Along with millions of others, on January 20 I watched Mr. Carter’s inauguration on television and was mesmerized. Since I am not a big fan of American politics, I wasn’t sure why. What was the fascination? As with all commencement exercises, swearing-in ceremonies exhibit the dominant religion of the times. What makes America tick in 1977? What is its self- image? My second reflection came when I heard some allegedly avant-garde critiques of Mr. Carter’s address. When the political radicals dismiss such public utterances, there tends to be a pseudo-profundity that masks how much we all share in common assumptions.
Basically, Mr. Carter announced that after the catharsis of Watergate (an easier crime to purify ourselves of than Vietnam), the United States can return to its moral leadership in making the history of the world progressively better. Those in the know have already ridiculed this liberal myth of progress and hasten to point to the contradictions between the rhetoric of individualism and the realities of American capitalism. But where do most radical thinkers stand on belief in human progress?
In fact, they have not rejected it; they want to speed it up. The commitment to creating the Kingdom of Humanity, in a radicalized form, still undergirds the condemnation of capitalism. Almost all social readings are permeated with the unstated premise that our age is an improvement over all others. Then some move to the argument that we can cooperate with the forces of history to bring about a stage higher than the present shallowness and brutality. After all, Karl Marx was the prophet of progress.
So what? What is wrong with the conviction that we are actively working with history to build the best of all possible worlds? If nothing else, I think it leads to a distorted reading of the past and a misleading analysis of the present.
For example, over and over I read that whereas the Middle Ages were socially and religiously monolithic, our age is pluralistic. Today people think they can pick and choose from a wide range of lifestyles. On this basis they conclude that, although it seems harder now to be satisfied with life, we can live more authentically and resolutely, for we have more insight into the real human condition.
How true is this perception? As Dr. George Grant put it,
As for pluralism, differences in the technological state are able to exist only in private activities: how we eat, how we mate, how we practice ceremonies. Some like pizza, some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys; some like the synagogue, some like the mass. But we all do it in churches, motels, restaurants--indistinguishable from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Is that a step up from the sadly misunderstood Middle Ages?
Perhaps more alarming is the assumption of progress found through out almost all contemporary Christian theology. It would be embarrassing to list all the names. The Roman Catholic version comes in the development of doctrine theory, which says that later theology makes explicit that which was only implicit in the earlier, unevolved writings. To my mind, it takes a certain amount of nerve to say that we understand St. Paul or Aristotle or Aquinas better than each did himself--especially when most of us have only the foggiest notions of what was said at all!
The Protestant version, on the other hand, is either the explicit acceptance of the idea of progress in the theory of progressive revelation or its implicit acceptance in a call to purge the Greek elements in favor of Hebrew ones. In principle, there may be no real harm in the latter position, if it is accepted that revelation must always be expressed in different, inadequate human languages. In practice, however, we must look at what is substituted for the supposed Greek deformations.
We see God working as the currents of history lead all people to bring in the kingdom--a strange interpretation when there is not word for “history” in the Bible! The danger comes in where there is a confusion of God’s ways with our ways--a confusion which is always suicidal for theology.
The books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation, among many examples, belie any thought of human progress in history taken as a whole. Any deep rooted belief in progress, whether more or less subtle than what comes across on TV, finally allows us to rely solely on our own modern perceptions. What could we learn from surpassed Jewish and Christian traditions anyway? Eventually the Bible itself must also be relegated to the past.
Our reliance on our own objectivity is what has in other ages been called “pride.”
When one questions progress, the defense usually is, “But would you rather have lived in the Middle Ages?” Then I remember that I am of the wrong sex and from the wrong social origin even to have asked the question. The issues are difficult and need further clarification. To me, at any rate, it is not fruitful simply to bemoan the present and glorify the past. The inverse of belief in progress need not be belief in retrogression.
The best alternative would be belief in the providence of a loving God. I suggest that we Christians turn again to careful political and theological study of the biblical revelation concerning the city of God and the city of humankind.
When this article appeared, Katharine Temple was a member of Maryhouse, a Catholic Worker house in New York City.
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