Reno On the Social Effects of Banishing The Strong Gods
In my last post, I described what R. R. Reno believes motivated the banishing of the strong gods, as well as the ideas that made that process happen. In this post, I’ll be reviewing what he sees as the consequences. One of the strong gods to be banished was the idea that communities are a sacred thing, and that individuals have obligations to uphold the well-being of their community and that the community has some claim to the loyalty of an individual living within in. This was acutely criticized by Karl Popper: We are tempted to imagine our collective life as in some sense sacred, giving the community a rightful claim upon our loyalty. Popper regards this as “magical” thinking, a form of “anti-humanitarian propaganda.” Strong notions of truth – not just moral truths, but even factual truths – are also strong gods. Turning to a weaker god of diminished, personal, or provisional “truth” prevents the kind of certitude that breeds fanaticism and motivates atrocities. Strong truths, the kind that are accepted as sacred and are considered unacceptable to question, “command our loyalty rather than being open to critical questioning and empirical falsification.” Because of this, the idea of strong truths needed to be rejected. This rejection of strong truths is more subtle than simply embracing blanket skepticism, even regarding issues of morality. Reno writes: Our moment is not one of thoroughgoing relativism or strict renunciation of moral principles. Instead, it encourages ways of thinking and social norms that are less burdened with pressing truths, giving us more elbow room to formulate our own bespoke views of the meaning of life while draining the demanding passions out of public affairs…It makes us less likely to rally around collective loyalties that fuel an aggressive politics prone to conflict and conducive to oppressive measures. Strong respect for inherited traditions, too, is a strong god in need of banishing: The “never-again” imperative imposes an overriding and unending duty to banish the traditionalists, who are loyal to the strong gods that are thought to have caused so much suffering and death. As the students rioting in Paris in 1968 insisted, “It is forbidden to forbid.” Those who forbid must be censured and silenced – for the sake of an open society. In the modern mind, the goal is not the pursuit of unifying and binding truths, but the discovery of personal meaning. Binding truth is a strong god, and disagreement over such truths can drive division. Personal meaning is a weak god – it puts up no borders between what is or isn’t acceptable. But as a weak god, it also provides no real guidance on how to lead a meaningful life: Just what we were to grow toward remained vague, as it must when metaphysical questions are held at bay…Man is to progress toward “greater meaning,” self-actualization, and autonomy – “liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves,” as Hillary Rodman declared to her fellow graduates of Wellesley College in 1969. Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development culminates in a post-conventional moral code that is at once deeply personal and universal. But precisely because it is post-conventional, one cannot teach young people the content of this code, the pinnacle of moral development – that would make it into a social convention. One can only urge young people in the direction of ever-greater “growth” and “development.” To tell people there is a specific goal they should be growing toward runs the risk of declaring some ways of living to be better or more desirable or more respectable than others – and this is an affront to the weak gods of openness and nonjudgmental acceptance. Reno sees great harm coming from this. In the end, humans beings simply are what we are. There aren’t many ways to live that lead us to thrive, but “the pathways of disenchantment are countless.” The strong gods of inherited cultural traditions helped to guide people through life in a time-tested way that leads to fulfillment and happiness – not perfectly so, but as well as can be expected in an imperfect human existence. Denying the value of this inheritance, declaring there are no truths that we can jointly hold to be self-evident and you must go off and discover meaning for yourself, leaves people adrift and listless about how to live: One conversation stands out. A younger friend, agonizing over the choices he faced in life, asked for advice. I told him I couldn’t help very much. For me, life has been like a train ride. The engine of strong cultural norms pulled me through life’s stages: college, job, marriage, children. In its time, the train will take me to retirement and, of course, death. He replied, “No, no—life’s not like that anymore. Now it’s a sailboat that you pilot first this way and then that in order to make your way to the destination of your own choosing.” It struck me as an exhausting way to live. More frustrating to Reno is the fact that the intellectual and cultural elites who advocate for the weak gods do not themselves live in the way they advocate: They may join in the chorus that condemns traditional norms as authoritarian, but they keep their marriages together, and their families look like traditional ones. In other words, they share the basic human desire to protect one’s children, to secure one’s patrimony, to sustain and transmit a living inheritance. They shelter themselves and those whom they love – a natural and healthy impulse. The problem is that what our most powerful and capable fellow citizens do in private is at odds with what they insist upon in public. But the rule of the weak gods has more implications than its impact on social life. It also has considerable political implications. We’ll look at what Reno has to say about that in the next post. (0 COMMENTS)