About a month ago, Alan Jacobs published an intriguing article in the September issue of Harper’s called “The Watchmen,” subtitled “What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?”
If the subjects of mainstream culture, Christianity and the conversation between the two are interesting for you then definitely give it a read – it’s an ambitious summary of how the influence of Christian voices has declined in popular culture over the past fifty years or so. Alan also delves into some of the reasons why this might have happened, as well as detailing the fallout and what it could mean for folks today.
There were two things, though, that stood out to me while reading the article and they kinda spiralled out into longer reflections.
a) Who (and what) are the watchmen, anyway?
Alan pulls together a number of fantastic musings (both his and others’) on the first few pages about the nature of what an intellectual, or his “watchman,” is.
He starts by name-dropping a sociologist of Hungarian-Jewish descent named Karl Mannheim, who lived in pre-and-early-Nazi Germany up until it became rather uncomfortable for a man of his background to keep doing so. He believed modern intellectuals were people “whose special task is to provide an interpretation of the world,” a “watchman” not in the sense of proto-policefolk in funny hoods but in the mostly literal sense of a person who watches. Alan goes on to define the word more concretely: they were “interested observers whose first job was not to act but to interpret.”
He goes on to talk about how today prominent, mainstream cultural watchpeople aren’t usually what we’d identify as outspoken Christians or interpreters of Christian thought (though I get the sense he’s referring moreso to prominent thinkpiece/blogosphere culture and major mags rather than to, say, Fox News), and how this’s kinda noteworthy because the first half of the twentieth century was full of such examples. Something happened that changed the cultural dynamic for the long haul – he goes into all that at length, though, and so I won’t repeat it here. But there was a thread in his descriptions that kinda raised a persistent blip for me.
Alan follows Karl Mannheim’s flight from Germany to Britain, where he joined a circle of Christian thinkers called “the Moot” (think a political, rather than aesthetic, smattering of Inklings). This gathering’s set up along the same lines as an American version with an absolute thud of a name: the “Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relations to the Democratic Way of Life” (hereafter referred to as the CSPRTTDWL [or “Casperttdowl” {or maybe just “Casper”}]). Both the Moot and Casper observed the Second World War with an increasingly desperate interest, trying to piece together an understanding of what shape the world was contorting itself into – but there was a crucial difference between the two: Casper included non-believers in the discussion.
Jacques Maritain, a name banded about today as a model for modern, aspiring Catholic intellectuals, was part of Casper and (according to Alan here) was inclined against having secular humanists or atheists at the meetings – he felt they wouldn’t be as helpful in sorting out where the moral compass should point for the second half of the century. Another Casper frequenter, Mortimer Adler, agreed and expressed his beliefs more vocally.
Even if one is more likely to believe that openness and a healthy dollop of negative capability will more often than not enrich both thought and action, it does raise questions that seem to need vocalization these days: if a religious person deeply believes certain spiritual precepts are key to understanding helping the world (ones not immediately obvious to a person not belonging to their religious tradition), how should that person relate to the potentially-limited capacity of folks not sharing those beliefs to contribute helpfully to that discussion?
The context here’s concerned with how Judeo-Christians relate to intellectual atheists or secular humanists, but the opposite can also (and should) be asked, along with, maybe, how orthodoxly-inclined Muslim intellectuals relate to non-(or-even-liberal) Muslims, or how pluralists relate to the ideas of folks who adhere to specific (and mutually-exclusive) traditions. Basically, how do we relate to the fact that not all our opinions and ways of doing things are going to jive together in one common direction?
Jacques and Mortimer seem to propose limiting the presence of alternative voices – it might be a mistake, though, to inherently see this as a kind of xenophobia or inability to understand an opposing point of view. Maybe it’s not about pushing others away so much as it is about trying to live a particular opinion/worldview with integrity, which sometimes has the side-effect of limiting certain options. I don’t know how they felt or thought about the usefulness of secular thinkers or what motivated them to stand where they stood, though, and so don’t want to jump to conclusions.
