“To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them.”

Excerpt from Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion On Culture and the Arts edited by Roger Kimball & Hilton Kramer

Kenneth Minogue

“My concern is with [the] shift in recent sentiment … the rising hatred of Christianity among Western peoples, which I shall call “Christophobia.’

… Scepticism about Christianity largely began in the eighteenth century and increased steadily throughout the twentieth. It is hardly surprising that a revelation couched in the idiom of a remote past and purporting to reveal the transcendental aspects of the human condition could not survive the coming of what we may call “the scientific worldview;” in which truth is tested by empirical confirmation. Much of Christianity has responded to this development by retreating into a modernist accommodation with what it takes to be science. It has generated the ecumenical movement, a kind of deism (if I understand it rightly) in which all religions are treated as variant responses to the one divine creation.

Secularism, then, is not at all puzzling. It leads one to expect that Christianity would slowly fade away, leaving Christians to their services and secularists to long Sabbath mornings with the Sunday papers. There are indeed exceptions to this general picture of accommodation mitigating decline…

The Greeks believed that man was a rational animal, which implied that being human was a function of being rational. Women and slaves being defective in rationality were also less human. Christianity replaced this with the idea that each person was an immortal soul equally valuable to God and constituted stituted of a set of affections, which had been deranged by the Fall. It thus counterposed against the hierarchical structures of society a theological egalitarianism which periodically erupted in trouble for holders of high office, bishops in particular.

In the course of developing this complex idea of what it is to be a human being, Christian thinkers evolved the organ called “conscience” which could be incorporated within the new forms of urban life to generate the mode of moral experience we call “individualism”.

Without this long development, the idea of human rights would he meaningless, as it largely is in other civilizations. The abolition of slavery was a major step in the advance of the progressive project, and it was, of course, almost entirely a Christian achievement.

The essential point may well be that Christianity as a religion was constituted by faith in Jesus as the redeemer.

Faith is different from knowledge, and hence Christianity was hardly born before the philosophers were working hard to preserve sonic coherence in a doctrine that was never secure because of the human propensity to get things wrong (or indeed perhaps to get them inconveniently right). One of the earliest of the distinctions necessary to make sense of the world in terms of Christianity was, indeed, that between the secular and the sacred on which secularism itself depends. Another given in the gospels is the distinction between the civil and the sacred powers, between church and state.

These are indispensable constituents of the pluralism at the heart of Western civilization. The relation between theology and science is much too complicated to be dealt with here, but one might point out that the emergence of experimental science (which allowed the modern world so greatly to surpass the Greeks) depended upon the proposition that man could only understand what man had made himself.

Since nature had been made by God, our only way of learning about it was not by speculation but by “putting it to the torture” as Bacon put it. These considerations are perhaps enough for our limited purpose:.namely, to make it clear that the question “Do you believe in God?” is a very bad indicator of where anyone might conceivably stand on the relation between our Christian inheritance on the one hand and our modern sophistication on the other. They are also sufficient, I think, to indicate that the common identification of Christianity as a repressive force by invoking the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the trial of Galileo is merely a tedious misunderstanding of history. What human institution, one may ask, doesn’t have its ups and downs?

But before moving on to make sense of the curious Christophobia of the modern West, I need to indicate why this is, in civilizational terms, so strange a phenomenon.

The minimal account of religion as a human phenomenon must be that it is a set of stories and beliefs human beings tell themselves to account for what lies behind the manageable world (to the extent that it is manageable) in which we live. In other words, a religion is a response to the mystery of the human condition. The going secularist account of human life is that we are part of an evolving organic life that happened to develop on the edge of a minor planet in a universe of unimaginable vastness.

Beyond this, questions of meaning and significance are in scientific terms unanswerable, and we tend to follow Wittgenstein: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

We have blocked off religious questions altogether, because they are empirically unanswerable, and people respond in a variety of ways. Some drop the questions and get on with life, others shop for a more exotic set of stories and rituals with which to respond, and many, of course, remain Christian to one degree or another. On the face of it, however, we have a culture which very largely carries on without seriously considering ultimates. We have abandoned the cathedral, and are content to scurry in and out of skyscrapers. So perhaps we are pioneering a new civilizational form in which the issues of human meaning have been recognized as essentially unsolvable, and left to one side. Or, alternatively, we may have transferred the passions appropriate to religion onto beliefs of some other kind.

