Tricks and Juggleries

Cautionary Notes On the Study of History

There are those who think that history is the ultimate arbiter of all truth and debates.  "History shows us . . . " or  "History says . . . " are phrases not uncommonly heard.  Such claims, while appearing both august and wise, are usually false.  History does not give up her secrets easily.  The past (like the present) is inordinately complex.  The more historians research, the more questions and complexities they find--at least this is the case for the serious professional historian.  

Herbert Butterfield concludes his essay, The Whig Interpretation of History with this cautionary note:

Perhaps all history-books hold a danger for those who do not know a great deal of history already.  In any case, it is never safe to forget the truth which really underlies historical research: the truth that all history perpetually requires to be corrected by more history.  . . . She is at the service of good causes and bad.  In other words she is a harlot and a hireling, and for this reason she best serves those who suspect her most.

Therefore, we must beware even of saying, "History says . . . " or "History proves . . . " as though she herself were the oracle; as though indeed history, once she has spoken, had put the matter beyond the range of mere human enquiry.  Rather we must say to ourselves: "She will lie to us till the very end of the last cross-examination." [The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1965), p. 131f.]

As we contemplate the present world--and even our own country--we can readily agree that we are faced with a whirling, complex mess.

The Study of History: Devious Tracks

Why and How Did These Things Come To Pass?

Herbert Butterfield on the complexity of historical causation, using religious liberty as a case-study.

It is not by a line but by a labyrinthine piece of network that one would have to make the diagram of the course by which religious liberty has come down to us, for this liberty comes by devious tracks and born of strange conjunctures; it represents purposes marred perhaps more than purposes achieved, and it owes more that we can tell to many agencies that had little to do with either religion or liberty.

We cannot tell to whom we must be grateful for this religious liberty and there is no logic in being grateful to anybody or anything except to the whole past which produced the whole present; unless indeed we choose to be grateful to that providence which turned so many conjunctures to our ultimate profit.

If we see in each generation the conflict of the future against the past, the fight of what might be called progressive versus reactionary, we shall find ourselves organising the historical story upon what is really an unfolding principle of progress, and our eyes will be fixed upon certain people who appear as the special agencies of that progress.  We shall be tempted to ask the fatal question, To whom do we owe our religious liberty?  But if we see in each generation a clash of wills out of which there emerges something that probably no man ever willed, our minds become concentrated upon the process that produced such an unpredictable issue, and we are more open for an intensive study of the motions and interactions that underlie historical change.  In these circumstances the question will be stated in its proper form: How did religious liberty arise?  . . . History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.  [Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1965), p. 45,47.]

The appropriate approach for Christians to history and its study is to see causation as "exceedingly thick"--deep, multi-variate, complex, and at many times mysterious.  What else would we expect from God--the all controlling Controller.

. . . remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
    I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
    and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
    and I will accomplish all my purpose’
[Isaiah 46:9,19]

The Myth of the Wars of Religion

Yet Another Cheap Trick

Voltaire once famously said, "History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead".  Voltaire had in view some "dishonest" historians.  Doubtless he was excluding himself and his fellow Philosophes from the sarcasm.  Yet, arguably the Enlightenment intelligentsia was guilty of playing more tricks upon the dead than most.

One of the staunch prejudices of the Philosophes of the Enlightenment was against religion and religious belief.  These were characterised as riddled with myth, superstition, purblind prejudice, and ignorance.  In contrast were the cool headed, evidence based intellectuals of the Age of Reason.  Or so the story ran.

One of the slurs against religious belief was that it was responsible for fomenting war.  People believed in things that were no more than ignorant prejudices.  Ignorance (rather than rational debate, analysis, and discussion) readily led to the use of force.  With no evidence, the only persuader in the face of disagreement was compulsion.  Hence, religion was responsible for much of the violence and bloodshed of the early modern period.  Terms like the Wars of Religion have been coined to characterise Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  These wars, we are told, only came to an end with the emergence of the secular Nation State.  When the map of Europe was redrawn into nation states, wars passed away.  Enlightenment flourished.  Convinced?

The "Whig" View of History is Alive and Well . . . And Just As Much Nonsense As Ever

Human History is Messier Than Modern Simplistic Nostrums Would Allow

In September 1931, Herbert Butterfield published an extended essay on how modern historians were misusing and misinterpreting history in order to make a contemporary buttress for one ideology or another.  Butterfield called it the "Whig Interpretation" of history.

Apparently Whig nostrums and the misuse of history are still alive and well.  But now the shoe is on the other foot, as it were.  In Butterfield's day, he was eviscerating the attempt to make the Reformation the seedbed of triumphant modern, Western liberal society.  Now, similar interpretative sallies are being made, but in completely the opposite direction.  Now the Reformation is being blamed for causing all contemporary ills and foibles.  The upshot: Luther was a cad.

Korey Maas calls time on the nonsense.

Why It’s Ridiculous To Blame The Reformation For Secularization

Lamentations over the Reformation tend to focus on, not theology, but what are viewed as its inevitable and detrimental social and political consequences.

