In one of our recent Merely Catholic podcasts, Professor John Loughlin, a former Cistercian and senior fellow of the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University, reflected on his sense that we were at a crossroads in history.
Woke culture (or whatever we call it) is taking no prisoners. To reduce the conflict to its simplest level, it’s a vision of the collective against the personal.
We’ve got so used to understanding the value of people by looking through a Christian lens, that it’s too easy to take it for granted.
In the ancient empires of the classical world, people were defined by nation, tribe or class. In Communist China (and before that, Russia) people were economic cogs in a collectivist state machine.
And perhaps the most serious consequence of this was that people were dispensable.
Whether we look to the brutality of the Spartans at the beginning of the first millennium who abandoned their weaker children at birth, or Stalin at the end of the second, creating an unnecessary famine in Ukraine and killing five million, collectivism holds human life cheap.
Christianity challenges the collectivist views that human beings have no intrinsic worth beyond their membership of the favoured group.
The whole concept of human rights derives from this unique Christian insight.
But not any more.
We might briefly ask what has happened, why did it happen and how can we counter it?
And there are things we can do. There is hope. If we ask what has happened, we find that the identity politics that has swept the West is a return to the collective.
Values are assigned according to the virtues of the group you belong to. The liberal arts faculties of universities popularised this new perspective.
They sold it with the promise that it would bring a new world order of justice and peace and it has spread like wildfire through the education system.
We might ask why, and that takes us to some odd places, including the idea that wokeism has started to behave like a new religion. It has fundamentalists, heresies, original sin, excommunications. As secularism has relentlessly attacked Christianity and driven it to the edges, there is a vacuum left at the centre of the human heart.
As St Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find themselves in you.”
Not just restless, but only too capable of making some alternative and more convenient path to a utopian heaven on earth.
The consequences of replacing Christianity with wokeism are profoundly serious. It’s not just the matter of aggressive secular agendas like abortion and euthanasia finding a platform in public policy.
There are also consequences that lead to the ending of freedom of speech, the introduction of thought crime and – surprise, surprise – the persecution of Christians.
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago was one of the most clear-sighted commentators. He took up arms against the culture wars and a few years before his death in 2015, he wrote:
“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilisation, as the Church has done so often in human history.”
He saw that the intrinsic power of the faith contains the means of countering spiritual and political corruption. His courageous hope and trust in the power of the Gospel was only threatened by one thing – a form of Catholicism corrupted by the secular spirit.
He warned that the only thing preventing such a restoration was the internal threat of “liberal Catholicism”, which in a famous 1998 speech he called “an exhausted project” that “has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and [is] inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood”.
Passionate and faithful Catholicism seeded our culture and its astonishing flourishing. The arts and sciences were founded on the pursuit of knowledge enabled by Catholic universities which unleashed the potential of humanity in the pursuit of the knowledge of God and his world.
Perhaps it is no great surprise that the fatal corruption of our Christian culture should also have been unleashed by the universities as they rebelled against their roots and chose relativism and postmodern mental anarchy over the founding vision.
Professor Loughlin believes that the fight for Christendom lies not in the virtual modules of learning that practical conservatives like Jordan Peterson are setting up, but instead in a recovering of confidence in the transformative powers of Christianity.
Two entirely different and opposing ways of looking at human beings and what constitutes their value are ranged against each other.
The 20th century is a terrible reminder of the power of collectivism to destroy human beings in unimaginably high numbers for the sake of secularist dogma.
If the 21st century is not to succumb to the tyranny of wokery, it will be because the Catholic intellectual tradition, embedded in its universities throughout the world, recovered its confidence in the reliability of revelation and tradition and guarded a Christian anthropology that resisted the corruption of rival secular philosophies.
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