PC also stands for post-Christian – Alexander Boot

The mystery of Christianity caught people unawares though they had been warned: Christ was to fulfil about 300 Biblical prophecies. But none was heeded at the time. People neither counted years in a descending order before the Nativity nor started from zero after it. Caesar did not foresee the cataclysm awaiting Rome. Tiberius was probably unaware it had occurred.

But occur it did, and the world gasped. For God was neither just a cosmic deity nor merely a man. He was both, and understanding of that was slow in coming. But when it did come, people had to express creatively their idea of God. After all, God had expressed creatively his idea of man. If the goal of life was to imitate Christ, creative self-expression had to play a big part.

Yet in the first millennium AD such self-expression was discouraged. For example, Clement of Alexandria wrote that art contravened not so much the Second Commandment as the Eighth: by displaying creativity, man was stealing God’s prerogative. But towards the second millennium things began to change, and it was through culture that Christians learned to express their understanding of God. St Anselm’s definition of culture as ‘faith seeking understanding’ set the terms, raising culture to a status it had never enjoyed in the Hellenic world. As its importance increased, it grew more intricate, with entry restricted to fewer and fewer people.

Christianity, in its pre-Reformation shape, was esoteric too. Its universality was owed to the power of its message, but only as relayed by priests. Although vernacular Gospels always circulated in small numbers, a serious attempt to disseminate them was a burning offence in Europe as recently as the sixteenth century. Thus an all-inclusive religion paradoxically expressed itself through a hierarchical culture. In order to thrive, this culture had to excrete the protective cocoon of a compatible, equally hierarchical civilisation.

Western civilisation thus had no option but to mirror the culture’s exclusivity. But culture’s meat is civilisation’s poison. Since the masses had numbers on their side, their exclusion could be sustained only by concentrating political, financial and military power in the same hands that moulded – if not themselves created – culture. This amounts to a reasonable definition of an aristocratic society. Whatever we may think of its fairness, it was the only arrangement able to provide the soil in which Western culture could grow and, consequently, Christianity could flourish.

This paradoxical observation must be qualified as the rule of aristocracy never was undiluted, at least in England. In fact, no political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating. Following Aristotle, Machiavelli argued that, when their purity is rigidly maintained, a principality turns into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy and a democracy into an anarchy. For a political arrangement to last, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government. That is why the synthetic constitution of Lycurgus in Sparta outlasted the democratic constitution of Solon in Athens – and why the English constitution outlasted any of its Western counterparts.

After the Reformation, the individual became more sovereign in religion, and increasing numbers became dissatisfied with secular exclusion. They wanted to uphold their own interests which, with metaphysical culture off-limits for most, had to be materialistic. Thus the co-existence of Christian culture and civilisation could not remain peaceful for ever. The potential for conflict was always there as the aristocracy could protect its cultural domain only by relying on coercion, thereby militarising its civilisation. This was more than just an oxymoron. It was the guillotine waiting to happen.

The threat to the Hellenic world came from outside. But the culture of Christendom was such that most citizens of its ‘polis’ were cast in the role of internal barbarians. Christendom’s own Alarics were as hostile as the nemesis of Rome, but they were wrapped in an equivalent of togas, not animal skins. That is why their hostility was harder to detect, though as impossible to resist.

Hostility seethed beneath the surface, only waiting for the physical strength to catch up. The more people were excluded and the stronger they got, the more certain was the revenge, and the more sanguinary its form. Thus, paradoxically, as Christian culture grew more sublime and consequently more exclusive, Christendom became more vulnerable. But as culture was a source of Christendom’s historical strength, the paradox sharpens to a razor’s edge: as Christendom grew stronger, it was growing weaker. The Reformation drove this point home with shattering force.

The Reformation shifted the accent from ontology to epistemology by placing God into man’s own existential realm, where to be or not to be became the question. To be was no longer the only possible answer. But radical reformations of any kind are a dangerous game to play. Luther and Calvin, or Cranmer and Tyndale, should have thought twice before throwing out the baby of clerical mediation with the bathwater of clerical corruption. They should have sensed that the shock waves of such an explosion would never be attenuated.

