Samuel Gregg

Politics, Ideas, and the West

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An excerpt from an essay published on OrthodoxyToday.org.

By Samuel Gregg

Yet as the French theologian Jean Daniélou S.J. once observed, there is no true civilization that is not also religious. In the case of Western civilization, that means Judaism and Christianity. The question of religious truth is something with which we must allow every person to wrestle in the depths of their conscience. But if conservatism involves upholding the heritage of the West against those who would tear it down (whether from without and within), then conservatives should follow the lead of European intellectuals such as Rémi Brague and Joseph Ratzinger and invest far more energy in elucidating Christianity’s pivotal role in the West’s development—including the often complicated ways in which it responded to, and continues to interact, with the movements associated with the various Enlightenments.

Such an enterprise goes beyond demonstrating Christianity’s contribution to institutional frameworks such as constitutional government. Conservatives must be more attentive to how Judaism and Christianity—or at least their orthodox versions—helped foster key ideas that underlie the distinctiveness of Western culture. These include:

their liberation of man from the sense that the world was ultimately meaningless;
their underscoring of human fallibility and consequent anti-utopianism;
their affirmation that man is made to be creative rather than passive;
their insistence that there are moral absolutes that may never be violated,
their tremendous respect for human reason in all its fullness;
their crucial distinction between religious and civil authority; and
their conviction that human beings can make free choices.

This last point is especially important precisely because of the difficulty of finding strong affirmations of the reality of free choice outside orthodox Judaism, orthodox Christianity, and certain schools of natural law thought. Beyond these spheres, the world is basically made up of soft determinists (like John Stuart Mill) or hard determinists (like Marx).

There is, however, something more elemental of which modern conservatism stands in desperate need. In the first episode of his acclaimed 1969 BBC series Civilisation, the art historian, the late Kenneth Clark, sat in the foreground of an old viaduct and spoke about the Romans’ “confidence.” By that, he didn’t mean arrogance. What Clark had in mind was the Romans’ self-belief: their conviction that the ideas and institutions which they had inherited, developed, and extended throughout Europe and the Mediterranean amounted to a singular cultural accomplishment worthy of emulation.

Read the entire article on OrthodoxyToday.org.

Is America Becoming Europe?

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Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future

Across the Atlantic, Americans see European economies faltering under enormous debt, overburdened welfare states, governments controlling close to fifty percent of the economy, high taxation, heavily regulated labor markets, aging populations, and large numbers of public sector workers. They also see a European political class that is unable — and, in many cases, unwilling — to implement economic reform.

This timely and sobering video explains why Americans cannot ignore the “canary in the coalmine” across the pond in determining our future. We must ask the question: “Is America becoming Europe?”

To learn more read Dr. Samuel Gregg’s Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future:

“This is a book that every economist, historian, and politician should read.”
— Amity Shlaes, syndicated Bloomberg News columnist

“Europe is a terrifying example of what happens when the state gets too large and the money runs out. Don’t imagine that it couldn’t happen to you.”
— Daniel Hannan, British Conservative Member of the European Parliament

Islam and the Closing of the Secular Mind

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Source: The American Spectator

By Samuel Gregg

The “enlightened” Western mind can no longer think seriously or coherently about religion.

Given the decidedly strange response of the Obama Administration and much of the Western commentariat to the violence sweeping the Islamic world, one temptation is to view their reaction as simple incomprehension in the face of the severe unreason that leads some people to riot and kill in a religion’s name. But while the Administration’s response has plenty to do with trying to defend a foreign policy that has plainly gone south, it also reflects something far more problematic: the Western secular mind’s increasing inability to think seriously and coherently about religion at all.

This problem manifests itself in several ways. The first is the manner in which many secular thinkers seem to regard all religions as “basically the same.” By this, they often mean either equally irrational or as promoting essentially similar values.

A moment’s reflection would indicate to even the most militant atheist that this simply isn’t true. Islam and Christianity, for instance, have very different understandings of who Jesus Christ is. Christians believe that he is God, the second Person of the Trinity. Muslims do not. Ergo, Islam and Christianity are not effectively the same. At their respective cores are fundamentally irreconcilable theological positions. It’s also very difficult to find robust affirmations of free will outside Judaism and Christianity (at least the orthodox varieties of these two faiths).

Likewise, as any informed Muslim will tell you, Islamic theology has no real equivalent of the Christian idea of the church. The Greek word for “church” (ekklesia) literally means to be “called out.” That, alongside Christ’s words about the limits to Caesar’s power, had immense implications for how Christians think about the state and its relationship to religion. Among other things, it means Christianity has always maintained significant distinctions between the temporal and the spiritual realms that are far less perceptible — again, as any pious Muslim will inform you — in Islamic theology and history.

