to our contemporary quandaries. Bishirjian’s very Voegelinian claim is that Western man’s sense of justice is borne of the experience of the divine inherited from the ancient Israelites, Greeks, and Romans, and crystallized into the culture and society of Christendom that rose from the ruins of the Roman empire to constitute “First Europe.” That philosophical-theological fretwork, though, has eroded, and “American political culture is experiencing… disorders caused… by its abandonment of the Western philosophical and theological traditions that once shaped what had come to be called ‘Christendom.’” When the American founders laid the groundwork for our nation, they built with materials forged in this rich philosophical and theological tradition. But they also alloyed the construction with material from the Enlightenment, weakening the foundation: “By 1787, the influence of the Enlightenment had transmitted not only those practical concepts of organization and powers, but also viruses that threaten civil society hundreds of years later. Today, American democracy is dealing with the symptoms of the cancers those viruses have caused.” The foundations of political order in Western nations are crumbling due to loss of beliefs, habits, and traditions rooted in experience of the divine.
The book advances arguments and notions that are basically sound, evincing an appreciation of the spiritual and philosophical scaffolding, the foundational experiences of transcendence and order, that undergird a decent and tolerably just society. Bishirjian provides a helpful survey of great thinkers and actors in Western history, and points to the significance of philosophical-theological underpinnings of culture, governance, and politics. He likewise offers an informative account of ideas and movements that have eroded Americans’ and Westerners’ experience of and connection to the transcendent source of our cultural and political inheritance. Yet, while the sprawling narrative raises numerous interesting points, it raises too many issues to fit the pieces into a cohesive assessment of our unmoored age and where to look for hope and renewal. In particular, the book’s assessment of American constitutionalism lacks clarity, and its focus on higher education as the source of cultural and theological renewal does not address the fundamental need for a return to the experience of the divine on which a recovery of order and hope can be built.
Whither Goes Western Man?
Conscience and Power bracingly confronts big questions of political theory: what attitudes, beliefs, and practices lead to political order, justice, flourishing, and peace? What mentalities instead lead to political decay? What experiences and habits conduce to the wellbeing of a free people? How do political orders decline and fall? What is the state of American democracy, and what is its trajectory? In addition to offering an account of our path from First Europe to modern decadence, Bishirjian turns to great commentators on politics, society, and education to answer these questions: Alexis de Tocqueville, the less-well-known conservative political theorist Francis Graham Wilson, and social critic Alan Bloom. With the loss of experience of the divine and the philosophical-theological framework of Christendom has come the advent of “political religions”—converging streams of neo-Gnosticism that posit a human-centered universe, without reference to higher purpose, power, or authority. The Enlightenment and the contractarian theories that flow from it undermine the cohesiveness and decency of our social and political order.
The work displays the author’s broad reading in political theory and history. Readers unfamiliar with political theory and the insightful critiques of democracy, materialism, and Enlightenment modernity the author discusses will be well served by this survey of ancient, medieval, and modern political and social theory. Yet, the book’s breadth is also a weakness; at times it presents a litany or catalogue of important personalities and figures who have helped shape the intellectual and social climate in different eras and our own. The book exhibits the opposite problem from works purporting to pinpoint a single important thinker or figure who led us to where we are, say Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Rousseau. The reader of Conscience and Power comes away with a sense that all that has come before has shaped our present moment—true, but not necessarily helpful for diagnosis.
The tendency toward litany and extraneous discussion buries the intriguing theme of tension between conscience and power, political pragmatism and transcendent justice, that Bishirjian describes as the heart of Western political thought and experience. The early chapters are clear about how the tension between conscience and power emerged in the context of the Israelite and Greco-Roman polities and in Christendom, but how this tension has become manifest and shaped our gnostic-humanist age is less clear—except perhaps to suggest that we have devolved into pure pragmatism. The theme gets lost in the wide-ranging survey of thinkers, the analysis of democracy, and the critique of “the left university,” dominating the later portion of the book. A more disciplined focus on this tension in Western thought would have improved the book.