Alas, they were unaware of the law since then amply proven: Any reform produces effects different from those intended. The likelihood of such effects turning out not just different but opposite is directly proportional to the zeal involved. The reformers introduced into Christianity both pre- and post-Christian values, thus devaluing the object of their veneration and, because of their zeal, achieving results opposite to those intended. Instead of inspiring religious revival, the Reformation paved the way for the English, American and French Revolutions.

When a man is encouraged to define his own religion, sooner or later he will become his own God. Thomas Jefferson is one example of this: some of Christianity was acceptable to him, some was not. Hence he clipped the acceptable passages out of the Bible and pasted them into a notebook, creating his own Scripture. One can argue that most Protestants go through the same exercise in their minds, if not literally. Atheism is the logical if unintended long-term result, even when it is masked by fulsome protestations of piety.

The blows that rained on Christendom as a result of the Reformation also struck against the secular fabric of society. For example, the nature of geopolitics changed as France and Holland or England and Spain had acquired a divisive difference that could not be settled by nuptial arrangements. From then on European countries were no longer just Christian. They became either Catholic or Protestant, and their churches had to take political sides. This rendered unto God the things that were Caesar’s, compromising both.

By demystifying the Church, the Reformation made it vulnerable to anticlericalism. Yet the thunderous anti-Church broadsides of Luther and Zwingli were custom-made specifically for the sombre Germanic countries. In France wit worked better. This is why, in the two-odd centuries before the head of Louis XVI plopped into a wicker basket, the personage of a venal and lustful monk, priest or nun was ever-present in French literature, from Rabelais to Molière to Diderot. So when we read these writers’ works, we should remember they are not just brilliant bagatelles. They are Iago whispering into Othello’s ear.

The Enlightenment shunted God aside as the eschatological dynamic, leaving man himself as the only candidate to fill the vacancy so formed. Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum set the scene nicely: ‘I’ was the new ‘He’. This shift was not so difficult to effect since the dominant philosophical doctrines had already made God more or less redundant.

If anticlericalism was the practice of barbarian onslaught, deism was the theory. While anticlericalism relegated priests to an antiquarian status, neo-Gnostic deism demoted God himself to part-time employment as some kind of demiurge. To a deist, God may have lived but is now dead. Admit grudgingly that he may have created the world, grant him no further role in life, and there is no need for ranting off soapboxes. Just wait for atheism to take over.

The wait will not be long: agnosticism comes out of deism the way Eve came out of Adam’s rib, and then atheism is just round the corner. Agnosticism is deism plus logic; atheism is agnosticism plus politics. Characteristically, Voltaire and Rousseau, who rival Marx and Darwin as the patron saints of atheism, were themselves not atheists but deists. They did not mind paying occasional lip service to God while demolishing his house.

England lent them a helping hand. Locke, Hobbes and then Hume pushed empiricism to the forefront of public discourse. Locke in particular became perhaps the most popular philosopher in the eighteenth century. The embryonic PC man was attached to Locke: divine inspiration was no longer seen as an essential cognitive tool, which was welcome news to those devoid of such inspiration. Knowledge was what emerged once the facts obtained by the senses had been processed by reason. The world was knowable only empirically. Man needed to look no further than himself as the repository of knowledge.

Linked to humanism was its political extension: liberalism. Empiricism and liberalism were a combination made in secular heaven. If people were now independent of God, it followed that they should also be independent of lesser authority, within reason. Equality before God now had to be replaced with social, political and economic levelling. This may have been merely a theoretical deduction by Locke, the longing of a statist PC man in the making. But hindsight tells us that Christendom was to find the fruits of liberalism poisonous.