All this, however, is a little complicated for those secular intellectuals who simply regard religion as just another lifestyle-choice rather than being essentially about people’s natural desire to (1) know the truth about the transcendent and (2) live their lives in accordance with such truths.

That’s why the left talks so much today about “freedom of worship” (as if your faith-decisions are akin to choosing which mall you shop at) and are trying to peddle a version of religious liberty that basically confines religious freedom to what happens inside your church, synagogue, mosque or temple on your given holy-day of the week. The notion that religious liberty is all about creating space for people to live out their beliefs consistent with others’ freedom to do the same and even permits us to peacefully argue — gasp! — about the truth of different religions’ claims seems to be beyond their grasp.

Then there is the sheer ignorance of history prevailing among much of the secular intelligentsia. This was unfortunately exemplified by the lamentable historiography that was on full display in President Obama’s once much-touted, now much-forgotten 2009 Cairo speech. Among other things, the President referred to how Islam “carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.”

Really? Did the President’s advisors and speechwriters know that this thesis has been subject to withering critique for over 100 years? Were they conscious that, as the French professor of Arabic and religious philosophy Rémi Brague demonstrated in his book Europe, La voie romaine (1992/1999), the statesman-scholar-monk Cassiodorus (c.485-c.585 AD) not only collaborated with Pope Agapetus I in arranging for the translation of classical Greek texts into Latin, but also established a monastery-school on his family estate to safeguard and study the same works? Were they aware that the works of Antiquity never somehow vanished but were preserved for centuries by Greek-speaking Eastern Christians? Or that Aristotle was known and read in the medieval West long before Arabic translations appeared in Europe?

The answer to all the above questions hardly needs to be stated.

In other words, civilizational development is a much more complicated affair than many secular-minded people are willing to concede. And that partly reflects their ongoing efforts to whitewash Christianity’s immense civilizational achievements out of history.

Today’s history textbooks, for example, are full of mythologies about the so-called “Dark Ages.” These publications invariably overlook, for instance, the powerful contributions made to the development of the modern sciences by figures such as the 13th-century saint Albertus Magnus or the profound advances made in constitutional theories of limited government by medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas.

Why? Because acknowledging such facts raises the question of whether the various Enlightenments (which saddled us with such intellectual dead-ends as David Hume’s skepticism and Rousseau’s egalitarian-obsessions) were as radical and enlightened as many liberals make them out to be.

And that brings us to yet another problem with the secular mind regarding religion: its increasing embrace of what might be called suppressive tolerance. This is the art of discouraging people from expressing their views on particular subjects on the grounds that saying what you think might involve what’s become the ultimate crime of modern times: hurting other peoples’ feelings.

Of course, most secular intellectuals are very selective about applying this. You can, after all, say the most uninformed and truly bigoted things about Christians and that’s free speech. If, however, you ask polite but direct questions about aspects of particular schools of Islamic thought (even while acknowledging parallels with specific Christian thinkers) as Benedict XVI did in his 2006 Regensburg lecture, then you’re being “hurtful.”

Lastly there’s the difficulty of wishful thinking. This might be described as many secular intellectuals’ belief that, deep down, everyone really wants to be like them: what George Weigel calls “debonair nihilists.”

Eventually, or so the theory goes, the unwashed masses will “get over” all those pesky questions about the meaning of life, death, good, and evil to which religious faiths attempt to provide comprehensive answers — many of which are far more convincing that the default philosophical materialism, relativism, and skepticism that passes for sophisticated thinking in the faculty lounge these days. Instead, they expect we’ll eventually accept that life is meaningless and the most we can do is, as Marx described his future society, “one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, just as I please.”

Unfortunately for the urbane hedonist crowd, God’s death has been forecast on numerous occasions by figures ranging from Marx and Nietzsche, to the Economist in 1999. The latter, however, was smart enough to retract this assertion in 2007 in the face of overwhelming evidence that, globally speaking, the world was becoming more religious rather than less.

And that perhaps points to the greatest tragedy of the secular mind’s remarkable close-mindedness to any serious contemporary conversation about religion. Its core operating assumptions, historical unawareness, and reliance upon numerous legends for legitimacy translates into many Western intellectuals having little of a meaningful nature to say about how we address real problems of religiously inspired violence and of truth-suffocating intolerance masquerading as tolerance.

