George Marsden’s latest book has about it the deceptive simplicity of a master at work. Which is another way of saying that it weaves together the familiar and the unfamiliar in a supple and plausible narrative, and with seemingly effortless momentum deposits its readers in territory they would not have thought to visit at the outset of the journey. Some readers may have a “here we go again” feeling at the outset, for the book covers oft-trod ground: the movement from unity to fragmentation, if not unraveling, of American culture in the decades since World War II, with many all-too-familiar signposts along the way. But Marsden tells it in a fresh and compelling way, with emphases that are anything but commonplace in American historiography. He grounds his argument in epochal shifts in the deep structure of ideas and culturally shared assumptions, choosing (as his subtitle implies) to regard the 1950s, rather than the 1960s, as the genuinely pivotal decade in this story. And that is not all. He forces us to consider the current movement toward fracture in light of larger and longer currents in American history, currents going back to the Founding, and beyond that to the modern Enlightenment itself. And finally he concludes with some tentative but thoughtful recommendations for the American future. Quite a lot to accomplish in under 200 sprightly and compulsively readable pages.
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief
Basic Books
264 pages
$32.08
In order to start with the Fifties, Marsden has had to reinterpret them, and that effort alone makes a useful contribution. There has been a growing recognition that the standard historical fable of the stolid, repressive, and complacent Fifties giving way to the energetic, open, and socially revolutionary Sixties has a great deal wrong with it. As the late Alan Petigny showed in his book The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965, nearly every cultural and intellectual trend that we associate with the Sixties had already taken root in the previous decade; one could argue that the revolutionaries of the Sixties were merely taking to heart, and action, the things that their immediate intellectual forebears, the Paul Goodmans and Erich Fromms and James Deans, were already advocating.
For Marsden, the Fifties were the best of times and the worst of times, and deep underneath both conditions was a long-term tectonic shift.
For Marsden, the Fifties were the best of times and the worst of times, and deep underneath both conditions was a long-term tectonic shift, beginning to work itself out decisively. On the surface, there was a level of prosperity and stability that Americans had not known since the 1920s—a confidence in the nation’s preeminent role in the world and in the persistence of a solid consensus about its shared fundamental values. Yet beneath that surface was much worrying: not only external worries about the perils of an unprecedented Cold War nuclear stalemate with the Soviet Union, but also internal worries about the loss of a sense of national purpose, about the persistence of racial inequities, about the debasement of national tastes and sensibilities by television programming and other mass-cultural productions, and above all else about the loss of individual vigor and distinctiveness in a middle-class consumer culture that seemed increasingly group-oriented and conformist.
Social critique is generally a veiled or strategic way of promoting alternative values, and never has that been truer than of the burgeoning social criticism of the postwar era, which saw the publication of such works as The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. As Marsden shows, the indirect result of the critics’ work was to support the growing view that the conditions of modern life were uniquely perilous to the soul of the individual person, and that the exercise of traditional or institutional or social forms of authority tended to debase the life of that individual. The inevitable conclusion was that individualism came to be seen increasingly as a law unto itself, with few or no traditional forms of political or social or moral authority that could legitimately countermand the judgments of the autonomous self. In the past, one might have expected weighty and respected opinion-leaders to weigh in against such antinomianism. But the élite critics of mass culture, such as the essayist Dwight Macdonald, seemed more interested in mocking the tastes of the many as a way of marking off their own superiority, rather than criticizing mass culture with a view toward the common good of the populace as a whole. This is not a neo-populist argument, for Marsden wants to insist upon the vital importance of a responsible élite for a well-functioning democracy. But it is one of the underlying themes of his book that the loss of such a responsible élite has been one of the chief calamities to befall American culture in the past century.
For Marsden, this loss was connected to an issue far deeper than the immediate sources of both the triumphalism and the worrying in the Fifties. The problem was a loss of deep intellectual and moral foundations for the American way of life. Those foundations were ultimately rooted in the Enlightenment model of an intelligible universe superintended by a morally normative conception of Nature. The material well-being and superficial cultural consensus of the Fifties, and indeed the coherence of the American culture and the legitimacy of its institutions and its constitutional regime, all depended on the prior existence of foundational beliefs in the existence of such a natural order. In Marsden’s words, this meant belief in “a Creator who established natural laws, including moral laws, that could be known to humans as self-evident principles to be understood and elaborated through reason.”
By the Fifties, though, this belief had all but disappeared from the intellectual classes, banished as unsophisticated and inconsistent with Darwinian science, although at the same time disappearing in a way that left much of the superstructure of Enlightened belief untouched—paradoxically, an allegiance to the very institutions that such foundational beliefs had made possible in the first place. But after all, one did not need to believe in foundations anymore; they were superfluous. It was possible to understand American institutions pragmatically, as having evolved out of a trial-and-error history, a history that produced instrumentalities that were invented rather than discovered, their authority undergirded by social consensus rather than metaphysical fiat, and therefore endlessly adaptable, revisable, revocable according to changing human needs. It was a civilizational gamble, positing that American democracy, having fully arrived, could and should dispense with the horses it rode in on.