The Federalist


October 31 will mark 500 years since Martin Luther’s posting of 95 theses on a Wittenberg church door, thereby initiating the Protestant Reformation. In simpler days, everyone understood how to react to such anniversaries. Protestants would celebrate the “German Hercules” cleaning out the Augean stables of a decadent church, restoring the primacy of Scripture, and bringing to light its gospel of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone. Catholics would harrumph and denounce the (allegedly literal) spawn of Satan whose revolt against godly authority and rejection of timeless orthodoxy corralled millions of souls through the gates of hell.

This year is different, though, and not simply because the anniversary marks a nice round 500 years. We now know, as our rude and ignorant ancestors didn’t, that it’s entirely impermissible to say that anybody’s theology might be defective. (Thanks, Bernie!)

Nevertheless, there is money to be made and press to be generated (and, ahem, a gospel to be proclaimed), so the celebrations will continue. And so will the lamentations. But the latter have, of late, tended less to highlight the perceived theological errors introduced with the Reformation and focus instead on what are viewed as its inevitable and detrimental social and political consequences. Hyper-pluralism; rampant individualism, relativism, and subjectivism; rapacious capitalism and soul-destroying consumerism; aggressive statism and secularism.

Stalinist Warriors and Febrile Iconoclasts

When Will Michelangelo's "David" Be Torn Down?

The past week or so have been "tearing down memorials" season.  We read a piece this week which asks when the establishment is going to get around to the bust of Margaret Sanger in the Smithsonian.  For the record, we are not in favour of destroying historical monuments, but like the Scripture itself, we believe the present is far better served by an abundance of memorials of the past that are accurate: a record of warts and all.  

As an exemplar, take the Apostle Paul--persecutor of Jesus Christ and Christians, complicit murderer of the first Christian martyr, quarreller with Barnabas, John Mark, Peter and Judaizers, at times tetchy and impatient, fiercely intolerant of apostate Judaism.  None of these sins, character lapses and militancy are hidden. Yet, at the same time,  he is arguably the finest exemplar of Christianity after our Lord Himself.  His contribution to the Church is virtually immeasurable.  His influence for divine good is greater than any other, apart from the Lord for whom and to whom he laid down his life.  Paul warrants the odd statue or two.

Or, consider King David.  His sins are painfully and accurately recorded in Holy Scripture.  He committed rape, polygamy, murder; at times he acted with great treachery.  We could go on.  Yet God raised him up to be the honoured forefather of our Lord, so honoured in fact that the King of all kings insisted upon taking the title, Son of David [Matthew 1:1; 12:23, Revelation 22:16]

Our view is that the statues of Lenin and Stalin and Saddam Hussein should stand--and the full truth be told about each of them.

Reality and the Past

There is None That Does Good--No, Not One

Over the past couple of years or so we have witnessed ideological cadres of the Left wanting to tear down all societal monuments and reminiscences of those who are now deemed impure.  In the United States, for example, public monuments to Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate general, are under attack--literally.

Some New Zealand academics have started a "me-too" dance.  Got to keep up with our brothers and sisters in the US.  A junior lecturer at Massey University has discovered that William F. Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand (1912-1925) was a flippin' racist.  (Please excuse the academic jargon).  Therefore, said activist has argued, Massey University (named after the errant PM) bears guilt by association.  The name of the University should be changed.

A racially-charged debate is igniting over research that has revealed "white supremacist" comments made by the prime minister Massey University is named after.  Now, almost a century on, a top academic is calling for the university to consider a name change.  The controversial call comes from Massey lecturer and recent PhD scholar Steve Elers, who was startled to uncover blatantly racist comments made by William Ferguson Massey.  [Stuff]

Elers has discovered the following sentiments expressed by Massey:

Arthurian Knights Redivivus

Zealots of a New Religion

Archaeologists tell us that civilisations build on top of each other.  Thus, archaeological investigations are usually called "digs" because layer upon layer of settlement and successive civilisations have to be uncovered.  Naturally, this can become a complex (and at times, expensive) business.  

The point is that civilisations come and go.  New civilisations rise up atop the old.  The old get torn down, reduced to rubble, thereby enabling a rebuild or redevelopment to begin.  But not any more.  At least not in the minds of those who call themselves heritage campaigners.  These dedicated followers of fashion would oppose the tearing down of any building to make way for new development or new land use because, by definition, the old represents our heritage, and our heritage must be preserved.

We are bemused.  But the fanatical zeal of the folks involved is proof that in the minds of many of the heritage campaigners is a cause which runs deep in the soul.  Like Arthur's knights they seem to be searching for a Holy Grail.  The buildings and sites they want preserved have assumed a mystical, if not religious significance.

Let's be clear.  We Christians love the past.  Our (and your) God commands us to remember the events of salvation history with holy reverence and awe.  From that great fulcrum stems the Christian love of the past, of heritage, of being able to trace descent, of knowing whence we have come.  As we trace our past, we maintain the knowledge of our spiritual heritage, and our place and part in salvation history.  We learn who we are, and why we have been created.

Christians, of all people, are interested in heritage--and not just our own, but of the entire human race.  But we do not find ourselves wanting to join the heritage campaigners.