Philosophers turn everything into preliminaries, and before I get to the plain argument, I should perhaps declare my own position here. I am a simple child of secular times, and a sceptic, but one impressed by the grandeur deur and complexity of Christian [traditional] intellectuality. The Voltairian and the village atheist, seen from this perspective, look a little shallow. In the vast rambling mansion of our civilization, the cobwebbed gothic wing containing our religious imagination is less frequented than previously, but it certainly remains a haunting presence.

And, of course, we have bought into substitutes. In secular terms, their basic feature must be that they look more like science than religion. Let me suggest that educated Europeans are today united in terms of a project we characterize as the perfecting of the human condition by the power of reason. Devotion to this perfection leads us to scan the news each day in search of signs of the times: we focus on the fate of rights and how they are violated round the world, at the poverty which signals the imperfection of inequality, at peace processes leading us forward and violence and bigotry dragging us backward. The aim is to foster the happiness of mankind, and we are buoyed up when the signs are good and cast down when they are had.

We seek, if we respond to this new form of devotion, to harness human power to control human folly, inspired by our past successes in triumphing over the vagaries of nature. There are many internal disagreements over what this perfection might mean, though currently there is a large measure of agreement that the central problem is war and other forms of human conflict. All of this can be subsumed under the famous slogan that mankind must take its destiny into its own hands. We can, I think, distinguish three stages, or more exactly variants, in the development of this project.

The first is the entirely familiar idea of progress. Nineteenth-century Europeans in contact with technologically incapable people not only brought them the benefits of Christian salvation but also clean water, railways, and industry. The whole package was understood as a god-like increase in human power controlling human cir- cunmstance. This was profoundly disruptive in other cultures because they had long been accustomed to a different idea of the balance between what could be changed and what must be endured. Here from the West came a set of aliens teaching that nasty things that had long seemed inevitable could be remedied.

But the actual situation of these interesting aliens was that they were missionaries not only to other cultures, but also to the mass of people in their own culture as well. Technologists, administrators, and intellectuals had to become, as Ernest Gellner has called them, “the Westernizers of the West.” The great figures of the movement to improve the lives of the heathen often happened to be Christian missionaries like Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, but in Europe itself, and in America and other Western parts, they were rulers and social reformers. Christians might he believers in progress, but progressives were likely to find Christianity an optional extra, if not an actual impediment to the advance of reason. Christians were therefore often suspicious of progress. “To become a popular religion;’ wrote W R. Inge, “it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. The Superstition of Progress had the singular good fortune to enslave at least three philosophies -those of Hegel, of Comte, and of Darwin.”

Beyond European civilization the demand was indeed for philosophies of one kind or another, not for religions, which many of them already had in abundance. Gunpowder, clean water, and vaccines were the thing, not routes to salvation. For most of the beneficiaries of Western enlightenment abroad, Christianity was for understandable reasons increasingly understood as an optional extra. The crucial thing was that scientists seemed to have a method of coming to agreement about what was true and what worked, whereas Christians and exponents of other religions seemed locked into endless unresolvable disputes. Hence the initial response of Indians, Chinese, and others was likely to be admired for the technical skills of Europeans, and contempt for their beliefs and manners. The smart thing to do seemed to be to copy Western technology and throw the rest away. Like most versions of smart cherry picking, this one turned out not to work.

The baffling thing was that in often mysterious ways, the generation of railways, medical surgery, military science, and so on seemed to be inseparable from Western institutions and ideas. Foreigners are always detestable, and superior foreigners even more so. The horrible possibility loomed that in order to cut themselves in on this Western power, non-Europeans might have actually to become Europeans themselves. Even outsiders as culturally close to Europe as the Russians developed strong countercurrents to Western influence, as with the Slavophiles. The same was true in Eastern Europe.

Even Germany before the First World War conceived of itself as a spiritually superior nation quite different from the shallow technology of the French and the British. Progress was a development that sought to bring reason and bettermen both to the poor in Western countries, and to the downtrodden in the rest of the world. It was a movement of benevolence, but benevolence at this level of human relations is not easy to distinguish from power.

