Manchester And Modernism
By SHAUN KENNEY
(Editor’s Note: Shaun Kenney is a former executive director of American Life League, a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia, an an op-ed writer and ghostwriter for various publications and personalities in Washington, D.C.)
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One has to be rather encouraged at the outpouring of response to events in Manchester, most notably in the tone of first responders and the Manchester community itself. Listening in on BBC Radio, one is particularly taken by a Sikh cab driver who put it upon himself to deliver meals — he was not asked, he merely responded.
All of this happens in multicultural Britain, whose reflections of empire and tradition are now enmeshed in a sea of vibrant voices, different faiths and traditions, all in the name of an Anglo-Saxon variant of secularism that seems to have forgotten the soul of Christendom.
Yet scratch the surface of British society, and underneath you will still find the spirit of Richard the Lionheart and Winston Churchill; the example of St. Thomas Becket and the zeal of St. Patrick — the great evangelizer of Ireland who happens indeed to be an Englishman.
In times of trauma, it is remarkably surprising how God manifests Himself, even among societies that have in principle abandoned the very idea of the Christian West some decades ago. Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago, allows some room for this when reflecting on the agnostic, who though ignorant of the God within the Gospel cannot ignore the God of History, a figure so great that time literally was split into two parts: before and after His presence on this Earth.
This God of History is worth dwelling upon, because His presence in the West has dimmed and is indeed constantly challenged, both by the presence of militant Islam from without and the erosion of secularism from within. George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral reflects on these points, and the dual response of the West against the challenges that materialism and Islam (and today, Russian Eurasianism) in the form of a Christian West and a secular West.
As most will probably admit, the secular experiment has failed catastrophically in the post-Cold War world. Bereft of leadership and succumbing to the postmodern substitution of authenticity for faith, these druids of the secular order can find no baseline other than banality. The lower their commonalities become, the less relevant the modernist framework becomes precisely because it offers no meaning in an otherwise meaningless secular existence.
So the race for authenticity begins. Faith becomes ideology, either of the gnostic or neo-pelagian sort, where one either becomes “woke” and thereby becomes part of an elite or one creates a stricture of rules so complex and interwoven that the spirit is beaten clean out. Within a variant of Islam, this sort of militancy seeks the “lone wolf” — someone who finds no meaning in the mundane, and so throws himself wholeheartedly into something that will command a supreme sacrifice.
Roger Scruton once observed that God is not dead, merely waiting for us to make room for Him. Of course, when Friedrich Nietzsche scribbled the words “God is dead” he never intended God per se, but rather was pointing his finger at the God of History in Hegel’s phenomenology. If God is indeed dead, then men such as Nietzsche and Heidegger are asking humanity to seek something deeper — a grounding — that predicates the morality of Western Civilization.
Yet what Nietzsche never intended — or perhaps, missed — was that the Christian ethos admits the death of God. Catholics around the world pray likewise: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” What the modernist misses and the postmodern world abases themselves to achieve is a self-destructive pursuit for authenticity. Instead of the altare Dei they seek to become altera dei — another god.
This grand pursuit of authenticity drives so much of our political discourse today, whether it is our town hall, social media, or even higher toward the demagogues and “lone wolf” terrorists who find in extremism that final and ultimate path toward an authentic value.
Of course, news headlines and a certain sense of outrage might allow one to feel despair. Yet facts on the ground should offer tremendous hope and courage to those who discover quite readily that the God of History and the God of Hosts remain very close to the hearts of men.
Whether the tragedy is in England or in Syria, Catholics have a moral duty to remind ourselves and one another that the spiral toward authenticity creates fanatics, not Christians. Faith is not fanaticism precisely because it is not free, and what predicates our existence here is a grounding of human freedom. It is the same grounding of freedom that allowed the Blessed Mother to give a free and assenting “yes!” to the Archangel Gabriel, and we choose every day in small heroic acts to honor that freedom with the gift of ourselves or deny that gift by focusing inward — on self.
The great tragedy of terrorism is that it rarely if ever works. Lives are sacrificed needlessly in support of a cause that in 20 years no one will recall. No one, that is, except the historians.