How We Got Here
Bishirjian’s account of the road to our present social and political woes winds through the rise of what he calls new forms of Gnosticism and attendant “political religions” they have birthed. What these new ersatz religions, both intellectual and mass movements, have in common with ancient Gnosticism is that they deify humanity. Renaissance Hermeticism, derived from a Neo-Platonist recovery of the works of Hermes Trismegistus in the fifteenth century and Idealist Humanism, chiefly expressed in the works of Immanuel Kant, converged to form the basis of mass movements and intellectual approaches deify man and reject the ancient Greek and Christian philosophical-theological notion of the transcendent, divine source of order and authority. The “atheist humanism,” of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, to borrow the coinage of Fr. Henri de Lubac, S. J., radicalized tendencies within Renaissance Hermeticism and Idealist Humanism to abandon any notion of a spiritual or transcendent reality, advancing an overtly political religion with a materialist, immanent frame.
The political religions, taken together, introduced a new morality of self-fulfillment, based on individual autonomy and self-assertion. This new version of liberty is perhaps best encapsulated in U.S. Supreme Court’s dictum in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The opportunity to define our own meaning, without reference to a genuine experience of transcendence, turns out to be a crushing burden, rather than a liberating prospect.
As a second stream flowing into the river of modern ills, equally focused on the individual to the exclusion of the transcendent order of which he is part, Bishirjian cites the incorporation of Enlightenment-derived social contract theory in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau into the American political ethos:
Unfortunately, though convenient for the movement toward independence of the British colonies in America from the British Crown, Social Contract political theory is not philosophically sound. In other words, the Framers utilized ideas that would come back later to threaten destruction of civil society in the American Republic.
Here, the book runs into the same pitfalls that plague other attempts to conflate Hobbesian social contract theory with Locke’s version and with a general over-attribution of modern ills to social contract theory. I agree that social contract theory is philosophically unsound, but that does not prove it is the source of modern society’s individualism, statism, and attendant problems Bishirjian critiques. Rather, many other sources and forms of liberalism that are opposed to social contract theory—including the liberalism of John Stuart Mill and Progressivism, each of which present a theory of organic social change that is much less rights-focused than social contract liberalism, have contributed much to the contemporary zeitgeist.
No doubt Lockean liberalism—much more than the contractarian thinking of Hobbes or Rousseau—has left its mark in the American political tradition and may have contributed to the individualism upon which Tocqueville commented. Yet, Lockean individualism did not obstruct the development of a political and legal theory in the American states and towns of a robust conception of the common good and regulation in the public interest evident throughout the nineteenth century, as historian William Novak documents in The People’s Welfare.
Virtues and Viruses of American Constitutionalism
Bishirjian’s treatment of Locke illustrates the deep ambivalence about American constitutionalism, particularly its classical liberal elements, that pervades the book. On the one hand, Bishirjian appreciates the “American defense of the Constitution as a fixed body of law founded on a philosophy of limited government” (147) and references the study of “classical liberalism,” including Locke, that Thomas Jefferson and others in the founding generation drew from in a positive light. He writes that “Liberty, which we Americans cherish, originates in Christianity and religious truth.” At the same time, his argument is that the American founding transmitted Enlightenment-derived viruses that plague our social order today, and he highlights the twentieth century Spanish traditionalists’ critique of freedom of religion that Francis Graham Wilson recovered, specifically of the First Amendment.
No doubt, there are good reasons for ambivalence. The great Russian thinker Alexander Solzhenitsyn critiqued the Lockean idea that governments are instituted among men to secure men’s freedom and their pursuit of happiness, trumpeted in the American Declaration of Independence. But the argument that “viruses that threaten civil society” have been transmitted into the American order from its founding, alongside sturdy, vital elements, requires more teasing out. Which parts are virtues, and which viruses? A complication here is that the same institutional frameworks and principles—limited government, for example—could be justified through different philosophical-theological approaches. Certainly, an Enlightenment-inspired, rights-based theory of government can generate support for limited government, but so could a theory of divine ordination and requirements of justice. It could also be the case that the foundations are based on sound principles, but they have accrued new meanings in the course of our history that have undermined their soundness. In particular, they have become unmoored from the idea of divine authority and ownership of human beings on which Locke based his understanding of unalienable natural rights.