Roots and Origins

The Power and the Glory

The questions, Who are we, and where did we come from? are always pertinent.  The most potent cultures are those which have a long lineage faithfully recorded, analysed, critiqued, and learned.  In this sense the most potent is the Christian culture because of the length of our lineage and the rigour with which it has been recorded, passed down, and reflected upon.  Not that there is no room for improvement in this regard, but the reality abides that the Christian faith is a historical religion, steeped in history, genealogies, kingdoms, and records--which Christians are expected to know and meditate upon perpetually.

We refer, of course, not just to the post-Ascension era, but to human history from the Creation and Fall onwards up to the present.  In this sense the Christian faith is unique.  We regard Noah and Abraham as our forbears, our fathers.  Moses is our great redeemer, a faithful forerunner of the incarnate Divine redeemer.  David is our king, a lesser messiah before his greater Son.  We are citizens of the restored Davidic Kingdom (as Christ is David's greatest son, and the kingdom has been given to Him, Revelation 22:16).  These references are not mere images or metaphors.  They are historical, literal, and prophetic realities.

The modern secularist culture knows little of these realities.

Legends and Myths

The Myth of the Dark Ages

The standard secular humanist perspective on European history was wrapped up and handed to us by Enlightenment philosophes.  The basic thesis was that rational thought and accomplishment ended with the waning of the Roman Empire.  It was succeeded by the Dark Ages--a period of ignorance, disease, poverty and brutality--until Charlemagne (circa 800AD), who represented a flickering, dying ember of former glories.  But human history did not recommence its triumphant upward movement until the Enlightenment, which it began to hymn brazenly, and with just a smidgen of self-serving chutzpah, declaring "We are the Champions of the World". 

Nowadays only the untutored cling to such a deceitful trick, and then only for the purposes of propaganda--which is elegantly appropriate, since this was largely why Gibbon wrote his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The way the story "rolled" was to magnify Rome and its Empire and contrast its glories with the succeeding degradations, then slip in an association of the "decline and fall" with the spread of Christianity (a superstition undermining classical thought), leading to the "inevitable" conclusion that the Christian religion was bad for the general well-being of mankind. 

Here is Gibbon's paean of praise to Roman accomplishment:

The Real Dark Ages

Intellectual Snobbery Plays Tricks on Both the Dead and the Living

The dominant narrative of Western history runs something like this: the classical age (Greece, Alexander, and Rome) represents a crowning glory of human achievement.  This age was marked by an explosion of refined cultural achievement, knowledge, discovery, and scientific advance.  It was followed by the Dark Ages when the West came under the aegis of the Christian faith and its attendant superstition.  During nigh on a thousand dark years, the West lived in penury, illness, and degradation, presided over by tyrannical feudal despots and a superstitious religion.

Then came the Enlightenment which threw off the shackles of religious superstition and began to recover the glories of the classical age.  Out of the resulting explosion of knowledge and cultural advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment came the Western dominance of the world--culturally, politically, academically, scientifically, and so forth.

But as Voltaire observed, "history" is a trick the living play upon the dead.

The Complete Picture

George Marsden, History and the Lord of the Rings 

Justin Taylor
January 3, 2013

George Marsden, in the second edition of his magisterial work on Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 259-260, comments on a Christian view of history:

The awareness that God acts in history in ways that we can only know in the context of our culturally determined experience should be central to a Christian understanding of history. Yet the Christian must not lose sight of the premise that, just as in the Incarnation Christ’s humanity does not compromise his divinity, so the reality of God’s other work in history, going well beyond what we might explain as natural phenomena, is not compromised by the fact that it is culturally defined.

The history of Christianity reveals a perplexing mixture of divine and human factors. As Richard Lovelace has said, this history, when viewed without a proper awareness of the spiritual factors involved, “is as confusing as a football game in which half the players are invisible.”

Pop Contemporaneity

A Prisoner in a Dark Place

There have been plenty of warnings about the dangers of ignorance of one's heritage and history.  George Santayana's aphorism is notorious ("those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it").  In our recent experience tyrants have arisen deliberately attempting to remake the past exert greater control over a compliant population in the present (think Soviet and Eastern European Bloc communism).  We see it before our eyes as Islamic fundamentalists attempt to obliterate the cultural heritage of former civilisations in order to exert more extreme and complete control over their subject peoples.

The Scriptures are replete with injunctions, exhortations, and warnings not only not to forget the past, but also to reckon with it, and live in terms of it.  In the past, God's people see revealed His faithfulness to them; they also see the outcome when a generation arises which forgets what has gone before and what He and our forbears have respectively done.  It is our duty to observe, learn, and act appropriately.

Unfortunately and dangerously there are many modern Christian confessions which glory in a studied ignorance of the past.

Comeback Kid

Geography Becomes Cool

Confession is good for the soul, we are told.  So first up we need to confess that throughout our schooling years, geography was always a bit of a mystery.  Tacked on to the subject of history as part of "social studies", geography was always a strange subject, hard to nail down.

It appeared to have no cohesive unifying principles, reflected by the following universal dinner party experience: when you ask someone next to you, "What do you do for a job," and he or she replies, "Oh, I am a geographer," you nod sagely but really have no idea what they do.  Admit it.  We have all experienced this.  Actually, come to think of it, we have never met anyone who professes to be a geographer, which says a great deal. 

But we may need to rethink our prejudices.