The West, it seemed, was bent on taking over the world. The result would be to turn everyone into imitation Europeans, and foreign cultures rebelled. It made no difference that their rebellion against the benevolence of the West could only be articulated in ideas and institutions (nationalism, self-determination, parliaments, etc.) borrowed from the arrogant West itself. Outsiders used whatever instruments were to hand and demanded for themselves the political freedoms the West claimed to champion. This repudiation of progress hardly stopped the project in its tracks. Western ingenuity was more than equal to the task of creating more assimilable similable forms of Westernization. The trick was to combine some version of Westernization, or perhaps we should say modernization, that was both a recipe for “joining the modern world” and also the expression of a powerful hostility to the West itself. Such a package would allow resentful Chinese and Indians to absorb the West while at the same time rejecting it. Reason and passion might thus both be accommodated. This was the achievement, though not indeed quite the intention, of Marx and other socialists for whom Westernizing the West was no less central a project than spreading enlightenment to the rest of the world.

What I am treating as the “stages” of the Enlightenment Project are not, indeed, successive. There is a good deal of overlap.

Marxism

The Marxist version of progress was communism, and the term may stand for all forms of collectivism which took off from the view that bourgeois individualism had merely been one phase in the emergence of modernity, and one that was imminently to be superseded by higher communal forms of association. In its beginnings, communism counted itself as the real inheritor of progress. Whereas the enlightened looked to reason, communists looked to revolution as the way of blasting a path through reaction to the promised land of technology and equality, or soviets plus electricity.

The Marxist version of human perfectionism had an irresistible appeal during most of the twentieth century, partly because it offered the promise not only of catching up with the West, but also of skipping a stage and jumping to the head of the progressive convoy. The great drama of twentieth-century history was the failure of this promise. Far from solving human conflict, the revolution of humanitarian fraternity served merely to increase it. Far from forging ahead into the modern world, the countries that followed this path lost much of their moral or social capital and ended up with an obsolete rusting industry built over a pile of corpses. It became clear that perfecting the human condition was a hit more complicated than it had seemed.

The failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases when prophecy fails, the faith never faltered. Indeed, an alternative version had long been maturing, though cast into the shadows for a time by enthusiasm for the quick fix of revolution. It had, however, been maturing for at least a century and already had a notable repertoire of institutions available. We may call it Olympianism, because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement. And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy-the universities.

We may define Olympianism as a vision of human betterment to be achieved on a global scale by forging the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights. Olympianism is the cast of mind dedicated to this end, which is believed to correspond to the triumph of reason and community over superstition and hatred. It is a politico-moral package in which the modern distinction between morals and politics disappears into the aspiration for a shared mode of life in which the communal transcends individual life. To be a moral agent is in these terms to affirm a faith in a multicultural humanity whose social and economic conditions will be free from the causes of current misery. Olypianism is thus a complex long-term vision, and contemporary Western Olympians partake of different fragments of it.

To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them.

Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable node of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice.

The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olvmpianism.

Olypianism is the characteristic belief system of today’s secularist, and it has itself many of the features of a religion. For one thing, the fusion of political conviction and moral superiority into a single package resembles the way in which religions (outside liberal states) constitute comprehensive ways of life supplying all that is necessary (in the eves of believers) for salvation. vation. Again, the religions with which we are familiar are monotheistic and refer everything to a single center. In traditional religions, this is usually God; with Olympianism, it is society, understood ultimately as including the whole of humanity. And Olympianism, like many religions, is keen to proselytize. Its characteristic mode of missionary activity is journalism and the media.

If Olympianism has the character of a religion, as I am suggesting, there would he no mystery about its hostility to Real religions (by contrast with test-tube religions such as ecumenism) don’t much like each other; they arc, after all, competitors. Olympianism, however, is in the interesting position of being a kind of religion which does not recognize itself as such, and indeed claims a cognitive superiority to religion in general. But there is a deeper reason why the spread of Olympianism may be measured by the degree of Christophobia. It is that Olympianism is an imperial project which can only be hindered by the association between Christianity and the traditional West.”

And the Beat goes on