Beyond Apocalypse: Believing in Cultural Restoration

In the past, I’ve written a good deal of criticism of the contemporary culture in which I live. I believe such criticism is not only warranted but important and necessary. At the same time, criticism and critique should never be an end point but, rather, a starting point. Let me indulge in one more critique: I fear that, too often, commentators on what we might call the “conservative” or “traditionally-minded” side of things—and these are somewhat inexact terms—fall into a habit of diagnosing problems without pointing toward any solutions. It is easy to diagnose, especially when faced with a culture as unhealthy as ours. It is much harder to prescribe a cure. But that’s our most important work. No one would pay a doctor who merely diagnosed disease and never healed anyone.

There are exceptions to this, of course, but I believe it’s a trend worth paying attention to and worth examining.

I think we surrender too much to the very revolutionary forces that we descry when we adopt their method of endless critique, suspicion, and skepticism. Certainly, those attitudes are fitting when dealing with many more or less corrupted modern institutions and the anti-culture of our day. When we use these tools, we’re trying to tear down something that actually deserves being torn down—in contrast to our revolutionary opponents who first used it to tear down the very civilization we wish to defend and preserve. 

Yet, for all that, we must remember that these are the enemy’s tools, as a rule. Skepticism appears as a major philosophical force in the Enlightenment, which sought to do away with the old world, growing into a full-blown nihilism in more recent centuries. Consider, for instance, that the dominant “scholarly” school of thought in our higher education is Critical Theory and its offshoots. A critical attitude is built into its very basis. “The hermeneutics of suspicion,” to borrow a term from Paul Ricoeur, were not bestowed on the world by traditional philosophy but by the likes of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. And that skepticism can threaten us from both sides. 

Both the progressive and the conservative can fall prey to a crippling skepticism about the world as it actually is. Anthony Esolen notes in his book Nostalgia,

We can see a strange family resemblance between Miniver Cheevy dreaming of an airy past that never existed while hating the ordinary things in front of him, and the self-styled “progressive,” dreaming of a future that never shall exist…while hating the ordinary things in front of him. The secular pessimist and the secular optimist are the same man, with a difference not in the mind but in the digestive tract, and neither one is a man of hope.

Disillusionment and disenchantment are not particularly traditional attitudes. Yet, ironically, they are a common (and understandable) temptation of the traditionally-minded person living in this brave new world.

Our tools ought to be the opposite of the revolutionary’s toolbox. Our tools are the ones that help us build, cherish, preserve, believe, love, embrace. The great task of cultural rebuilders today is not disenchantment but re-enchantment—not to abandon all the time-honored institutions of human civilization with a sorrowful shake of the head but to pull up sleeves and restore them, however impossible the task may appear. Certainly, many of our institutions have been corrupted, but this isn’t the first time in history that has happened, and to reject those institutions outright, to give it all up for lost, would be the ultimate act of folly, the ultimate surrender to the enemies of civilization.

Some of us—and I include myself in this—have occasionally fallen into the habit of speaking as though we’re facing the end of the world, or at least as if our culture is beyond redemption. One gets the impression from reading some authors that the state of the West is, more or less, hopeless. That is a dangerous assumption to make, for a number of reasons.

First, it reveals an ignorance of history. Many generations living through tumultuous times—from the fall of Rome to the astrological panic of medieval Europe to the lead-up to the year 2000—have believed they lived in the end times or that their era was the worst and most chaotic one in history. Yet inevitably, after a crisis, there came a restoration and rebirth of civilization and culture—precisely because some people didn’t despair but, rather, quietly got to work rebuilding.

Now, I will admit that, from my limited perspective, the problems in our world today appear unprecedented in their scope and magnitude. But our perspective is just that: limited. We walk through the dark wood of this world like small children, and we can really only see a little way behind us and a little way ahead of us. Further, if history is any predictor, then we can reasonably hope that if our time is unique in terms of its degeneracy, then that means whatever restoration occurs on the other side of the modern crisis will be equally unprecedented. And that should give us hope.

A second problem with an attitude of doom is that it fuels a fatalistic despair and stifles action. If one has lost hope in the face of so much cultural degeneration, one sees no point in working either to preserve what is good from the past nor to see what is good in the present. One does not dream of a new Christendom if one is too terrified by visions of an impending hell on earth. Skepticism, fear, and pessimism constrict the soul. St. Francis de Sales taught that, after sin, anxiety was the greatest enemy of the soul. By contrast, hope, joy, trust, and optimism expand the heart and make us capable of great deeds.

An excess of negative commentary runs the risk of curtailing hope; but losing hope is never the Christian response to any situation. Just as a Christian should never believe—this side of death—that a soul is beyond redemption, we should never assume that a culture is beyond redemption either. Somehow, the early Christians took that cesspool of pagan Rome and turned it into the resplendent heart of Christianity. Rome was not beyond redemption. Neither are we. 

Our God crossed the seas of infinity to become man, to find us and save us from sin, and the religion He founded shortly thereafter transformed the world. Let us not place limits on what He can and will do with poor modern man and the messes we’ve made. And let us remember that, as a rule, He looks for the cooperation of weak human instruments to bring about renewal.

Of course, with that said, this tired old world of ours might be on its last legs after all. We have no way of knowing for certain. And perhaps we ought to live with the same urgency, the same gratitude, the same fire in the veins and thrilling of the heart that we’d have if we knew, for sure, that the end of civilization as we know it lies somewhere just ahead, just past tomorrow. 

But even then, that realization wouldn’t be an injunction to cower in fear but, rather, a call to bold action, to stand up for what we believe, to change however many hearts we can before the last sand slips through the hourglass of history—and to build, even in a twilight hour, something worth remembering.