Memory, Historians, and a Jug of Beer

Down The Memory Hole

A state that successfully obliterates the past can easily exert control over its citizens.  A state that manages to be successful in comprehensively revising the past after its own image according to its Ministry of Truth (or Education) has the potential to exert totalitarian control.  In the West we have not yet witnessed such an all encompassing dominion, apart from the Stazi in Eastern Germany.  It is significant that the GDR seriously attempted to revise comprehensively the people's memory of its past.

Historians and chroniclers, therefore, are very important.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

With the File Cabinets Still In Them

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, February 01, 2011

One of the biggest problems that conservatives have is that of sharing the liberal view of history. They both believe the same thing is inevitable, but one is for it and the other is against it. This makes the conservative (the one against) the one who is always tagging along behind, trying to keep up appearances with a respectable amount of growling. But he believes, as much as the liberal does, that the fix is in.

But this actually means that most conservatives are liberals in their view of history. They think they can decorate their freight train of liberalism with a bit of opposition bunting, but the freight train is still going to the same place.

This is why the idea of actual victory (as defined by an actual change of direction) is so hard for people to get their minds around. We think that all debates are just over speed of implementation. The liberals want to wreck the country in three years, while conservatives want to do it in ten. Conservatives think that it is a victory to cut the budget for the Department of Education, when a real victory would be to abolish the Department of Education, and burn down all the buildings with the file cabinets still in them. That would be a victory. "Ah," say the conservatives. "Never gonna happen."

But sometimes, in spite of all the defeatism, something actually happens, and this is why the trials of Obamacare are so significant. As has been wisely said, anything that can't go on indefinitely, won't. The liberal view of history is wrong, erroneous, misguided and, as noted earlier, wrong. Sooner or later, as Lady Thatcher put it, you run out of other people's money. Reality catches up with us, and conservatives begin to recognize there might be greater depths to their political philosophy than bitching about liberalism.

Over fifty percent of the states filed suit against the federal government, and with the declaration yesterday that Obamacare was unconstitutional, they won their first round. The House of Representatives has repealed the misshapen thing. The Senate will probably not do so, but they are holding out under a seige. Various states, including Idaho, are weighing the option of nullification, meaning that they don't care who wins the case in federal court; they aren't going to implement Obamacare anyway. Elections in 2012 will have this as one of the central issues -- in House races, in Senate races (where Democrats have a lot more seats to lose), in the presidential race, and in the state legislative campaigns.

Obamacare stands a good chance of being actually repealed, actually turned back, actually returned to store. And who knows what might come from that? It might turn out that some conservatives conclude that the notion of progressive inevitibility was just another false liberal doctrine, which is exactly what it is. It might occur to us that there could be a conservative view of history. What that might be will prove to be a most interesting question -- because eschatological questions cannot be answered without reference to Jesus.

Slavery as Propaganda

Misusing History

Inhumanity, like humanity, is universal.

Thomas Sowell

Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa. At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus — and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.

I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks — which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian, or whatever.

The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic, and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.

Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read — not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species — because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion, and nationality.

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.

It is true, just as it is true that I don’t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans — more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States or in the 13 colonies from which the nation was formed. The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves who picked cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilizations, it is in that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery — including, in some cases, by armed resistance.

Only the fact that the West had more firepower put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently it is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia, or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

The Twilight Years, Part IV

A Nutty Idea Still Believed

In this series of posts we are blogging on Richard Overy's new book, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), in which he documents the pervasive pessimistic outlook that gripped Britain for over twenty years. People everywhere in the twenties and thirties believed that Western civilization was going to come to an end, and Britain, the beacon of light for civilization itself, was going to disappear, Atlantis-like, sunk in the ceaseless repetitive tides of history.

What were the signs of the coming collapse of civilization? Clearly, the pointless and senseless World War was one sign. Civilization was crumbing from within as the West went to war with itself. But another sign that the end was nigh was the prophesied death and expected collapse of the capitalist system. The recitation of the last rites over capitalism came most frequently and stridently from the intellectual socialists of the day: particularly Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw.
Underlying the conviction that capitalism was about to collapse lay the particular eschatology of Karl Marx which argued that the internal and inherent contradictions within any capitalist system would ultimately lead to its destruction.

Marx's jeremiad was grounded in his nutty view of the labour theory of value. The idea was that the value (and therefore the correct or just price) of any particular good was the cost of the labour to produce it in the first place. But capitalists wanted to make a profit over and above the actual costs of production, which to Marx was theft. Profit was exploitation in Marx's economic lexicon—specifically the exploitation of labour. By charging more for a good than it cost to produce, labour was kept in a state of impoverishment. They could never afford to buy goods and services produced under the capitalist system: they could not afford them because they were priced above what they earned. Moreover, the more machines (that is, capital) employed, and the less labour, the poorer workers became, while the richer became richer. In the end, the workers would rise up and violently destroy capitalism and the civilization upon which it had been built.

Jay Richards “runs the numbers” on Marx's nutty labour theory of value:

Of course, labor often adds value to a produce, as long as that labor creates what someone wants. But you can't define economic value in terms of labor. Someone can dig a ditch in a field until his hands are bloody and raw, and then fill it back in again, without making anything that anyone wants. In that case there is a lot of labor, but no economic value . . . .