That said, I personally believe very much in the value of being constantly exposed to the worldviews/opinions of others – however, this belief is coupled with a desire to explore the ways we can coexist without compromising our stances clean out of existence. As in, not bending over backwards out of an idealistically-pluralist sense of watering down things that seemingly contradict each other for the sake of civility, but instead trying to actually look the situation in the face and attempt to work out what exactly it means to live closely with those who seem to be allies in one arena but intellectual opponents in another. So I would lean closer to the side of Louis Finkelstein, the founder of Casper, who advocated fiercely for an open, intellectual space for folks of all metaphysical persuasions to discuss together the ongoing significance of religion, science and culture.
In the article, Alan mourns (it’s presented as a detached history, but there’s a clear element of elegy here) the fact that Christian voices seem to be increasingly excluded from mainstream cultural discussions, that Christian intellectual contributions are assumed to be irrelevant or dead-on-arrival. He describes the process (accurately, I think) as being linked to the way mainstream ideas of ethics (particularly ones relating to sexuality and relationship) parted ways with Christianity in the sixties and onward, but I also wonder if processes like this happen because of (or at least are sped up by) the very act of Christians trying to limit the conversation to the exclusion of other voices.
For me, the moment you start closing a vital conversation so that only a niche group can participate is the moment you stop being seen as relevant to the world at large – and it’s the world at large that’s in need of a certain diversity of approaches. This isn’t #diversity (flags everywhere!), but the very real and painful work of sorting through who we are as a species, and doing it together. Jacques and Mortimer tried (or at the very least desired) to streamline the types of voices participating in the conversation, but the irony’s that they themselves would be pushed out over the coming decades.
If Alan Jacobs was just describing their opinions that would be one thing, but I kinda get the sense that his text veers toward the same conclusion as Jacques and Mortimer. Maybe that wasn’t his intention (and it could certainly be argued that the text implies otherwise), but the way he describes Karl Mannheim’s introduction to the Moot gives me a bit of pause.
Alan refers to Karl as having been “drawn to the Moot because in their discussions he found intellectuals playing their proper roles as interpreters and watchmen” – what’s left uncomfortably ambiguous is whether Karl likes the Moot because they’re intellectuals doing their job, or because they’re religiously-inclined intellectuals doing their job. Again, maybe Alan doesn’t intend on it, but there’s a floating implication that these guys might be excelling at watchmanship precisely because of their spiritual stances, as it if gives them privileged positions as intellectuals.
The paragraph following that one is where Jacques and Mortimer are described as wanting to limit membership of Casper so as to make it more effective – these two factors are what made me go “hmmm.” For an article trying to elaborate on how one interest group was sidelined in the greater cultural dialogue, it potentially leaves a lot of (potentially unintended) leeway for justifying this very act of cultural disenfranchisement.
That said, this is a huge and complicated issue and there was no way that Alan could have engaged with all the nuances here – his Casper/Moot thing was almost more of an aside than anything else and so it shouldn’t be seen as the core of what he’s trying to say here. But the ambiguity about the role different groups have (or shouldn’t have) in dialogue could very much (even if unintentionally) shore up the beliefs of particular Christians who really do think they and they alone should be the ones in charge of the cultural conversation. Which seems weird and counterproductive, as it oozes contempt for certain audiences that really should be at the table with them.
The second of the two things that struck me from the article was Alan’s treatment of none other than the (arguably) most prominent religious novelist working in America today: Marilynne Robinson.
But that will have to wait till Part II.
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Josh Nadeau is currently on retreat in Georgia (the country, not the state) and, when not writing or teaching, may be found winter cycling, hitchhiking or engaged in general shenanigans. He hopes, when he’s older, to maintain a sense of awe.