Hume’s trust in empirical knowledge was just as strong as Locke’s. No wonder he became the darling of Paris salons and Rousseau’s good friend: Hume’s French admirers were lifting man to the pedestal previously occupied by God, and empiricism was a sturdy winch. Man no longer needed a deity for any practical purpose; he was becoming both autonomous and sovereign.

The same trend is observable in science: until the eighteenth century, most scientists were believers who used science to get closer to God by learning more about his creation. Once science was torn away from its theological underpinnings, scientists turned away from God. As they believed reason knew no bounds, now it had been untethered by the philosophes, they could see their way clear to using science to prove that God did not exist.

The French, told to doubt everything by Descartes, were now prepared to go further along that route than had been fathomable hitherto. They were not quite happy with Hume who, dissatisfied with both the a priori and a posteriori proofs of God’s existence, presaged Kant by inferring that the existence of God could be neither proved nor disproved by reason. The illogical conclusion Hume drew from this inference was that ergo God does not exist: he was an atheist after all. But his was not the atheism of his French chums – it lacked the fervour springing not so much from disbelief in God as from belief in the opposite of God. Even though Hume denied faith, he still did not go so far as to pass atheism as irrefutable fact. This was lily-livered as far as his politicised friends were concerned. They wanted to go Hume one better.

By acclaiming the sovereignty of the individual, the philosophes shoplifted the ethos of Christianity. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the importance of the individual derived from the grandeur of God. Prostrate humility before the latter was a precondition for the proud self-assertion of the former. The philosophes snipped off the connecting links, casting God adrift and dragging such concepts as freedom and love into the new secular domain. The individual was now to feel proud not of being created in the image of God but of his own autonomous self. This closed the loop of the vicious circle inside people’s minds, and their heads swelled.

The internal barbarian liked what he heard. For centuries he had been taught that he ought to spend his whole life atoning for original sin. Now he was told that was nonsense: he was good to begin with, and further perfectible. For Christ, original sin was something to redeem. For Rousseau, it was something to dismiss. If before people had had to toil to become good, now they could devote the same energy to becoming happy, while others would take care of perfecting them. No effort was required on their part. Happiness, proclaimed by the philosophes and enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, ousted virtue as the aim of life.

But what exactly was happiness? Rousseau and some philosophes had a ready answer. They reminded people how in the unlamented past they had been equal only before God. Now it had all changed: we are born equal not only in that narrow sense but in every respect. At birth we all resemble the primitive man, noble sauvage. That chap felt unabashedly happy tossing his hirsute female onto the grass. And he was good, not having yet been exposed to the corrupting influence of Christendom. Moreover, he was equal to other noble savages in wealth and social status. Alas, that good individual was destroyed by those with a vested interest in his subjugation: kings, aristocrats, priests.

The conclusion had to be clear. Let us get rid of these leeches and return man to his happy-equal state socially and politically, while still enabling him to acquire the trappings of modern wealth. Equality was thus portrayed as both a desirable and achievable objective, and Fichte was to write that promoting it was the only true function of the state.

As people were both perfect and tautologically perfectible, it followed that they were all qualified to govern themselves by electing the worthiest among them to attend to the actual business of governing. It also followed that any other form of government was anathema, as it would block the paths leading from private goodness to public virtue.

When these ideas were first put into practice, Frenchmen were handed liberty on a platter. But upon closer examination, this piece of proverbial chinaware was instead found to contain a pile of severed heads. First, the ruling class had to be democratically brought down a peg. Then the merchants had to be democratically dispossessed. Then the clergy had to have their property democratically confiscated. Then the army officers had to be democratically cashiered. Then the farmers had to have their crops democratically requisitioned. And then they all met under the democratic guillotine.

That device went into high gear and ran up a score never before even approached by any state not listing secular brotherhood among its desiderata. The only people set free in the process were the rabble: free to murder, rape and plunder. The newly elected tool of the people’s power had to conscript the mob into the National Guard, so as to gain some control over it and to counterbalance the old army that inclined towards scepticism about liberté, egalité and fraternité. Overnight the country’s army tripled in size, and France fell under military control.