Surely, as Bishirjian argues, there are lessons to be learned from the experience of France and Spain, as transmitted from Tocqueville and Wilson. Yet, we might wonder how applicable those lessons are to twenty-first century America, with the predominance of the English and Protestant influence in the foundations of American culture and institutions. Tocqueville thought lessons could be learned from antebellum America for France—one of them being that the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty are not at odds, as many critics of the French Revolution believed. In this and other ways, the American experience has not tracked the convulsive French political experience, leading to laïcité. As the German historian Friedrich von Gentz pointed out, the French and American revolutions had very different principles and goals, and the connection Bishirjian draws between Locke’s influence among the American patriots and the French experience is highly tenuous: “John Locke became the patron saint of the American revolution. But revolutions do not stop where we want them and in France during the reign of Louis XVI, the revolution took a new turn toward violence and terror.”
The Spanish conservatives’ criticisms of religious freedom and separation of church and state also contradict Tocqueville’s assessment that it was precisely these arrangements that allowed religion to remain robust and influential, even describing religion as “the first of America’s political institutions.” Some political economists of religion have made related arguments about the damaging effects of religious monopolies for religion, and, as Ross Douthat has written, it’s far from clear that states with established churches have promoted religious adherence better than those without.
So, while an ambivalence toward the American constitutional tradition, particularly its classical liberal elements, is understandable, greater clarity and elaboration is needed to support the book’s case that the abandonment of Christendom-based philosophical-theological principles, present at the creation. The idea of religious freedom may be reasonably seen as part and parcel of the American tradition of limited government based, as Bishirjian suggests, on Christian ideas on the distinction between church and state, the limited role of the state with regard to religious doctrine, and respect for human liberty. The centrality of Christian moral and spiritual truths to the American founding and the early state-level church establishments notwithstanding, prominent strands of the American tradition of limited government and liberty thus constitute a rejection of key elements of Christendom as instantiated in First Europe.
Higher Education, Daimonic Souls, and the Recovery of Order
Higher education plays an important role in Bishirjian’s account: a contrast between the classically-informed education of American founders such as James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson and the left university is woven throughout the work. Drawing on Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and James Piereson’s Shattered Consensus, along with reports and data from the Heterodox Academy and other sources, the book paints a picture of a university system increasingly dominated by voices on the left, unmoored from its original purpose of preserving and transmitting a tradition, discerning and applying the wisdom available from study of the Western patrimony, bedazzled instead by the lure of the German-style research university, and more recently by activism. While the picture may be somewhat alarmist, in general it seems accurate.
As Bishirjian points out, many of the great American institutions of higher education, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, began as religious institutions, primarily for training clergy, and have abandoned that original purpose. That’s an important point, and it points to major change in American higher education. But it says something not only about the secularization of the university, but about a change in American society. In a society with little demand for ministers, there will be little incentive to provide a supply of them. If ministry is not valued and honored, there will be less incentive for young people to become men of the cloth.
Tracking with the focus on higher education, the solutions in the book focus on reclaiming higher education and building alternative institutions for reclaiming the philosophical-theological patrimony of the West. Bishirjian is right to focus on long-term cultural change and urge those with means to support existing institutions pushing against secularization and preserving the liberal arts and also to build new institutions. At the same time, the book ultimately points beyond higher education to daimonic souls—souls open to the experience of the divine—to catalyze spiritual renewal. These souls are not likely to be found among elites but among blue-collar workers and humble professionals. For cultivating daimonic souls, then, we might do better to focus on classical schools, Christian education at the lower levels, and participation in the church.
Openness to contact with God’s presence, with experience of the divine, seems to be the deepest need of our society, as the book argues. As the story about St. Thomas Aquinas, exemplar of the intellectual and spiritual achievement of First Europe, goes, after a mystical experience during Mass in his 48th year, he said, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” Bishirjian identifies the gnawing existential, experiential weakness eroding the foundations of contemporary Western society. No doubt, reclaiming and revisiting the best of the Western patrimony and an energetic embrace of liberal Christian learning in higher education will be part of the solution, but the problem runs deeper and demands an existential, experiential response. The recent hints of spiritual and religious revival on college campuses may suggest signs of hope for a generation yearning and reaching for “the warm hand of God.”
Conscience and Power: The Contest for Civilization in the West
By Richard Bishirjian
St. Louis: En Route Books & Media, 2023; 241pp
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