Put another, more troubling way, one of the West’s greatest impediments in its struggle against religious extremism may well the fact that the secular part of its soul turns out to be far less enlightened than anyone imagined possible.

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute.

Read the entire article on the American Spectator website (new window will open).

Obama and the Dictatorship of Relativism

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When the Manhattan Declaration first came out, Orthodox signers came under considerable criticism. Too much culture wars was the usual response. I signed the document because I saw that efforts to institutionalize secular liberalism could only succeed if dissenting voices were silenced. The cost of that silence is high and will include the loss of liberty if it succeeds. Secular fundamentalism allows no prisoners.

Below Samuel Gregg examines the historical antecedents of the present conflict and writes, “(T)he Catholic Church’s fight — in fact, the fight of anyone, believer or non-believer, who recognizes secularist fundamentalism as a danger to freedom — against the despotism of “there-is-no-moral-truth…” is only just beginning.” He’s right.

Source: American Spectator | Samuel Gregg

There is no moral truth and Rawls is his prophet.

If there was ever any doubt about one of the Obama Administration’s key philosophical commitments, it was dispelled on Jan. 20 when the Department of Health and Human Services informed the Catholic Church that most of its agencies will be required to provide employees with insurance-coverage for contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs: i.e., products, procedures, and chemicals used to facilitate acts which the Church and plenty of others consider intrinsically evil.

Alas, it’s not a question of the administration being tragically “tone deaf,” as one American Jesuit claimed, to specifically Catholic concerns. Nor is the bedrock of President Obama’s position, in the end, a commitment to “women’s health.” Outside the ghoulish world of Planned Parenthood, pregnancy does not qualify as a disease. A fertile womb is no threat to human life.

No, this is all about the absolutization of choice for the sake of choice. It’s also about creating a society in which any discussion of the actual ends we choose is considered unacceptable in public debates about law and morality.

Modern liberalism has a long history of trying to exclude consideration of the proper ends of human action from public discourse in the name of tolerance. But neither liberalism nor secularism are as neutral about such matters as they pretend.

Self-identified modern liberals (and secularists more generally) typically insist that justice and tolerance demand that governments shouldn’t privilege any conception of morality, religious or secular, in framing its laws. Unfortunately for liberals, this position — outlined in excruciating detail by the seer of modern secular liberalism, the late John Rawls — is self-refuting. Why? Because it, ahem, privileges a legal and political commitment to relativity about moral questions. It’s the same absurdity underlying the philosophical skeptic’s claim that there’s no truth — except for the truth that there is no truth.

These little internal inconsistencies, however, don’t stop the use of such conceptions of tolerance and justice as weapons for terminating any contribution to public debate that’s informed by the propositions that moral truth exists, that we can know it through revelation and/or reason, and that it is unjust to cordon off these truths from the public square.

And here we come face-to-face with the essence of what a certain Joseph Ratzinger famously described in an April 2005 homily as “the dictatorship of relativism.” Most people think of tyrannies as involving the imposition of a defined set of ideas upon free citizens. Benedict XVI’s point was that the coercion at the heart of the dictatorship of relativism derives precisely from the fact that it “does not recognize anything as definitive.”

In this world, tolerance no longer creates the safety for us to express our views about the nature of good and evil and its implications for law and public morality. Instead, it serves to banish the truth as the reference point against which all of us must test our ideas and beliefs. The objective is to reduce everyone to modern Pontius Pilates who, whatever their private beliefs, wash their hands in the face of obvious injustices, such as what the Obama administration has just inflicted upon not only Catholics, but anyone whose convictions about the truth requires them to abstain from cooperating in acts they regard as evil per se.

Of course, modern liberals do have their preferred ends, which (despite all their endless chatter about reason) reflect their profoundly cramped vision of man’s intellect. Here they follow the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. He argued that “reason ought to be the slave of the passions.” Reason’s role, in other words, is not to identify what is rational for people to choose. Instead, reason is reduced to merely devising the means for realizing whatever goals that people, following the profound moral reasoning of a five year-old, “just feel like” choosing.

On this basis, utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham concluded that life was really about nothing more than the experience of sensations. Hence, the goal was to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But having repeatedly failed to construct a coherent hedonistic calculus of utility (even Rawls concluded it was a doomed endeavor), the “ultimate goal” of modern liberalism and secularism now “consists,” as Benedict noted in 2005, “solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

That in turn reduces life and my choices to ensuring that I am among those who are (1) powerful enough to get to indulge my ego and my desires, (2) sophistical enough to produce rationalizations (otherwise known as consequentialist ethics) for doing so, and (3) strong enough to trample over anyone whose existence or beliefs might limit my ability to do whatever I just happen to “feel like” doing.