This may have been Marx's biggest blunder. I say this because Marx's prophecy that capitalism would destroy itself hinged on his labor theory of value. According to Marx, when a factory owner hires a worker to build a chair and then sells the chair for more than it cost to produce, the owner has taken more than the good is actually worth. He's taken its “surplus value”. Such profit is basically theft, since, on Marx's terms, the chair is worth exactly what it cost to produce it. So the factory owner has gotten more than it's really worth. This is why Marx speaks of capitalists “exploiting” workers, even if the workers have chosen to work for the salary they are given.

Without his definition of value, however, Marx's argument collapses. The workers have received what they agreed to. The factory owner has wisely combined their labor with his resources. He then markets and sells the chairs for more than they cost to produce but not more than others will freely pay. He's rewarded with profit for his entrepreneurial effort. There's no injustice here, no exploitation, no contradiction that will inevitably lead to class warfare and revolution.” Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem, (New York: Harper/Collins Publishers, 2009), pp. 66,67

All predictions and rife expectations of the collapse of the economic order in the UK during the Inter-War years were grounded to one extent or another upon Marx's labour theory of value.

The labour theory of value is still subscribed to widely in our modern world. One common manifestation is the ideological resistance to government privatising or selling off state owned businesses or services. Out trots the labour theory of value. The introduction of the profit motivation of the capitalist into something like managing prisons, or schools, or utilities will result in exploitation, not only of staff, but also of consumers of those services. They would need to pay an exploitative price we are told. And, if the consumers were actually willing to pay the price, it only serves to “prove” that labour is being exploited and underpaid. The workers should have been paid more in the first place. Strip profit out, and businesses can be run far more efficiently, and staff get much higher rewards. And consumers get told what they are to buy, when, how, and for what price. The long term result: everyone is "employed", but there is nothing attractive or useful to buy. Meanwhile, the bread-lines lengthen by the day. The "black market" flourishes. And so it came to pass in the Soviet Union, the great experimental workshop of Marxist economics.

But, according to Marx's labour theory of value, capitalism is morally bankrupt, is inherently diseased, and will collapse and die—just like any other organism that has a cancer eating away at its vitals. This notion that capitalism was decaying from within became widely accepted in Britain in the Inter-War years. Capitalism was grounded in exploitation, theft, and selfishness—and as such it would drive the world into anarchy and barbarism because, in the end, the exploited working classes would not tolerate it. These ideas gained much wider credence as a result of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed, giving them an apparent empirical weight.

What solution did the economists offer? There were some who argued for the introduction of a communist economic system as quickly as possible. The majority of economists, however, argued for a mixed economy, where the worst excesses of capitalism could be curbed and controlled by central planning and by targeted State intervention.

The most popular solution suggested for the crisis which was capable of uniting individuals across the political divide, was planning. The belief that a planned economy was the necessary successor to the free market was widespread across Europe, from Stalin's Soviet Union to Mussolini's Italy. For the British left, planning was something which would make the tradition from capitalism to socialism possible and secure a measure of social justice without the need for a violent revolutionary politics. In her reflection on the diseases of the capitalist system broadcast by the BBC in 1932 Beatrice Webb pointed out that 'planlessness' was in her view 'the most intractable disease' suffered by contemporary capitalism, but also the one illness that capitalism could do nothing to cure.” (Overy, p.76,77. Emphasis, ours.)

Her solution was to turn to the public service (that is, government bureaucracies, to “plan the life of the community”. The idea was that capitalists could not do the planning: the conflict of interest was impossible to overcome. But “public servants” would be disinterested, and therefore, be able to plan for the greater good of the whole public.

Belief in the efficacy of planning came to be shared by both progressives and classical-liberals. In the case of the latter, whilst being fundamentally sympathetic to market forces and economic individualism, they argued that the worst excesses of capitalism and its inner contradictions could be assuaged by rational planning.

The mixed-economy model is the one which emerged post-World War Two. In part, the planned and state directed war-economy set Britain up for moving in this direction. We need to be clear, however, that this “solution” was promulgated out of deep and widely held beliefs that the economic model of minimal state interference was fatally flawed and immoral. Neither belief was correct. The mixed-economy model exists as the solution to a falsely diagnosed problem.

The alleged internal contradictions of an economy built upon universal private ownership of both capital and labour were fabrications. The crisis was a fiction. In classical economic systems based upon the rectitude and sovereignty of property rights, the Great Depression was a normal, expected correction. Government interference and overriding of sovereign property rights only served to make it many times worse.

The “solutions” which were finally adopted to a non-existent problem, and which are with us to this day, have wreaked a terrible cost, which is rising progressively as the decades pass. The parallels in our day of the reaction to the credit crisis of 2007-8 are eerie. In this most recent case, the “crisis” was amplified way and above a normal market correction by the distortions and excesses spawned by decades of government largesse, or planning. Once again, there have been many prophecies and pronouncements of the end of free-market economics. But the reality is that free-market, sovereign property economics died a long long time ago. But, as before, the proffered solution is more centralisation of government power to plan, tax, regulate, direct, and control how people deploy their own sovereign capital and labour. As always in such cases the cure is many, many times worse than the purported disease.