Jacobs’ essay didn’t really impress at all, mostly because he wants a certain type of “Christian intellectual” – a liberal one. If the history of the West has shown anything it is that liberalism may allow Christianity to have some influence at first, but is inevitably shut out because neutrality re: the Last Things is the only god in liberalism. At this stage in the game it’s absurd to think that We Can Get Along. Furthermore, (and I’m curious what you have to say about her) Jacobs observation about Marilynne Robinson’s liberal Christianity in her painfully earnest novel Gilead – that it is an inward directed faith – should provide him with yet another reason why liberalism is not a fertile ground to seek the growth of Christian thought. Though I’ve not read him yet, I’ve heard enough good things about Aladair Macintyre’s post-liberal thought that I’m happy to call myself an illiberal. Just because liberalism is The Way Things Are doesn’t mean it is forever.
Hi Paul – how would you define what you mean by “liberal intellectual” here?
I agree that there are a number of things in the article that don’t satisfy as much as they could, but I think that to label Alan’s desire for cultural interpreters as a desire for more liberal intellectuals might not just misrepresent what he’s trying to do, but it also kinda conflates “a capacity and/or richness of understanding” with “liberalism,” which I wouldn’t quite agree with. I think that his eventual discussion of Marilynne Robinson (more on that in part two), who could arguably be classified (and seemingly self-identifies) as a liberal, shows that he’s looking for something deeper than that.
I would venture a guess that his approach to the question of whether we can Get Along involve suspecting that we actually haven’t exhausted all possibilities and shapes of what Getting Along would look like. A dominant (perhaps “the” dominant?) strain of cultural pluralism today amounts to wanting uncomfortable ideologies to water themselves down until they can live at peace with their neighbours – if this is what Getting Along looks like then of course I agree with you that it’s unsustainable. But just as Chesterton said “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting[, it] has been found difficult; and left untried,” maybe there are ways of dialogue and co-existence that we haven’t found yet – and maybe we haven’t found them so far because we lack the language, drive or a history of illuminating mistakes.
Or maybe real coexistence will never happen and we’ll constantly be in a state of conflict until one side demolishes the other or the sun implodes or the angels take a stab at unrolling the scroll. Or maybe, even if a way of peaceful coexistence does exist, we’ll still find our nature too weak to actually follow through with it. I myself don’t know, but we’ll only find out for sure by exhausting all avenues open to us. And leaving those avenues untrod comes with dangers of its own.
You mention that he should be aware of how “liberalism is not a fertile ground to seek the growth of Christian thought,” but I don’t think he’s talking about the growth of Christian thought at all. I get the sense that he’s talking more about the ability or capacity of mainstream Christians to understand the liberal social order (and thus the people holding to it), and the ability for secular humanists to understand what it means for a worldview to be permeated by faith. He sees these capacities as being on the decline and mourns their loss – rightfully so, in my opinion.
I agree that the article has many flaws, but in particular, it fails to offer any explanation as to *why* simply being pro-life so alienated Fr. Neuhaus and others from the general public sphere. Okay, his former companions-in-arms took the opposite side on this one issue, but why does that mean his voice had to be so completely shut down? “But Neuhaus, and many who shared his core convictions, made the prudential judgment that this renewed access [to public discourse] would be impossible to acquire — and if acquired would come at too high a price.” What price? Why couldn’t people who had worked closely together on civil rights, etc., just agree to disagree about abortion and still respect each other? There are some serious elephants in the room that Jacobs is choosing to ignore, possibly because he can’t explain them.
My history professor in college (who was a helluva smart guy) said that the sexual revolution could not be explained. According to him, no historian could convincingly trace its origins to anything more than spontaneous collective insanity. In hindsight, I think he might have been hinting obliquely at demonic influence, which theory would not have gone over very well in a public university. But that theory does explain why the shift to deny Christian intellectuals access to the public sphere was so swift and so nearly complete.
In theory, I agree completely that the more people of differing belief systems sit down at the the table and listen to each other – the more we foster good will and friendship without demanding that others water down their own beliefs – the closer we will come to “getting along.” I agree that the Christian who wants to shut down secularist voices is a hypocrite when he demands that the secularists listen to his own, and I believe that every genuine seeker of truth deserves to have his say in public discourse. But at the same time (and this relates somewhat to our other discussion about censorship), there does come a point when the Christian might have a duty to step in and say, “We cannot listen to *this* voice. It is the voice of the evil one.” Maybe Maritain and Adler reached that conclusion too soon; I don’t have any way to judge that. As we’ve already seen, pinpointing the moment when human confusion crosses over into outright evil is extremely difficult, at best. But still, the idea that Christians should be 100% open to whatever voices arise in public discourse is just as flawed as the proposition that we should be 100% closed.
