By JEFF MINICK
Piedra, Alberto. No God, No Civilization (Lambing Press: 2018); paperback, 255 pages. Available at amazon.com.
In January of 2018, I resolved to read my way through Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus The Story of Civilization before the end of the year. It is now early November, and I am nearing the end of volume X of this series, Rousseau and Revolution, meaning that if all goes according to plan, I will have completed the eleven volumes around Christmas.
The Durants — Will began sharing credit with his wife Ariel in volume VII, The Age of Reason Begins — devoted the last three volumes of their epic history to the period 1715-1815. A casual observer of The Story of Civilization might well wonder why these chroniclers of world civilization exhausted so much ink and energy on so limited a spectrum of time and place.
Were they simply enamored with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the age of Napoleon?
Not at all.
At the end of Rousseau and Revolution — yes, I looked ahead while working on this article — the Durants remark: “So we end our survey, in these last two volumes, of the century whose conflicts and achievements are still active in the life of mankind today.”
(Despite this farewell, the Durants added a final volume, The Age of Napoleon.)
The Durants examined the political, philosophical, and scientific whirl of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and understood the profound impact of that age on our present-day politics and culture. The ideas and propositions of the philosophers, statesmen, and scientists of this period — Catherine the Great, Maria Teresa of Austria, Diderot, Rousseau, Burke, Voltaire, Newton, and so many others — may be hidden from our sight by the mists of time, but their ghosts haunt our dreams and ideologies.
Of all the transformations wrought by these not-so-distant ancestors — the advances in science, the Industrial Revolution, the growth of nationalism and democracies, and a hundred other phenomena — perhaps the most profound cultural shift of the eighteenth century was, as the Durants repeatedly suggest, the jettisoning of Christianity by so many influential men and women.
Among the learned of that age, atheism, deism, pantheism, and agnosticism were rampant. (It’s amusing to read how so many of these free thinkers, particularly those who were natives of France, received their education from the Jesuits.)
Suffering from these assaults and from the loss of ecclesiastical powers to the nation-state, the Church found itself very much playing defense, as it does today, against its secular critics.
In No God, No Civilization: The New Atheism & the Fantasy of Perpetual Progress, Alberto M. Piedra, professor emeritus at the Institute of World Politics and U.S. ambassador to Guatemala 1984-1987, also tells us how the Enlightenment is “still active in the life of mankind today.”
Unlike the Durants, and with the hindsight of an additional forty years — the last volume published by the Durants was in 1975 — Piedra in his history of civilization and Christianity reveals the great damage the freethinkers of the Enlightenment left in their wake.
In the chapter with which he ends his history, “The Enlightenment: Darker Than Commonly Understood,” Piedra writes, “The more radical ideas of the Enlightenment are the mistaken notions that people themselves are masters of the universe and that they are capable of establishing paradise on earth.”
The goals of today’s progressivism could hardly be summed up more succinctly. Heirs to philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot, and to the scientific advancements of the last three hundred years, our modern-day Wizards, as Piedra calls them, advocate “an illusory belief in the idea of perpetual progress and in the unstoppable powers of human ingenuity and reason.”
Though Piedra respects such atheists as Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Hawking for their commitment to their search for truth, he wrote his book in part to get their adherents “to rethink some of their philosophical positions.”
Throughout No God, No Civilization, as he looks at those forces that brought the West into being — antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation — Piedra contrasts the philosophers and theologians of those epochs with the Wizards of today. We see in those earlier times a humility vis-à-vis knowledge and power, learning and debate governed by a belief in God and an awareness of human nature.
In contrast, Piedra describes in these pages the brash arrogance of many of our current Wizards, who without proof so easily dismiss Christianity and the existence of any god whatsoever.
(An aside: As the Durants constantly tell their readers, even the philosophes and rulers of the Enlightenment with little religious faith nevertheless believed that Christianity brought comfort to men and women, and offered society a viable moral code. Unlike today’s Wizards, they understood that they had developed no system to replace Christian faith and morality. They knew that the great majority of people would not substitute philosophy or, more implausibly, reason, for their God, that the farmer and the laborer lacked not only the means but also the inclination to do so.)
No God, No Civilization offers not only insights into history and a fine defense of the Christian faith, but also contains on nearly every page some memorable remark worthy of quotation. The copy sent to me for review is now honored with ink and highlighter, notes written next to various passages, and bits of paper marking special pages.
In addition to Piedra’s pithy observations, he includes quotations from dozens of authors: various Popes and saints, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among many others. Piedra cites as well other writers new to me, like David Berlinski.
In the “Epilogue,” Piedra writes: “In a global village filled with half-truths, lies, and failed utopian projects, it is high time the world’s elites woke up from their self-induced stupor and ditched their infatuation with half-baked unworkable ideologies of liberation, equality, and brotherhood, which are pitched as salvific but are divorced from truth and reality.”
Will No God, No Civilization rouse those slumbering elites?
Perhaps a few of them, should they chance to read it.
A related question: Will our Wizards lead us to utopia?
Given that we are coming off the bloodiest century in the history of mankind, the result of Communist and fascist Wizards, and given the blindness of our contemporary Wizards to the workings of the human person, in the words of my long-deceased grandmother, “I wouldn’t make book on it.”
Highly recommended.
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