Marsden beautifully brings out the complex role of Walter Lippmann in these developments, first as a bold and confident prophet of the new foundationless pragmatism in his younger years and then, beginning in the 1930s, as a lonely, chastened prophet of the dangers of that very same pragmatism, and a proponent of the need to return to a conception of natural law as the only sure basis for a common public philosophy. Lippmann had come to see early on what became clear later, that although pragmatism could draw effectively on the spiritual and moral capital which had been accumulated by older precepts, it was powerless to contribute to the refreshment and renewal of those very sources. With only the authority of value-neutral science and the dogma of individual sovereignty to anchor such arrangements, the cultural unravelling that hit full force in the Sixties, and has continued unabated since, seems all but inevitable.
It is in the context of this cultural unraveling, made possible by the steady disappearance of “the American enlightenment idea of a consensus based on rationally derived, shared humanistic principles congenial to a broadly theistic Protestant heritage,” that Marsden understands the rise of the politicized Religious Right. His argument recalls Nathan Glazer’s description of the Religious Right as a “defensive offensive,” an effort to push back against the forces of secularism in the courts and political culture. But Marsden suggests that it was also an attempt, whether consciously or not, to restore the missing elements of consensus that were needed for an American culture to cohere. He argues—persuasively to this reviewer, although not all will be so persuaded—that despite the triumphalist sound of much evangelical rhetoric, the Religious Right was not by and large theocratic, and presumed the protection of religious liberty and other freedoms, so that its call for the restoration of “Christian” America was in reality a call for a return to the days of the “American enlightenment” and of an “informal Protestant establishment” that had left most of the culture to operate on broadly secular terms. In any event, the effort failed, in part because, as Marsden argues, although the Religious Right was zealous in protecting its own religious liberties, it lacked the ability or the will to articulate grounds for the religious liberties of others.
Which brings us to his final chapter, entitled “Toward a More Inclusive Pluralism,” in which Marsden sketches what he believes to be the best possible outcome of the current situation. Readers of his previous works, including notably The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, will not be surprised that he again tacks in the direction of a radical inclusiveness. It seeks neither to re-impose a lost consensus, nor to impose a new secular one by privatizing or proscribing religiously based speech in favor of a denatured viewpoint-neutral public secularism, but instead to embrace the viewpoint diversity that characterizes our society as it actually exists. This would create an environment in which the situatedness of speakers and the rootedness of their perspectives in prior religious and cultural presuppositions are taken as givens, and respected. Marsden looks to Abraham Kuyper as a source for conceptualizing this pluralism, and offers a brief exposition of the Kuyperian view. He might also have pointed to Richard John Neuhaus’ work, which rejected both the “naked” public square, in which religion is stripped of any public role, and the “sacred” public square, where religion is given theocratic power, in favor of a “civil” public square, in which religious speech is encouraged but constrained by the requirements of civility, and in which the sources of all moral convictions, religious and secular alike, would be in play in a robust debate.
A pleasing image, and with a great deal to be said for it, both as an ideal and as a prudential option. Yet here even an admiring reader feels obliged to offer his demurrals—or, at least, questions. Doesn’t the creation and maintenance of a regime of “inclusive pluralism” require a substantive and not merely procedural consensus among all parties? Is a “dissensus consensus” really enough to enable a society to deliberate effectively about and reach resolution on difficult issues of public policy? To put it bluntly, aren’t there issues about which we need to require agreement? Don’t we have the right, even the obligation, to say “No” to some sincerely religious beliefs, if their practice is incompatible with the nature of the regime? And if we do that, are we not obliged to articulate a principled basis of such exclusion, and when we do so, are we not articulating a foundational premise? Is Marsden presuming the existence of a metaconsensus, which would itself serve as the basis for the robust public debate?
In practice, “inclusive” is always a relative term. A place at the table is always contingent upon the willingness to abide by the rules and customs of the table. And, to continue the metaphor, someone has built, and is maintaining, that table, and propounds and enforces the rules, and is doing so for reasons that have the effect of ruling out a great many viewpoints. Which is a way of pointing out that pluralism works best when someone is in charge. When pluralists invoke, as Jane Addams famously did, the glory of a choral performance blending diverse voices into a harmonious whole as a model for an inclusive social order, they need also to pay tribute to the composer, and to the often tyrannical conductor, who made such glories possible, and kept them from degenerating into cacophony or some other ungainly mess. The pleasing and stirring harmonies are more a matter of Gleichschaltung than freewheeling diversity.
Moreover, one of the deep questions for secularism and the Enlightenment is the extent to which they presume the prior existence of the biblical religions, which they rely upon in crucial ways. John Courtney Murray had another way of dealing with the inadequacies of the American Enlightenment, which involved rediscovering and reappropriating intellectual and moral foundations of the American regime that were even deeper than the modern Enlightenment ones. I suspect that, in the long run, something like what he had in mind may be a more fruitful way of sustaining liberal and democratic institutions than the alternative of embracing radical pluralism, which may be little more than an unstable holding position between the present and some new order yet to emerge.
But the weightiness of such questions is a tribute to the enormous stimulative power of this book, which deals with complex ideas in an astonishingly direct and uncomplicated way, and which is entirely accessible to any reader who wants to take the time to read it. Such accessibility reflects the generous and hopeful nature of the author, who has been one of our era’s most consistently courageous and admirably original minds in the field of history and of Christian thought. Like everything he writes, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment will be a book to ponder, and reflect upon, for years to come.
Wilfred M. McClay is G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma.
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