When Dr. Addleman wrote asking me if I might speak at a pre-conference event for the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities gathering, he suggested the title: “What Age are We Living In?” I’m a historical and cultural sociologist, and in my writing and teaching, I like working with a big canvas. His suggestion offered me a very big canvas. How could I say no?
What age are we living in? It’s a good question. The Italian literary critic, Roberto Calasso, recently called this moment, “the unnamable present.” Yet I think we know more than he allows. It’s possible that we don’t have the right label for it yet, but I rather think that there are things we can confidently say about it.
So, this morning, I want to talk about the age we live in and, depending on the time, what it might mean for Christian higher education.
In what follows, it’s important to highlight that in the attempt to grasp the nature of the age we live in, I am not speaking of individual experience or a collective psychology. To speak in those terms would mischaracterize the “age” we are living in by failing to account for the vast differences one can find in large populations at any given time. Rather, I am speaking of culture—the symbolic resources available to us to make sense of our lives. To define the spirit of the age is to understand the cultural resources and logics that characterize an age or an epoch.
A Moment of Rupture
A short and preliminary answer to the question is that “ours is an age of rupture” that marks a new moment in history. Our world is certainly a post-Christian world—that much is obvious to everyone in this room. But even more, it is an increasingly post-Enlightenment world and, therefore, a post-liberal world as well. This, in my view, is a world historical event that has been unfolding for over a century, but whose consequences are only now bubbling up to the surface. It is world-historical because this rupture is not only taking place on the surface of social life, but in the deepest movements of our civilization.
What do I mean by the deepest movements of our civilization?
Think of the distinction between weather and climate. The weather changes daily, but the climate represents long-term patterns that we might intuit, but don’t ordinarily pay attention to, measure, or see.
The same is true with culture. On the surface of culture are all those things we can see, name, articulate, and argue about. The depth of culture includes those things we typically cannot name because we take them for granted. They are mostly invisible to us because they are implicit or tacit and therefore unspoken. The depth of culture resides in the framework of assumptions and dispositions that guide life.
The deep structures of culture take form around at least five questions.
Every civilization, every society, every institution and, indeed, every human being, lives by an implicit understanding of what is real and how we know what is real, an implicit understanding of who and what is human and how we are to treat other human beings, and an implicit understanding of what the point of our individual and shared life is really all about. This is to say that every civilization, every society, every institution and, indeed, every human being lives by an implicit metaphysics, an implicit epistemology, an implicit anthropology, an implicit ethics, and an implicit teleology. And when this implicit cosmology is oriented toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, human beings flourish; when it fails to be oriented in these ways, human beings suffer.
If we live in a genuine age of rupture, then the rupture occurs not only on the surface of social life—in what we can see, name, observe and articulate; it is also and more importantly occurring in the tacit realm of a culture that is largely invisible to us. The assumptions and premises and unspoken logics of our life-world that are so deeply taken for granted that we aren’t aware of them.
The Enlightenment That Wasn’t
This idea of the tacit matters a great deal because it calls into question what most people, including Christians, take to be the fundamental rupture of modern Western history, which is the Enlightenment, an intellectual and cultural revolution occurring between the late 17th century and the opening years of the 19th century. That story has a wide audience indeed; long accepted by many scholars and lay people, secularists and people of faith.
As the story goes, this rupture divided European history between a civilizational order rooted in and animated by religious authority and tradition and one grounded in science, empiricism, and self-directed reason. The evocative symbol of a dawning “light” so central to the Enlightenment evoked a picture of a world in which the “darkness” of ignorance, superstition, and bigotry would be dispelled, replaced by the bright radiance of expanding knowledge and increasing toleration.
Two quick illustrations: This narrative is the source of the motto, “the integration of faith and learning,” a well-intended formula that reinforces the very dualism it seeks to overcome.
This account of the cleavage of Western history through the Enlightenment, has political consequences. Today’s Right accepts this narrative nostalgically, believing that if history hadn’t taken a secular turn, and we still lived under the authority of a Judeo-Christian cosmology, all would be right with the world. Today’s Left accepts this narrative hopefully, believing that if the forces of religious orthodoxy just gave up their resistance to the promises of liberation, all would be right with the world. But whether spun by the Right or the Left, this narrative emphatically does not describe the problem we actually face today. The Enlightenment did mark a rupture in Western history; it just wasn’t as stark and as revolutionary as its proponents and detractors claim it was.
Why do I say this?