Here modern liberalism’s essentially illiberal nature reveals its true face. Because if your theological or philosophical convictions get in the way of your employee’s desire to neuter his spouse at your expense in order to avoid the “disease” of pregnancy, then tough luck. Desire plus autonomy — the calling-cards of secularist fundamentalism — trump all (except, apparently, when it comes to the distribution of wealth, climate change, and smoking).

The Catholic Church — and its teachings about good and evil — goes back 2,000 years. Since that time, it’s weathered the savage persecutions of the Roman Empire, the terrorism of the French Revolution, the systematic harassment of National Socialism, and the all-out assault of Marxism-Leninism. And, perhaps most telling of all, it’s managed to survive the many, often terrible sins and faithlessness of its own members. The Church will be around long after the not-so-New Atheists have gone to their eternal reward.

The Church’s struggle with the dictatorship of relativism may, however, prove one of its most difficult challenges. That’s partly because it’s a subtle form of oppression that trades off words like “choice” that strongly resonate in Western societies — the same societies in which many secularists all-too-quickly equate any religion’s claim to teach the truth with murderers who fly planes into buildings.

In the span of human history, the Obama Administration is just a blip, however much it considers itself, like all progressivists, to be on history’s cutting edge. But be warned: the Catholic Church’s fight — in fact, the fight of anyone, believer or non-believer, who recognizes secularist fundamentalism as a danger to freedom — against the despotism of “there-is-no-moral-truth-and-Rawls-is-his-prophet” is only just beginning.

Samuel Gregg: Christians in a Post-Welfare State World

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How much of the activism of the Progressive wing of American Christianity (including some Orthodox participants unfortunately) in the current budget battles is nothing more than grabbing its piece of the federal pie before the welfare state collapses?

Progressives like Jim Wallis and others routinely use the moral imperatives of the gospel to justify their Progressive moral vision. They conflate the imperatives into Progressive ideology to persuade the unsuspecting that the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Progressive ideology are one and the same. They are, at heart, statists who refuse to examine the soul stultifying and character destroying dependencies that statism fosters.

Welfare states are dying because this albatross of good intentions is not economically viable. Welfare states can only exist on borrowed money. Once the bills come due, as they have for America and all the countries of Western Europe, change is inevitable and necessary. “Christian” Progressives understand this as well as anybody. That’s why the endless moral condemnations by Wallis and other Progressives towards those who value liberty and individual responsibility are delivered at warp speed.

The article below examines the responsibility of Christians in a post-welfare state economy. The author, Samuel Gregg, makes some very good points including:

In crisis, the cliché goes, we find opportunity. Instead of engaging in politically exciting but ultimately futile rearguard-actions to defend welfare-states crumbling under the weight of decades of irresponsible spending, the coming post-welfare state age could be a chance for a Renaissance in Christian thought about the whys and hows of loving those to whom Christ Himself devoted special attention.

Gregg draws on Christian history, particularly the Early Church, to show that a return to Christian moral foundations can give us some direction on how to address the wrenching change that the collapse of the welfare state portends. In the early years, Christians took care of the unwanted, the cast-offs of society. Their actions were driven by a deep and abiding faith in the risen Christ that became a powerful and compelling testament to the mercy of God and commended the Christian faith to the consciences of their pagan neighbors. David Bentley Hart describes this in his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Gregg argues that this depth of faith and moral clarity will be needed in our future.

Is Gregg an idealist? Has Christianity lost its salt? Not necessarily. Think back on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. Once the bluster and finger-pointing subsided, what happened? Thousands of people ravaged by the disaster were relocated to different cities. This unprecedented migration was an entirely private effort, and it was organized and driven by Christians. That kind of character, rooted deeply in Christian morality and tradition, might be our future.

Don’t be surprised when you see “Christian” Progressive voices grow increasingly shrill over the next few years. These aging Boomers are witnessing the self-serving idealism they adopted in the 1960s and 1970s fade into irrelevance and they don’t like it. This is their last gasp, their last attempt at carving out a society built on the wayward notions of “social justice” they hold so dear to their hearts. Time will pass them by, but not without a fight.

Source: American Spectator | Samuel Gregg

As the debt-crisis continues to shake America’s and Europe’s economies, Christians of all confessions find themselves in the unaccustomed position of debating the morality and economics of deficits and how to overcome them.