What’s the solution? I don’t know. I fully agree with you that we have not yet exhausted all of our options – or even realized what all of those options are – and we won’t know the answer until we go through that process.
Hey Karen! You bring up a lot of interesting points.
a) I think that the article is definitely going to feel unsatisfying on a number of levels purely for the fact that Alan is ambitious (or foolhardy?) enough to try an encapsulate an entire century’s worth of cultural history in relatively short article. He could have gone off on a million different tangents: the apolitical nature of Flannery and co, the appropriation of Christianity to justify western democracy, the “quiet” voices of contemporary writers of faith, the nature of liberal/conservative cultural divides, the fallout from CSPRTTDWL’s splintering or, yes, why sexual issues (like abortion) proved to be such an iconic and divisive issue in the culture wars.
I wouldn’t call his lack of addressing *why* abortion became as with-us-or-against-us a failure because he wasn’t so much trying to explain it as just say that’s how it is – which I agree with completely. If you take a room of stereotypical secular liberals in a classroom, writing circle or back-and-forth-post-fest and have someone stand up to comment about something from a pro-life point of view you can instantly sense a change of air. It really proves to be a red line in many (maybe even most) cases, and too many folks are instantly (if not explicitly) labeled an “other” or anathema. Why it happened like this requires a whole other article – that it *does* happen seems pretty obvious. Or at least that’s been my experience up in Canada.
The kind of nuanced relationships between activists and cultural theorists that you’re talking about, where folks with widely diverging opinions on abortion or queer marriage/unions can agree to disagree while focusing on a common task, do happen, but only after a whole heck of a lotta groundwork being laid beforehand, and they still seem to be in the minority. I enjoy a number of these relationships myself, but they are very complicated to maintain.
I remember reading an article once about feminists who felt caught in a spot because they wanted to fight the effects that pornography was having on women, but they felt they needed to do so without the support of Christians doing the same thing because they felt that, because of their additional pro-life stances and defense of traditional definitions of marriage, they would be compromised too much in other areas to make the cooperation worth it. This kind of thinking (even if counterproductive in a number of ways) really does dominate in a number of circles.
b) I wouldn’t necessarily agree with your professor about the roots of the sexual revolution – there were a lot of signs that were there beforehand, and a number of factors were gathering for a long time that would allow for it to happen the way it did. For example, rising rates of literacy at the end of the 1900’s, the lifestyles/experiments of influential artists/intellectuals in the 30’s/40’s, widespread disillusionment in political and spiritual authority, early twentieth-century narratives of (successful) revolution, the growing perception of traditional (often conflated with “Christian”) morals being a threat to people’s development, the shock of both world wars and so on. Even if there was direct demonic influence, the building blocks clearly were there. This was even the subject of a tangent in a previous post here on the blog: https://dappledthings.org/5748/degrees-of-cool-part-ii-or-post-christian/
That post, as a whole, talked about how Christianity was demonized in certain ways because it was perceived as a threat to people’s lifestyles – which it kinda was. Now that this anxiety’s died down somewhat there can be a bit more of a nuanced approach (like, this article appeared in Harper’s, and just yesterday there was a piece that ran in The Atlantic about the place of ‘The Exorcist’ in the context of, in their words, “The Lost Art of Great Catholic Storytelling” (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/exorcist-tv-show-reboot-catholic-storytelling/500597/).