Though the philosophes viewed the Enlightenment as a repudiation of Christianity, the Enlightenment, was, in fact, an imitation of Christianity; a derivative of and a vulgarized restatement of traditional Christian culture: its new philosophy, a secularized faith; its cheerful belief in steady innovation and progress, a secularized hope; and its humanitarianism, a secularized charity. Beyond this, the Enlightenment had substituted the immortality of the soul with the immortality of reputation and replaced religious saints with their own hagiography of Newton, Bacon, Locke, etc. Yes, there were important substantive differences, not least the view that human nature is benign; that the supernatural is mere superstition; that the ends of life are life itself, not the beatific heavenly city. But the categories themselves that Enlightenment figures wrestled with, the deep structures of this “new” culture were the inheritance of orthodox theology. Thus, even when the champions of secular reason and of orthodox religious belief disagreed, they disagreed religiously. As Carl Becker famously put it, when we examine the foundations of Enlightenment faith, “we find that at every turn the Philosophes betray their debt to medieval thought without being aware of it . . .. there is more of Christian philosophy in the writings of the Philosophes than has yet been dreamt of in our histories.”[1] They put off the fear of God but maintained a respectful attitude toward the Deity. They ridiculed the idea that the universe had been created in six days but still believed it to be a beautifully articulated machine designed by the Supreme Being according to a rational plan. The Garden of Eden was for them a myth, but they looked enviously back to the golden age of Roman virtue, or across the waters to the unspoiled innocence of an Arcadian civilization. They renounced the authority of the Church and the Bible but exhibited a naïve faith in the authority of nature and reason. They denied that miracles ever happened but believed in the perfectibility of the human race.
It has been said that pieties never die, they just change their objects of worship. Indeed, there was much more substantive overlap between the “age of faith” and the “age of Enlightenment” than the protagonists in this historical drama believed.
The American Case
Nowhere was this more true than in America. The Enlightenment in America was not a unitary and triumphant movement of secular rationality. Nor was it a revolution that uncomfortably coexisted with the fading legacy of Puritanism. The Enlightenment in America was, in fact, a lively and evolving syncretism. The Enlightenment in America was a hybrid-Enlightenment; a blending of cultural sources that drew from many different tributaries of thought and practice: it pulled as much from Calvinism as it did from classical Republicanism and Lockean individualism. Though fundamentally different in their understandings, there was, nevertheless, a shared commitment to reason, a common and unqualified ethical commitment rooted in the sacredness of human life, and a teleology of a bright, promising, and perhaps perfected future ahead. The hybrid-Enlightenment was a complex and fairly thick cosmology from which a powerful and generative mythos would take shape, fueling more than a century of nation-building.
So, rather than a rupture that divided history between an age of reason from an age of faith, the hybrid Enlightenment actually provided the cultural conditions and normative sources for solidarity and cohesion in the nation. It was the adhesive that kept America together for it served as a common framework that contained our many differences and made those differences intelligible to each other.
Much of American political history can be retold through the history of the hybrid-Enlightenment; how this culture was worked through again and again over many generations in ways that certainly altered the character of the hybrid-Enlightenment, yet invariably in ways that were recognizable to successive generations.
Indeed, it has been the unravelling of the hybrid-Enlightenment in recent generations, and the culture war that has followed as a consequence of its unravelling, that marks the rupture of our time; a rupture of far greater significance, in my view, than the rupture represented by the Enlightenment.
The Deeper Meaning of the Culture War
With the contemporary culture war, we see tension, conflict, and polarization on every conceivable issue and in every conceivable sphere: in the family, faith, the arts, law, philanthropy, sports, business, and every level of education. You’ve seen this yourselves for more years than you can remember.
But that’s only on the surface. What really matters with this culture war plays out within the deep structures of our civilization—as I say, the implicit assumptions that define the fundamental frameworks of a social order.
The culture war, then, is not just about polarization between political parties and special interest groups on an expanding range of policy issues—abortion, sexuality, church/state issues, race, immigration, and the like. The culture war is about the destruction of any architecture of shared meaning that could bind us together through our differences. The evidence for this is everywhere. Let me mention four ways we see this.
We first see it in a wide-spread epistemological crisis. “Rationality” has given way to multiple and competing rationalities, none of which is privileged. There is no single framework of truth, only truths each with its own public. And this fragmentation of reality is reinforced by an informational eco-system spawned by the new communications technologies and driven by market incentives. These massive institutions render truth and reality beside the point.
Thus, it’s not that our leaders, and the range of institutions they inhabit, have lost the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, but rather they have become indifferent to the distinction under the pretext of that effectiveness matters more. As to the public, it is not that ordinary citizens have become more stupid or more gullible than in times past, as Christopher Lasch put it, but rather we have no real institutional alternative to the consumption of hyperbole, spin, distortion, and lies.[2] For the average person, navigating this baffling symbolic landscape tends to be the information that reinforces one’s own understanding of the world, an understanding shared with anonymous others in a simulated community.