When pagan societies become fearful, dreading the future, believing that the end is nigh they are usually not disappointed. But the damage comes not from their fears but from their misdirected and ill conceived diagnoses and solutions. In effect, things do become much worse, but not for the reasons they expected. They become worse because their so-called solutions carry extremely damaging unintended consequences.

The consequences of the mixed planned-economy under which we now labour are ubiquitous and relentless: they have pushed us into a miasma of increasingly despotic smothering nannying government. They have also sufficiently undermined and therefore distorted the price setting power of the free consumer so that when inevitable corrections occur, they become so bad and so severe that entire collapse is a serious possibility--as the recent global credit crisis demonstrates.

It is deeply ironic that the “solution” to a non-existent, incorrectly diagnosed problem in the thirties led to the mixed-economy model throughout the West, which is really creeping state ownership and direction of an increasingly centrally planned economy. In the long run, this makes economic decrepitude, if not outright collapse inevitable.

When gilded idols are finally broken, maybe people will be “foolish” enough to return to the God of their fathers and to the sovereign rights of property ownership, which He commands.

The Twilight Years, Part III

Condemned to Implacable Cycles of History

In this series of posts we are interacting with Richard Overy's history of the Inter-War years in Britain. [Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009)]. It was a period of profound social pessimism. It was widely believed that civilization was coming to an end. "The end of the world as we know it", was openly discusssed in newspapers and on radio. Studying this British Inter-War phenomenon is of particular interest and relevance in our day because it has once again become fashionable to prophesy that the end of civilization is nigh.

Of course the doomsayers in the thirties--which was just about everybody--were eventually proved wrong by the passage of time. But not before a great deal of damage was done--damage that is still with us to this day.

In tracing the major causes and pretexts for this pessimism during the Inter-War period, Overy points firstly to a new historical narrative. Until the time of World War One, the dominant narrative had been that history was moving forward and upward; progress was inevitable. However, after the War, new philosophies or theories of history emerged—well, actually they were old theories dusted off and reissued.

In particular ancient Greek and Eastern notions of human history being endlessly cyclical, repetitive, non-teleological, going nowhere once again took centre stage.
Specifically, it was advanced that no civilisation--however great or magnificent--could endure, but that in the past each had gone through a cycle of emergence, dominance, and then inevitable decline. These new (revived) theories of history changed the dominant eschatological outlook of Britain from an anticipated bright future to one of inevitable decline.

Historian Arnold Toynbee described the “bright outlook” that held sway before the War.

It was taken for granted by almost all Westerners . . . that the Western civilization had come to stay. Pre-1914 Westerners, and pre-1914 British Westerners above all, felt that they were not as other men were or ever had been. . . Other civilizations had risen and fallen, had come and gone, but Westerners did not doubt that their own civilization was invulnerable. (Cited by Overy, p.11.)

This dominant consensus was shattered by the War. The popular press, reflecting the national mood, in the twenties began to promote remorselessly the imminent threat of the collapse and extinction of Western civilization. This view was endorsed repeatedly by intellectuals, authors, playwrights, and philosophers.

Oswald Spengler, drawing upon Nietzsche, in The Decline of the West put forward the idea of history moving in cyclical patterns. His book had an enormous appeal in post-War Germany and was of significant influence in Britain. The argument was grounded in a particular variant of the naturalistic fallacy: that human history is necessarily bound to an organic pattern where living beings are born, grow to strength, then weakness, then death. The fatalistic optimism of the pre-War period was now being supplanted by a fatalistic pessimism in the post-War period. Declension was inevitable.

Spengler's views were taken up and made the dominant narrative of the period by Oxford historian, Arnold Toynbee, who spent all his professional academic career putting empirical historical flesh upon Spengler's idealist bones, attempted to trace out the endlessly repeated cyclical patterns in past civilisations. The pattern was: creative expansion, mechanistic consolidation, internal decay prompted by cultural stagnation, social division, and a final universal Caesarism. (Overy, p.40) Readers of Toynbee rapidly concluded that they were living in the days of stagnation, division, and were about to enter a time of state absolutist barbarity. The rise of Stalin and Hitler put empirical meat into this ideological lunchbox.

A growing belief in an inevitable, historically determined, circular decline of Western civilisation as part of a universal human pattern became the dominant narrative of history amongst intellectuals and the media in Britain in the twenties and thirties, which provided academic credence to the prediction of the coming collapse. The absolutism of inevitable progress was replaced by the absolutism of inevitable non-directional historical cycles. All Unbelieving thought tends to whipsaw between these two polar opposites.

The Christian view of history is profoundly different. Firstly, the final determined certainty of human history and of eschatology is indescribably and unimaginably good for His people because all human history (past, present, and future) now belongs to Christ. Secondly, as human history now moves ineluctably towards this glorious triumph and fulfilment there are many mini-risings and fallings. These are not organic, nor do they reflect an ultimate fate-driven cyclicality in history. Rather they reflect the blessings and curses of the covenantal structure that runs through all human history, and through which the Lord brings His Kingdom to pass. If a people honour, serve, and obey God they are blessed; if they turn away, they fall under the curses of the covenant.