The new state realised Rousseau’s ideal: ‘The state should be capable of transforming every individual into part of the greater whole…; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it. [It should be able] to take from the man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him and incapable of being made use of without the help of others. The more completely these inherited resources are annihilated, the greater and more lasting are those which he acquires.’

Every modern state created since, be it liberal, authoritarian or totalitarian, has had this ideal burnt into what Durkheim called its ‘collective soul’. Only the tactics changed from one to another.

Residual resistance to modern vandalism had two basic patterns to it, followed with minor deviations everywhere. The French pattern represented a principled stand based on a sense of rectitude. French aristocrats espoused the traditional view of their role, and would never see it as an unbilled walk-on. They did not want compromise; their disdain for the internal barbarian was too deeply ingrained. That is why PC men turned against them armed not only with egalitarianism but also with passion. PC men no longer just wanted them out. They wanted them dead.

As in England tradition had learned to resist in a cleverer way, it could be ousted only by attrition, not frontal assault. The English constitution, evolving over a millennium, had balanced the interests of every estate. It thus gave the English a tool for reaching a compromise at a time when one of the estates, the common man, was no longer prepared to accept the traditional equilibrium. But compromise can be a perilous affair. As Burke’s exegesis showed so powerfully, the English constitution embraced every liberal tenet, in the Lockean sense. What Burke did not mention was the kiss of death implicit in that embrace.

For no marriage is possible between Christendom and the internal barbarian. Social compromise is useful for preventing social upheaval. It bribes the internal barbarian into abandoning his murderous instincts and agreeing to win in a nonviolent way. But it cannot prevent his victory. Thus, though England has more or less managed to avoid the physical destruction of Christianity within her borders, she could not prevent its fading into the background.

Burke also failed to realise that the American Revolution he extolled had come from the same philosophical source and pursued – albeit by different means – the same goals as the French Revolution he decried. Both revolutions were perpetrated by the new species: PC man. However, two different sub-species were involved: the philistine, who begat the liberal version of the PC state; and the nihilist, responsible for the totalitarian variant.

But neither the nihilist nor the philistine exists in an undiluted form. They cohabit in the breast of PC man. Given his natural inclination and outer circumstances, one of them can at times assume a greater importance, but not to the point of ousting the other. Thus even the most bloody-minded nihilist can still pursue material ‘happiness’, whereas the most complacent of philistines will still harbour violent feelings towards tradition. That is why modernity cannot co-exist with Christendom any more than a rap song can fit into a Shakespeare sonnet. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and then carve thee up, thou bitch’ does not quite ring possible.

With the nihilist storm brewing on the continent, England assumed the role of pathfinder for the philistine sub-species. Even as the agnostic empiricism of Hobbes, Locke and Hume had provided the philosophical basis for PC man’s first tentative steps, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill now propelled him to the bauble of the Industrial Revolution.

Bentham followed Hume as inexorably as Marx followed Bentham, what with Christianity disappearing from philosophical equations. Bentham and Mill eschewed Hume’s honest but ill-advised attempts to find a basis for absolute morality outside faith. In doing so they abandoned absolute morality. For, unchecked by the eternal and immutable arbiter, morality can only be relative, which is to say nonexistent. Rather than a house able to withstand any storm, it can only be a weather vane sensitive to the way the wind is blowing. Man may have an innate moral law within him, as Aristotle and Kant believed. But if so, this law is suspiciously flexible: the secular view on what is moral changes from one age to the next, from one society to another and even from one individual to another. Add and multiply all those changes, and Kant’s moral law begins to look more like an expedient than an imperative.

Instead of the Christian polarity of virtue and sin, the utilitarians postulated the PC polarity of happiness and pain as the starting point of moral choice. Happiness was good and therefore virtuous. Pain was bad and therefore sinful. The morality of a choice had to be judged by its outcome. If a choice led to happiness, it was moral; if it produced pain, it was not. A century later Hemingway expressed this concept with his typical crudeness: if something feels good, it is moral. Using this logic, one has to believe that Fred and Rosemary West were paragons of morality, as their murderous peccadilloes undoubtedly made them feel good.