At present, these are important discussions. But frankly they’re nothing compared to the debate that has yet to come. And the question is this: How should Christians realize their obligations to the poor in a post-welfare state world?

However the debt-crisis unfolds, the Social Democratic/progressive dream of a welfare state that would substantially resolve questions of poverty has clearly run its course. It will end in a fiscal Armageddon when the bills can’t be paid, or (and miracles have been known to happen) when political leaders begin dismantling the Leviathans of state-welfare to avert financial disaster.

Either way, the welfare state’s impending demise is going to force Christians to seriously rethink how they help the least among us.

Why? Because for the past 80 years, many Christians have simply assumed they should support large welfare states. In Europe, Christian Democrats played a significant role in designing the social security systems that have helped bankrupt countries like Portugal and Greece. Some Christians have also proved remarkably unwilling to acknowledge welfarism’s well-documented social and economic dysfunctionalities.

As America’s welfare programs are slowly wound back, those Christian charities who have been heavily reliant upon government contracts will need to look more to the generosity of churchgoers — many of whom are disturbed by the very secular character assumed by many religious charities so as to enhance their chances of landing government contracts.

Another group requiring attitude-adjustment will be those liberal Christians for whom the essence of the Gospel has steadily collapsed over the past 40 years into schemes for state-driven wealth redistributions and promoting politically-correct causes.

The welfare state’s gradual collapse presents them with somewhat of an existential dilemma. The entire activity of lobbying for yet another welfare program will increasingly become a superfluous exercise — but this has been central to their way of promoting the poor’s needs for years.

More-pragmatic liberal Christians will no doubt adjust. Others, however, will simply deny fiscal reality and frantically lobby for on-going redistributions of an ever-shrinking pool of funds.

But even those Christians who have long moved past the heady-days of the ’60s and ’70s — or who never actually drank the kool-aid — will have their own challenges in a post-welfare state era.

One will be financial. Will Christians be willing to reach even further into their pockets to help fill the monetary gaps caused by on-going reductions in government welfare-spending?

For American Christians, this will be less of a struggle. They’re already among the world’s most generous givers. For European Christians, however, it will require a revolution in giving-habits. Many of them have long assumed that paying the taxes that fund welfare programs somehow fulfilled their obligations to their neighbor.

But the more important, long-term challenge posed by significant welfare state reductions will be less about money and more about how Christians will take concrete personal responsibility for those in need.

Here Catholics, Orthodox, and the many Protestant confessions will find helpful guidance in Benedict XVI’s 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est.

Among other things, this text reminds Christians that poverty is more than a material phenomenon. It also has moral and spiritual dimensions: i.e., precisely those areas of human life that welfare states have never been good at — or interested in — addressing.

For Christians, humans are more than mere mouths. They know moral and spiritual poverty can be as devastating as material deprivation. This expansive understanding of poverty has enormous potential to help Christians correct materialist assumptions about human needs.

Another source of inspiration — especially for Americans — may be Alexis de Tocqueville’s great book, Democracy in America. Among other things, this nineteenth-century text illustrates how American churches played the predominant role in helping those in need in an America in which government was the means of last resort when it came to poverty.

Lastly, there is the example of the ancient church. The early Christians didn’t imagine that lobbying Roman senators to implement welfare programs was the way to love their neighbor. Instead, to the pagan world’s amazement, the early Christians — bishops, priests and laity — helped anyone in need in very direct, practical ways.

As anyone who has read the Church Fathers knows, the early Christians went out of their way to personally care for the poor, the incurably-sick, and the disabled — the very groups who were non-persons to the pagan mind.

Moreover, the Christians undertook such activities at their own expense, and often put their own lives at risk. When plagues came and everyone else fled, Christians generally stayed behind, refusing to abandon those in distress, regardless of their religion.

In crisis, the cliché goes, we find opportunity. Instead of engaging in politically exciting but ultimately futile rearguard-actions to defend welfare-states crumbling under the weight of decades of irresponsible spending, the coming post-welfare state age could be a chance for a Renaissance in Christian thought about the whys and hows of loving those to whom Christ Himself devoted special attention.

Yes, that means abandoning much of the framework that dominated 20th-century Christian reflection upon these questions. But anyone interested in serving the poor rather than their own ego or career-advancement shouldn’t hesitate to take such risks.

The poor’s spiritual and material well-being demands nothing less.

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society, his prize-winning The Commercial Society: Foundations and Challenges in a Global Age, and Wilhelm Ropke’s Political Economy.

Read the entire article on the American Spectator website (new window will open). Reprinted with permission.

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