The epistemological crisis, in short, is that in public life, there are now no shared objective, knowable truths; that all claims to authoritative knowledge are without foundation; that “reason” as an autonomous capacity independent of presuppositions or free from any vested interests is a fiction.
Second, we see evidence for the destruction of any comprehensive idea of the good in an ethical incoherence that is equally wide-spread; the recognition that there are no absolute moral or ethical values, but rather, a recognition that right and wrong, good and evil are, in the end, nothing more than vague constructs tied to social circumstances and emotional states. In our personal experience, moral truth may seem obvious, natural, or objective, but outside of our own heads and the students we aspire to teach, moral truth is arbitrary and without warrant.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s elegant summary applies even more today than in the early 1980s when he wrote it: “From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises, argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion.”[3]
This means that “there is nothing to contemporary ethical disagreements but a clash of antagonistic wills, each will determined by some set of arbitrary choices of its own.”[4] What this means is that moral language today fails as a means to truth, but succeeds as a means to power.
A third way we see evidence for the collapse of hybrid Enlightenment is in the absence of a coherent vision of the future—a telos. A telos is important because both meaning and hope rest upon it. Without ideal images of a better world, collective life has no animating direction. But an overarching and comprehensive telos is unimaginable in a world like ours. Wendy Brown put it this way: “History becomes that which has weight but no trajectory, mass but no coherence, force but no direction; it is war without ends or end. Thus, the extent to which ‘dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ is today unparalleled even as history itself disintegrates as a coherent category or practice.”[5]
This matters for so many reasons, but not least because common goods depend upon common purposes.
Finally, we see the loss of an architecture of shared meaning in the diminishment of the rich complexity and moral worth of human persons. This diminishment comes about in different ways, but perhaps most tragically when people look to identity groups and their political aspirations as their primary source of social life and formation.
Whether Left or Right—whether based in sexuality, race, religion, or disability—identity groups are networks of individuals united by their grievances; grievances that are fueled by narratives of injury. Identity groups are the natural outcome of a dehumanized and dehumanizing world.
The appeal and endurance of identity groups as a social formation in today’s world can be found in their function. They represent a means to power and influence in a world that has rendered average citizens mostly powerless over the conditions of their existence. They are an assertion of distinctiveness in a world that tends to flatten or level all meaningful differences. They suggest the possibility of meaningful belief and purpose in a world that renders most beliefs a matter of mere taste. They represent an anchor of certainty in a world of contingency and a way of belonging in a world that weakens the ties of local and organic community. They constitute a plea for recognition and the dignity it confers in a world that cares very little for the individual personally, and the hope of living a meaningful and significant life, a life that matters, in a world that makes most of us feel our lives are insignificant and inconsequential.
Tragically, identity groups may be all that many have available to them, but we should not pretend that they are anything other than surrogate communities, and as such, they are compensatory for the genuine article. As I say, identity groups are the natural outcome of the destruction of organic communities; one of the sources of dehumanization endemic to the modern and late modern world.
In sum, our nation, our society, is divided not only in its opinions, but in its vocabularies; and not only in its vocabularies, but in its premises about what is real and true, right and just, and how we know these things. In the midst of it all, the moral worth of human life has been reductively indexed to different political or ideological positions. In the process, we have become unable to tell a common story about ourselves and our communities. We’ve lost the old framework and there is nothing on the horizon that seems capable of replacing it.
What I’ve just described as the deeper significance of the culture war is the textbook definition of nihilism.
What is the age we are living in? We are living in the age of Nietzsche, the late 19th century philosopher who predicted the nihilism that would naturally follow from the death of all god-terms. Put differently, underneath the deep polarization we see all around us, a new common culture is emerging. And that is a culture of nihilism.
This is not to say that we are all nihilists—far from it. It’s just that we are living in an age where the frameworks of meaning and moral order are nihilistic in character, and it is against the backdrop of that nihilistic cosmology that we have to find our way.
Needless to say, the political consequences of this rupture are playing out before our eyes. The culture war is not about opposing sides in a democratic debate over the future of the nation. It is, rather, a manifestation of the competing will to power. The dominant forces in our public life are not oriented toward conciliation, but annihilation. This is the meaning of cancel culture—a tactic to obliterate all that obstructs the will to power; a will to bring enemies to nothing, to destroy completely. In other words, annihilation is not an accidental feature of the present conflict. It is the point of it.
Hence, the rise of authoritarian tendencies we see both on the Right and on the Left, though obviously, especially on the Right. Whether from the Right or the Left, the authoritarian impulse becomes manifest in the attempt to address the absence of any kind of social and moral cohesion. If solidarity cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively. I fear that we have not yet seen the full consequences of this.
