In my first post in this series, I outlined R. R. Reno’s idea of strong gods and weak gods as metaphors for the kinds of ideas that organize societies. Reno argues that the strong gods have been banished, or at least critically diminished, in favor of weak gods. What led to the banishment of the strong gods?
Reno describes the banishing of the strong gods as resulting from a postwar consensus among prominent leaders in politics and the intelligentsia. In the first half of the twentieth century, a single generation witnessed and suffered through two devastating world wars and looked at horror at the atrocities committed during those conflicts. The Second World War capped this process off with the introduction of weapons that could do more than merely level cities – they introduced the very real prospect of destroying all of humanity. Reno writes,
The history of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to speak for itself: German militarism and the seduction of aggressive nationalism caused World War I; in the social disorder that followed the armistice, Mussolini rose to power as the supreme leader of a paramilitary political party; Nazism combined anti-Semitic animus with a cruel ideology of strength; and, of course, communism governed in the Soviet Union for decades, feeding on the same totalitarian temptations. The inescapable lesson, most came to believe, was that war and destruction arose from close-minded modes of life and thought.
Recall that in Reno’s description, the “strong gods” are the ideas that command and inspire loyalty and reverence. But Reno doesn’t shy away from the fact that strong gods can be corrupting, and he doesn’t deny that the horrors that drove the world wars were done in service of strong gods. He freely acknowledges that those who harbored this worry have a real point:
I am not opposed to the anti-totalitarian struggles of the last century. The postwar consensus arose for good reasons.
The good reasons motivating the postwar consensus was a desire to ensure that the horrors of the twentieth century would never repeat themselves:
The imperative is bracingly simple: Never again. Never again shall we allow totalitarian governments to emerge. Never again shall societies reach a fever pitch of ideological fanaticism. Never again shall the furnaces of Auschwitz consume their victims. This imperative—never again—places stringent demands upon us. It requires Western civilization to attain self-critical maturity with courage and determination, which Popper hoped to exemplify with his full-throated attack on Plato, the founder of our philosophical tradition. We must banish the strong gods of the closed society and create a truly open one.
Ensuring that nothing was sacrosanct and above critical scrutiny was necessary to ensure nothing could become strong enough to encourage people to commit atrocities:
We must strip our inheritance of the vestiges of sacred authority that blinker men’s reason, making them vulnerable to ideological fanaticism. It is not cultural or religious piety that is needed today, but rather independence and courageous criticism. An open society needs open minds. To foster them, we must free the rising generation from its deferential habits.
But the banishment of the strong gods was a slow process, that proceeded in a slippery slope fashion. The initial intent was not to throw the gates wide to total openness (and thus total weakening) – the goal was simply to open the door to a greater critical questioning of the inherited traditions and institutions of a society. As an example of this shift, Reno describes a report titled General Education in a Free Society, produced by the faculty of Harvard University that aimed to, in the words of the report itself, “both shape the future and secure the foundations of our free society.”
The Harvard committee didn’t want to undercut the value of traditional Western civilization, Reno says – “Since the Western tradition is itself the source of the ideals of a free society, the committee argued, it must be passed down to the next generation. But precisely because critical inquiry and freedom are crucial to the Western inheritance, we must avoid a slavish devotion to the past.” The goal was to balance these two countervailing forces.
The Harvard committee worked to combine traditional content with a critical spirit. The educational philosophy of the future, they observed, must “reconcile the sense of pattern and direction deriving from heritage with a sense of experiment akin innovation deriving from science that they may exist fruitfully together.”
Similar programs were carried out by elites at other top universities – and they, too, were not initially set on throwing off traditional Western canon, but with promoting a critical evaluation of it as part of inheriting it:
There was an emphasis on authority in the initial stages of the postwar era, true, but not strongly imposed and always open to experimentation. 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 too tilted against authority, even as he commended authoritative texts. “The [great] books should speak for themselves,” he wrote, “and the reader should decide for himself.” Tradition, yes, but the free individual has the final say.
But, Reno says, opening up the idea that rejecting the traditional foundations of Western civilization was a viable and even respectable option would inevitably throw the gates wide open. Of Harvard’s approach, Reno says,
The Harvard committee sought a delicate balance between the authority of great books and the independence of critical questioning. But the latter enjoyed the prestige of moral progress, and over time it predominated.
Similarly, of Hutchins’ approach to balancing the inheritance of the Western cannon with an ongoing critique of it, Reno says,
This was a dynamic tendency, not a stable position. The arrow of development always pointed toward more openness, more deconsolidation of old authorities, more disenchantment, which is why the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s, while certainly disruptive, was more in continuity with the 1950s than in rebellion against it.
This tendency led to the banishing of the strong gods and the rise of the weak gods – not immediately or all at once, but as an inevitable process that would proceed at an increasing rate over time. As John Maynard Keynes once said, “the world is ruled by little else” beyond the “ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong.” Once this consensus was reached among elites and intellectuals in the postwar society, it would inevitably radiate out to everyone else.
Reno has much to say about both the social and political consequences of banishing the strong gods. In the next post, I’ll be outlining what he takes to be the social consequences.
