RJN on Rieff

I'm late this morning turning in a piece to a symposium that takes up the question of whether the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have any meaning any more, and what other ideological options, if any, are out there. The reason is I keep completely rewriting my short essay. I was just about to send it in, when I read, via Amy, Richard John Neuhaus's reflections on the recent death of Philip Rieff. Now I'll have to do another revision. Here's Neuhaus:

For all the intellectual panache, however, there was something more sobering about Philip Rieff, for which the right word may be prophetic. While we were preoccupied with our therapeutic games, it went largely unnoticed that our culture died some while back; the ideas, habits, and traditions that sustained and vivified it have been shattered and can’t be put back together. Culture began with renunciation and ended with the therapeutic renunciation of renunciation.

Rieff, a Jew, believed that Christianity supplied the best bet for a sustainable culture, but that’s all gone now. In a 2005 interview with the Chronicles of Higher Education, he says he does not believe that an authentic religious culture could be resurrected, no matter how hard we might try. Following Marx, Weber, and Freud, he argues that modern prosperity, cities, bureaucracy, and science have completely transformed the terrain of human experience. People who try to practice orthodox Christianity and Judaism today, he says, inevitably remain trapped in the vocabulary of therapy and self-fulfillment. “I think the orthodox are role-playing,” he says. “You believe because you think it’s good for you, not because of anything inherent in the belief. I think that the orthodox are in the miserable situation of being orthodox for therapeutic reasons.”

I’m still reading the last book, but I think Rieff is saying that it’s all over. I don’t think he’s right about that. I hope he’s not right about that. But he could be right about that. At the very least, it is a possibility to be considered when proposed by one so thoughtful as Philip Rieff. Christ never said of Western Civilization that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

I think Rieff is wrong about orthdox religious believers. The demands of any kind of serious Christian or Jewish orthodoxy are so difficult in the modern world that I can't imagine anyone choosing to live that way because it feels good. But I can't get it out of my head that he's generally right about it being all over. Like Neuhaus, I desperately hope he isn't right about that, but the trouble I've been having with this essay has to do with not having much hope that politics can do much to arrest our fragmentation and decline. Yet I resist accepting that, because of its implications. It would bring us to the point that Alasdair Macintyre described in this famous passage:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead -- often not recognizing fully what they were doing -- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict.

You look around at the peace and prosperity around us, and wonder, "What planet does MacIntyre and did Rieff live on?" But what both men saw was the metaphysical and philosophical structure of Western civilization having decayed beyond repair. Before dismissing them as hysterical pessimists, we should take their arguments seriously. One enormous catastrophe -- the Mideast going up in war, cutting off the world's supply of oil and collapsing the world economy, say; or an avian flu epidemic in humans; or Washington obliterated by a suitcase nuke -- would make our world and our prospects look very, very different, and quickly.