The Church, Identity, and Formation
Christianity in America, of course, is not immune to these long, slow, cultural developments. In many inspiring ways, the church in its diversity bravely resists the spirit of the age. In many heart-breaking ways, the church accommodates the zeitgeist and indeed justifies the worst aspects of these cultural developments.
One way, it has done the latter is—and let me be clear—in its public witness, parts of American Christianity have acquired all of the attributes of an identity group; no different from any other identity group, it is defined by its resentments toward the other side, its implicit ethics of revenge, and its will to power. Obviously much more could be said about this.
Two points—one quick, the other a bit rambling.
First, we need to be crystal clear. For Christians, the enemy cannot be the other side. The enemy, rather, is the nihilism that insinuates itself into all of our institutions and practices.
Second, the more we Christians lean into the nihilisms of our culture war, the more difficult the task of forming young people in the faith will be.
Americans in the age of the culture wars have an abundance of scripts but little in the way of tradition. Indeed, the obsessive adherence to political formulas that we see on both the left and the right precisely reflects the absence of the wise and discerning spirit that a healthy tradition can cultivate in a person. The children of an amoral and nihilistic age long for moral seriousness and a sense of purpose. They find a poor substitute for both in the thin, formulaic dogmas of social media, which reduces every thought to its simplest and angriest form. The rewards systems of the major websites incentivize a kind of algorithmic conformism: the way to win likes and shares is to spit out the prescribed response to every ideological stimulus. Doing so efficiently and forcefully earns them the approval of their copartisans and a sense of participation in a noble struggle. What it costs them is, among other things, their individuality as moral agents—an individuality that tradition at its best leaves intact and in fact makes possible by teaching the individual to be a full person. Much of the brutality of the culture wars can be attributed to this reduction of rich cultural frameworks to systems of formulaic rejoinders.
And yet that is the way things tend to go, not only online, but wherever the ideological factions are primarily motivated by the fear of encroachment by their enemies. An anxious formation does not inspire real love or even real knowledge of a tradition, only a kind of instinctive reaction to the ideas of the other side.
Even as the two cultural factions struggle on in defense of their ways of life, then, neither is successfully forming strong, capable, confident young people.
While presenting themselves as two powerful and demanding cultural systems, they are not, in fact, coherent, authoritative traditions into which young people can be formed. And this absence of real living traditions leaves the young bereft of the sources they need to cultivate strong characters and independent judgment.
Traditions can seem constraining, frustrating, arbitrary, unsuited to a fast-changing present. They are easy to throw aside. Yet the gifts they offer us, though harder to perceive, are in fact especially valuable in times of bewildering change. Tradition gives us a place to begin from when we are confronted with something new. It does not tell us what to do, exactly; those who take orders directly and mindlessly from a tradition have misunderstood its function. Rather, living in a tradition nurtures in us a capacity for discernment. It imparts to us some part of the experience of the ages, not so that we can blindly imitate it, but so that we can take it into ourselves and make use of it in ways that belong to us.
The problem is that you cannot just will yourself—or your children or your students—into a tradition. When a tradition becomes a script, either it has failed to teach or the student has failed to learn.
The challenge then, is in an age of nihilism, how do we form the young into our tradition in ways that help them become all that God intends but also in ways that encourage them to be fully and faithfully present as God’s people in a troubled and broken world.
Conclusion
As MacIntyre once wrote, we can only know how to live in this world, and we only know how to lead, when we know the story of which we are a part. We only know how to give ourselves to hope and inspire others to hope when we know where we fit within the plot of a larger history; a history that is, in some small part, ours to make.
This is so because we are, by our very nature, narrative creatures. We humans are constituted by the tales that we tell, and this is true both individually and collectively, in the institutions you lead. Stories are definitional. They give us identity, meaning, purpose. Through story, we are inspired or repulsed; and when shared, we come together in solidarity, when contested and opposed, we are driven apart from one another. Stories, and the language we use to tell them, then, are neither trivial nor tangential—they’re not an adornment to the real things in life—but elemental to our being as persons, as institutions, and as communities. They are, as I say, definitional; they are constitutive of life.
The age within which I believe we reside is both incredibly exciting and incredibly scary. That age is certainly a post-Christian world, but it is also post-Enlightenment and thus increasingly post-liberal. I believe we are moving into an age of nihilism.
Needless to say, this is a challenging moment for Christians. But they are not challenging to God.
[1]. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Yale University Press, 1932).
[2]. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (W. W. Norton, 1995).
[3]. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), 8.
[4]. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 9.
[5]. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 1995), 71.