But Christianity, Catholicism in particular, is still seen as a threat among feminists advocating for abortion access or for queer and trans activists because a number of precepts (not all) on either side are fundamentally opposed to each other. While things have let up over the past decade and a half in particular (one can find interesting concesions to the depth or interestingness of religion popping up in all sorts of places), social activism is still a cultural battleground.
c) I think a Christian can still, like you say, advocate against agreeing with particular voices, but that might not mean limiting that voice’s expression in the common sphere, or limiting one’s access to it. I know that this isn’t what you meant at all and so this is more just another tangent, but one of the things that helps us get a better understanding of the world as it *is* is actively (and critically/compassionately) listening to the people who are advocating against the things we hold dear. Dialogue can’t happen without that. And genuine inroads in the culture wars will never happen without dialogue.
The idea of 100% openness is a complicated one because there are different kinds of opennesses. If we’re defining openness as agreement then I agree with you, but if we definite it as allowing someone to state their piece (or giving the devil his due, as it were) then being 100% involved wouldn’t necessarily be problematic.
This goes back to a number of things we were talking about in the whirlwind of posts talking about censorship: what happens when people get involved in the discussion without being really prepared in critical, cultural, emotional and intellectual senses? There are some people who are super impressionable to whom being 100% open would lead to some awkward and dicey conclusions, and this has to be taken into account somehow.
Even though we’re still in the process of making this road and aren’t sure what are the best/worst things to do yet, keeping the lines of communication open is one of the few things that we might be able to be unequivocably behind.
Hi Josh,
I think what I mean when I say that we should not promote 100% openness in public discourse is that, where possible, Christians ought not to give evil any more airtime than they can help. For example, if you and I were setting up a modern-day Moot/ Casper, would you invite Richard Dawkins? How about the leader of ISIS? These are clearly people with something to say about how the social order ought to work, but that doesn’t make their voices helpful to society. The fact that these people have already garnered a portion of the public sphere to promote their views leaves us Christians no choice but to publicly engage with them and their ideas. However, In a Christian-dominated culture, there would be no good reason to invite Dawkins to guest lecture at a university or publish in a magazine about how Christianity is ruining the world. His views have already been vetted by the Church and found lacking, and to give him space to vent his heresies endangers the souls of his listeners. Surely, if a Christian invited him to lecture and even one of his listeners abandoned the faith as a result, the inviter would bear responsibility. I think this (or something similar) was probably the reasoning of Maritain and Adler. If you don’t *have* to let the devil have his say, why would you?
Nevertheless, that same Christian who denies Dawkins a lecture podium would have a responsibility, if afforded the opportunity, to engage with Dawkins himself, as a human being, to try to understand how he arrived at his world view, and to try to lead him toward the Truth – which will necessarily mean the Christian himself has to grow and change along the way. Neither person is perfect, and both have to change for mutual respect to grow. But there is a fundamental difference in the place from which the two of them enter the discussion, because only one of them is actually speaking the Truth (with a capital T).
Thus – because we do not live in a predominantly Christian society anymore, if we were organizing our own Moot, it would be crucial to include people who represent the heresies of the day. The heresies have become part of the culture, and there is no way to change them except by engaging with the people who hold them to be true. Where possible, I would vote for calling in the atheists who don’t think all Christians are stupid to represent their fellows, thus making it more likely that actual progress might happen. But because we’re not the watchmen anymore, we don’t always get to choose. It’s a fine line, to try to combat evil itself without leaving behind the people who have fallen victim to its lies. It *is* good to be 100% open to our fellow human beings. But that doesn’t mean we should willingly give all of them the public microphone.
I would certainly salivate at the chance of getting into a room with Richard Dawkins and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – obviously, though, if there were no weapons involved and we were merely intending to chat over obligatory hot drinks.
You hit on a good distinction here when you talk about giving a space at a moot vs giving someone a podium or platform to speak to culture as a whole. A moot would be limited to intellectuals who would, hopefully, be equipped to deal with the nuances and layers, with all the negative capability that requires. Which would be something different than giving someone a lecture series to themselves. It would be for the purposes of understanding where we are, both as different subcultures and as a society as a whole – so I very much think that, if Richard minded the snark and Abu Bakr didn’t feel like ordering anyone’s head from their shoulders, it could be a lunchdate beyond stimulating.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall at that moot…
Keep the dream alive.