Though the complexities of Christianity were now in the public domain, their accessibility was of no use to internal barbarians. They had no time for complicated things; their time could be spent more profitably on pursuing happiness. Hence Bentham and Mill made sense to them. ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ was a licence to destroy traditional culture, which had been produced for few by fewer still. With numbers working for them, PC men were ready to tighten the screws, creating what Tocqueville called ‘the tyranny of the majority.’

Once absolute standards of good and evil were tarred by the brush of relativism, the numbers game began to be played in the arena of morals and aesthetics, areas not hitherto available for mass pageantry. Politics and economics had to follow suit and, in the year Bentham died, the Reform Act inaugurated the political ascent of modernity in Britain.

Since the greatest happiness of the greatest number was now seen as utilitarian and therefore moral, it followed that the greatest number should have a direct impact on their own political happiness. This meant that franchise had to expand ad infinitum. The extent of its expansion was no longer dictated by Burkian prudence but rather by the utilitarian expedient of how much PC men could get away with at any given time.

By the nineteenth century all the destructive weapons of PC modernity were in mass production. But they needed sharpening by radicalism. This came from the economic determinism of Marx and the biological determinism of Darwin, later abetted by the psychological determinism of Freud.

Marx’s materialistic picture of life as an on-going clash of hostile classes, each striving to expand its economic bailiwick at the others’ expense, has served both sub-species of PC man well. For example, even if they reject Marxist economics, most Britons today accept the class view of life as a given – in spite of a Tory Prime Minister extolling classless society, the multimillionaire Alan Sugar calling himself working class and Tony Blair trying to master the glottal stop.

But whatever service Marx provided for the philistines was unintended. It was the nihilists who gained most from his theories, as Marx gave them something they had been missing: an eschatology to fit their instincts. Assault on Christendom could now be put on an intellectual footing. While the kingdom in heaven had already been debunked beyond a comeback, the kingdom on earth was at last described in detail. For Marx outdid Moore and Owen by creating a utopia that did not look utopian. His ideal society appeared to be there for the taking.

The popular view is that Marx’s ideals are worthy but unachievable, or else that Marx’s theory was perverted by Soviet practice. In fact, Marx’s ideals are unachievable precisely because they are so evil that even the Soviets never quite managed to realise them fully, and not for any lack of trying. Where the Bolsheviks perverted Marxism, they did so in the direction of softening it.

Marxist abolition of all private property, militarization of all labour, turning all women into communal property and all children into wards of the state remained a sweet dream. Bolshevism only came close to realising the Marxist dicta by hatching what Engels described as ‘special guarded places’ to contain aristocrats, intelligentsia, clergy and other ‘noxious insects’, in Lenin’s phrase. Such places have since acquired a name, but in essence they are exactly what Marx envisaged. However, Lenin and Stalin were again found wanting in spreading concentration camps to a mere half of the world.

Not only has every attempt to implement Marxism failed to make people free, it has also failed to make them equally rich – or even equally poor. Yet though the fallacy of Marxism has been demonstrated, the rumours of its demise are exaggerated. For Marxism answers PC men’s need to find a justification for their hatred of tradition. So they will remain for ever grateful, no matter how many academics now advance their careers by abandoning Marxism, no matter how many Marxist states now use ‘ex’ as their first name. Marxism has been widespread not because its home was in Russia but because it is in PC man’s heart.

Darwin became another pilot of modernity by steering biology towards Bentham and Marx. Reducing man to his physicality rang mellifluous PC bells. Yet any honest observation of life reveals an incontrovertible fact: an animal man may be, but he is not just an animal. Describing him as such misses the only point worth making: man’s mind and soul, his unique metaphysical self. And though there is evidence of physical evolution, none exists of any incremental development in that faculty.