But ultimately faithful love, service and obedience will be the norm universally, for such things depend not upon man who runs, nor upon he who wills, but upon the King of all kings Who is seated at the right hand of God. All enemies are gradually and ineluctably being placed under His feet.

Humanist man—that is the devotee of the West's current established religion—will continue to be racked by cycles of ridiculous vaunting optimism followed by decades of deep despair. As his most gilded idols fail and are crushed, dark demons emerge to taunt and to haunt. The two Inter-War decades in Britain provide a classic example of this religious syndrome. For puny man does not have Atlas-like shoulders to bear up the world. When his dreams of false greatness are dashed, nightmares of dark demons grow.

The Twilight Years, Part II

The War That Killed False Hopes

Society has always had its “bears” or cassandras. But the significant factor of the Inter-War period in Britain was that a bleak view of the future was shared by so many. It became part of the popular discourse of the age. It is found, to be sure, most strongly amongst the intellectuals of the day. T.S.Eliot and the Bloomsbury group reflected the dour and bleak aspect. But, even deeply religious and socially conservative intellectuals such as J.R.R. Tolkien were depressed at the increasing mechanizing of society and the passing of a more kindly age.

But social depression was not just the preserve of the literary set. It captured professional economists, sociologists, physicians and the medical establishment; fear of what was believed to be coming—at least as the experts of the day foretold it-- motivated hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to mobilise, organise, and engage to try to prepare for, if not prevent the coming calamity.

It is striking that the language of menacing catastrophe surfaces in most areas of public debate and discussion and is not simply a literary trope. . . . The phenomenon was neither evidently reactionary nor exclusively avant-garde. For the generation living after the end of the First World War the prospect of imminent crisis, a new Dark Age, became a habitual way of looking at the world. Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), p.3.

What interests us here is not so much whether the cassandra spirit was correct—clearly, in many ways it was not, for Britain continues to this day, and a civilisation of a kind endures. But more interesting are the causes of this widespread apocalyptic belief of approaching end times. Equally interesting are the experts and academics who, out of their ivory towers, led the charge proclaiming that the end of the world was nigh—and the kinds of remedies and solutions they proposed. We confront their step-children every day in our world.

What becomes abundantly clear is that those experts and academics who believed darkly that civilization was coming to an end did so on spurious analysis or false premises. Moreover, faced with the prospect of a collapse of civilisation, the academic experts offered no solutions—at least, none that were remotely palatable or viable. Nevertheless, they remained highly respected as experts and as people to be listened to: academia in general and science in particular retained its unassailable position as the authoritative logos for the human condition and solution to the ills of society. This condition abides to this day as well.

As Overy points out:

A significant aspect of the explanation, . . . is to recognize that the human and natural sciences had an important part to play in generating anxiety once scientific discoveries had filtered into the public arena . . . . There existed a wide expectation that science could supply the truths that politics could not, though science was then, as today, only true for the time being. . . . (S)cience, despite its assumed role as the voice of material reason, played a key part . . . in creating the morbid culture that inhabited the Western world view in the 1920s and 1930s. Overy, p.4,5.

This phenomenon is eerily reminiscent of the role of “science” in our day whipping up morbid hysteria about the world facing a bleak future due to man-caused global warming.

In future posts we will trace some of the scientific “discoveries” that parlayed into “evidence” that a Dark Age was coming and that nothing could be done to prevent it. In the meantime, however, we should recall that the West was set up for these morbid “twilight years” in that in the previous decades Western society had been gripped by an overwhelming sense of optimism. Expectations of the dawning of a golden age had been very high in the US, the UK and Europe. The City of God was coming to earth, it was commonly and widely believed, and it was coming through the vast explosion of knowledge brought about by the application of the scientific method to the study of the natural world. Rationality was the redeemer of mankind. The West was advanced, prosperous, powerful and blessed precisely because it had laid aside myths and superstitions (particularly of religion in general and the Christian faith in particular) and had enthroned human reason as the final arbiter of truth and knowledge. The real was the rational and the rational was the real. It was setting mankind free.

Naturally, but fatuously, the triumph and advance of reason was applicable equally to human relations, society and activity as it was to discerning the laws of mathematics, chemistry and engineering. If reason solved the problems of constructing high rise buildings or of inventing and manufacturing the internal combustion engine, it would also solve the problems of how to construct advanced human communities, ridding the world of crime, or achieving peace between nations. Human reason would enable mankind to move easily and seamlessly between the “is” of the material world to the “ought” of human action, and in turn, reason would make the “ought” into the “is” of actual experience and existence.

The burgeoning optimism that characterised the first decade of the twentieth century was shattered by the First World War. It was hard to overstate the extent of dashed hopes—but it does provide one explanation of why the decades after the war were so racked with pessimism. If hope deferred makes the heart sick, hopes dashed must make it despair. Not only was World War One terrible bloody, it was fought between so-called rational civilised people. Moreover, it seemed utterly pointless, not just in the strategy and tactics of attrition which sought to win through grinding down the opponent to capitulation, but also in the reasons for which the war was fought. However much the Kaiser and German kultur was held up as an evil, rapacious enemy, every body knew that it was really little more than a mere family squabble.

