The Watchmen Part I (or, the moot meets CSPRTTDWL)
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 bandied 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.
