In my first message in this series I sketched RR Reno’s idea of strong gods and weak gods As metaphors for the kind of ideas that organize societies. Reno argues that the strong gods have been banned, or at least critically reduced, in favor of weak gods. What led to the exile of the strong gods?
Reno describes the exiling of the strong gods as a result of a post -war consensus among prominent leaders in politics and the Intelligentsia. In the first half of the twentieth century, a single generation witnessed and suffered by two devastating world wars and I looked at horror about the atrocities committed during those conflicts. The Second World War concluded this process with the introduction of weapons that could do more than just level cities – they introduced the very real prospect to destroy all humanity. Reno writes,
The history of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to speak for itself: German militarism and the temptation of aggressive nationalism caused the First World War; In the social condition that followed the truce, Mussolini came to power as the supreme leader of a paramilitary political party; Nazism combined anti -Semitic animus with cruel power ideology; And of course communism ruled for decades in the Soviet Union and fed with the same totalitarian temptations. The inevitable lesson, most, came to believe, that war and destruction resulted from narrow -minded life and thought.
Remember that in Reno’s description the ‘strong gods’ are the ideas that recommend and inspire loyalty and reverence. But Reno does not shy away from the fact that strong gods can corrupt, and he does not deny that the horrors that the world wars drove were done in the service of strong gods. He freely acknowledges that those who cherished these worries have a real point:
I am not against the anti-top struggle of the last century. The post -war consensus arose for good reasons.
The good reasons that motivate the post -war consensus was a desire to ensure that the horrors of the twentieth century would never repeat themselves:
The imperative is bracingly simple: never again. We will never again allow totalitarian governments to appear. Never again, societies will achieve a fever of ideological fanaticism. The Ovens of Auschwitz will never again consume their victims. This imperative – never again – sets strict requirements for us. It requires Western civilization to reach self -critical adulthood with courage and determination, which Popper hoped to illustrate with his full intestinal attack on Plato, the founder of our philosophical tradition. We have to banish the strong gods of closed society and make it a real open.
Ensuring that nothing was holy and was needed above critical research to ensure that nothing could become strong enough to encourage people to commit atrocities:
We must strip our legacy of the remains of Saint Authority that blink the reason for men, making them vulnerable to ideological fanaticism. It is not a cultural or religious piety that is needed today, but rather independence and courageous criticism. An open society needs open mind. To promote them, we must free the rising generation from his respectful habits.
But the exile of the strong gods was a slow process that went on a smooth slope. The first intention was not to throw the gates wide to total openness (and therefore total weakening) – the goal was simply to open the door for greater critical questions from the hereditary traditions and institutions of a society. As an example of this shift, Reno describes a report entitled General education in a free societyProduced by the Faculty of Harvard University that was the goal in the words of the report itself, “Formed both the future and the foundations of our free society.”
The Harvard committee did not want to undermine the value of traditional Western civilization, says Reno: “Because the Western tradition itself is the source of the ideals of a free society, the committee argues, it must be passed on to the next generation. But precisely because critical research and freedom are crucial for Western legacy, we must avoid a slavish dedication to the past. “The goal was to balance these two compensating forces.
The Harvard committee worked to combine traditional content with a critical mind. The educational philosophy of the future, noted them, “must” reconcile the feeling of pattern and direction that arise from heritage with a sense of ancin innovation experiment that stems from the knowledge that they can exist fruitfully together. “
Similar programs were carried out by elites from other top universities – and they too were initially not set to throw away the traditional Western Canon, but by promoting a critical evaluation thereof as part of inheritance:
There was an emphasis on authority in the initial phase of the post -war era, where, but not strongly imposed and always open to experiments. Convinced that a free society requires a foundation in the Western tradition, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the famous President of the University of Chicago, launched an ambitious Great Books project for a mass audience. Yet he also tilted against authority, even when he praised authoritative texts. “The [great] Books must speak for themselves, “he wrote,” and the reader must decide for himself. “Tradition, yes, but the free person has the last word.
But, says Reno, opening the idea that rejecting the traditional base of Western civilization was a feasible and even respectable option, would inevitably open the gates wide. Of Harvard’s approach, says Reno,
The Harvard committee sought a delicate balance between the authority of large books and the independence of critical questions. But the latter enjoyed the prestige of moral progress and prevailed over time.
Similarly, of the approach of Hutchins to balance the inheritance of the Western cannon with a continuous criticism on it, says Reno,
This was a dynamic tendency, not a stable position. The arrow of development always pointed to more openness, more deconsolidation of old authorities, more disappointment, that is why the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s, although certainly disruptive, was more in continuity with the 1950s than in Rebellie.
This tendency led to the exiling of the strong gods and the rise of the weak gods – not immediately or all at the same time, but as an inevitable process that would continue at an increasing pace over time. As John Maynard Keynes once said: “The world is ruled by little else” beyond the “ideas of economists and political philosophers, both if they are right and when they are wrong.” As soon as this consensus was reached under elites and intellectuals in post -war society, it would inevitably radiate to everyone.
Reno has a lot to say about both the social and political consequences of banning the strong gods. In the next message I will outline what he takes to be the social consequences.