Fossil evidence shows practically instant transition from beast to man; the earliest sites of man’s habitation show him to be as intelligent as most scientists, and more artistic. This punches a hole in Darwin’s theory, with all those endless atavisms he cherishes. An aeroplane resembles a tricycle in that both are made of metal, have three wheels and can transport people. However, anyone who offers this explanation to a visiting Martian, without mentioning that aeroplanes fly, is not partly right or almost right. He is either mendacious or mad.

Darwin repeated Leibnitz’s fallacy of nature knowing no leaps, of everything having developed gradually. His contemporaries doubted that theory. Our contemporaries reject it outright. The Descent of Man now holds more than curiosity value only for the stridently politicised. Terms like ‘big bang’, ‘intelligent design’ and ‘irreducible complexity’ are now used not by theologians but by biochemists and geneticists. Many inch towards Genesis in their view of creation. Few accept that an amoeba can evolve into a human being, even one as flawed as Richard Dawkins.

The Reformation encouraged every man to fashion his own God, for the Church could not be trusted. The Enlightenment taught him to be his own God, for the original one was dead. Darwinism told him he had better be his own God, for there never had been any other. And Marxism said the state was God, with proletarians its angels.

These doctrines formed PC man; each subsequent doctrine was formed by him. Most of them were embellishments on the formative ones, or else their pale imitations. For example, the logical positivism of A. J. Ayer was but an attempt to modernise Hume. The Frankfurters Marcuse and Adorno fell out of Marx‘s buns. Post-modernism and deconstructionism merely put a modern twist on the antinomian relativism of the Enlightenment. The likes of Dawkins and Wolpert try to put the moth-eaten Darwinian straitjacket on life. Of the modern prophets only Freud cannot be traced back to an antecedent, which goes to show that originality is not a redeeming quality by itself.

Much as they extol reason, PC people are not about thought. They are men of action. Their idea of the world is fully formed; they may welcome new suggestions, but they do not really need them. The formative doctrines gave them their marching orders and march they did, mostly to man foxholes and firing squads. While ripping the heart out of Christendom, the ‘progressive’ twentieth century produced between 300 and 500 million victims – more than the previous recorded history combined.

To make sure that others would follow, PC men had to relay the marching orders in a language to which others would respond. As there was no more absolute truth in their world, there could be no more absolute meaning in their words. This had to be relative, communicating whatever suited PC men’s purposes at the moment. For language stopped being a conveyor of meaning; it became a mechanism of power.

Lewis Carroll realised this before anyone else, which is why Humpty Dumpty conducted this dialogue with Alice: ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’

The nihilist ‘master’ rules by the gun – therefore he must have a monopoly on the use of guns. The philistine Humpty Dumpty rules by the word – therefore he must have a monopoly on the use of words. If he chooses to describe as ‘free’ a healthcare system that costs at least 10 percent of people’s income, then that is the meaning he will enforce. If he wants people to believe – or rather not to enunciate disbelief – that racial murder is morally worse than any other, or that an even spread of illiteracy is comprehensive education, or that homosexual marriage is as commendable as the old kind, he will use force to ensure compliance.

This becomes a test of power, and it works only when people are made to use words in other than their true meaning. That is why Karl Popper was too timid when saying that, for an idea to be true, it has to be falsifiable. (Famously, his statement that an idea is either tautological or open to empirical proof is itself neither.) More in keeping with PC cant would be saying that, for a modern idea to be true, it has to be false.

Thus both meanings of PC, post-Christian and politically correct, morph into one gaping whole. Christianity, the sublime mystery that made everything else limpid, has been replaced by atheistic solipsism, which makes everything else murky. And so the modern world limps along, waiting for God to prove yet again that, just as there is death implicit in life, so there is life implicit in death. That, though Christendom appears dead, it can rise again as it has done many times in the past.

The Nation that forgot God is available from the Social Affairs Unit – http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/pub/001952.php