How could such an enlightened people behave so badly, so brutishly? Cultural pride and vaunted self-aggrandizement was shattered. But notice—the War did not lead to repentance. It did not lead to the dethronement of human reason to its rightful place, nor to any breaking of the idols of rationalism and a return to the Lord Christ. Consequently, the judgement upon the West represented by World War One was not followed by hope and a new beginning because the old gods were still clung to. Human reason remained the inviolable authority—only now it was blighted with failure.

For the two decades after World War One the Western view of the world was essentially diagnostic: what went wrong; what caused the War; where did the disease lie; and would it prove fatal? It was the sheer number of the ostensible problems being faced that led the diagnostic temper into an acutely pessimistic frame of mind. The “solution” to one problem led to new maladies and threats.

The first explanation as to what was happening arose out of the study of history itself. From the Enlightenment to World War One the grand assumption of most historians was that history was linear and it was moving forward and upward. Progress was inevitable. After World War One this view ceased to be dominant and fell out of favour. It was replaced by a Greek view of history as endlessly circular, going nowhere. No civilisation survived. If it arose, it would be followed by an inevitable decline. The conviction grew that Western civilisation has reached its apogee; from this point it would inevitably decline and wane.

This new meta-narrative of human history made pessimism intellectually fashionable.

The Twilight Years, Part I

Cassandras and Sirens

During the twenties and the thirties, Britain was afflicted with a profound pessimism. There was a widely shared angst that civilisation (a very significant and loaded term) was coming to an end and a long night of barbarism was about to descend upon European civilisation generally and upon Britain specifically. And Britain, at the time, regarded itself as the leader of the civilized world.

This period of two and a half decades has been highlighted recently through the publication of Richard Overy's The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009) which has received acclaim. In effect, the study of any period of history has implicit significance if can help us understand man—his devils and demons, his pride and passions, his nobility and fragility. All good historical studies provoke questions and reflections upon our own days under the sun. They also inevitably lead us to think about the future.

Overy's work achieves all of this, which is not unexpected since it is a work of social and intellectual history by a master of his craft. It traces how Britons were thinking about themselves and their culture and their dark fears for the future. In Overy's treatment we learn much about the transition of Enlightenment optimism to post-Enlightenment pessimism. This pessimism still dominates in the West. (“The world is bad; it is going to hell in a hand basket, and only the government can save us.” Variations on this theme abound, and have done for the past eighty years in the West.

What we do not often credit, however, is that the relentless wail of the sirens calling for more and more government, rules, regulations and controls is predicated upon a deep, pervasive, and persistent pessimism. The dominant cultural consensus is that the civilised world is fundamentally stuffed up; it is broken. It needs fixing.

The Inter-War years were the time when the shift from pervasive optimism to persisting pessimism occurred in the West. It goes without saying that dominant cultural moods (whether optimistic or pessimistic) are expressions of the dominant religion of the time. What is particularly interesting is that the switch from relentless optimism to prevailing pessimism about the future in the twenties and thirties did not reflect a change in the dominant religion. Enlightenment rationalism continued as the established and dominant religious faith, even as it has to this day. This is not unexpected. When man asserts himself to be the measure and master of all things, reality eventually annoyingly intrudes; the more extreme the previous optimism had been, the deeper the disappointment upon the dashing of hopes is likely to be.

Although Overy does not say so, we believe his research illustrates clearly enough that pessimism and despair and desperation is the natural and abiding world-view of Enlightenment rationalism.

A second theme developed and traced by Overy is the impact made by the educated elites of the time. Almost all from the perspective of their respective fields were in the vanguard crying doom and woe. In every case the experts and intellectuals—who had assumed the mantle of prophets and priests within the established religion of secular humanism—misread and misdiagnosed reality. But to add insult to injury their prescriptions for preventing the collapse of civilisation ranged from the barking mad to the positively dangerous. Their “solutions” were far worse than the actual problems they intended to resolve.

In many ways, the solutions of the experts (whether sociologists, eugenicists, economists, psychiatrists and psychologists, historians, political scientists, philosophers, and dominant literary figures) became self-fulfilling prophecies. Their advice, to the extent that it has been followed, has made the world into a far more difficult and dangerous place.

In the West we have been gripped in recent years by climate change mania that has announced then end of civilisation as we know it. This mania has been an almost purely Western phenomenon—notwithstanding the attempt to dress it up as a global concern. Recent events have stripped away the framing and positioning, and climate change mania is now clearly displayed as a Western syndrome.

The hysteria has been fed by “experts”, by the prophets of our culture—the academics and the scientists. The people are troubled with nightmarish visions of the future. They have been provoked by the siren song of, “Something must be done.” Guilt, blame, darkly pessimistic prognosis, harbingers of catastrophe, a reverence for science and its ability to save us, and “solutions” which would bring untold suffering upon the entire human race.

All of this is eerily reminiscent of what occurred in Britain in the Inter-War years. It turns out the apple has not fallen far from the tree these seventy years later. We are reminded of the wise words of Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This is why a careful study of, and reflection upon, the critical Inter-War years is so important.

In the forthcoming series of posts we will endeavour to summarise the main aspects and critical features of this period as Overy recounts them for us. We will thereby endeavour to learn much about our own days.