Richard John Neuhaus (1937-2009) [11]
Neuhaus was a priest in New York, the President of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. Like all priests, he was concerned more about ethics and the decline of morals, i.e. he views progress from the ethical perspective, naturally.
Neuhaus specifies from the very start the difference between “change” and “progress.” He’s not the only one; many others do this, since these terms are often mixed up in literature, even scientific literature. Thus, some believe that change is in itself a good thing, while others disagree, quoting the examples of the various bloody events of the 20th century. This is why Neuhaus writes: “Progress is more than change; it is change with a purpose.” (р. 15). This banality has to be repeated constantly.
He shares Nisbet’s view that in the present time progress has turned into a dead or half-dead idea, especially if we keep in mind the rupture that took place in the equality: knowledge = progress. The idea itself is correct, but the development of knowledge has slowed down dramatically, and scientists themselves supposedly started talking about it. Neuhaus quotes as an example the already mentioned biologist Gunther Stent and reproduces his skeptical pronouncements from the book The Coming of the Golden Age: a View of the End of Progress – regarding art in particular. Stent said there that the rejection of accepted canons and limits in art took on the form of freedom for the sake of freedom. He wrote: “The artist’s accession to near-total freedom of expression now presents very great cognitive difficulties for the appreciation of his work. The absence of recognizable canons reduces his act of creation to near-randomness for the perceiver. In other words, artistic evolution along the one-way street to freedom embodies an element of self-limitation.” (р. 17)
Stent noted that a similar sense of limits and the end of progress is evident also in the so-called hard sciences, including his own sphere of molecular biology. He quoted as proof the impossibility to explain the phenomenon of the “thought/matter paradox.” He believed that the search for a “molecular” explanation of consciousness is a waste of time. Thus even science is not able to clarify many things which we don’t understand and will never manage to understand. The connection between science and progress which was established long ago by the Greeks is now broken.
Neuhaus does not share Stent’s extreme pessimism. He points out in response that the Sumerians probably likewise believed when they invented the wheel that progress came to an end, that there was nothing left to invent. He also reminds the views of the French historian Charles Perrault who wrote back in 1687, not without irony: “Our age is ... arrived at the very summit of perfection. And since for some years the rate of progress has been much slower and appears almost insensible - as the days seem to cease lengthening when the summer solstice draws near - it is pleasant to think that there are probably not many things for which we need envy future generations.” (pр. 17-18)
So does progress have a future? Neuhaus reminds that Nisbet, for example, thought that it does and reproduces that author’s appeal for return to religion – or, more exactly, its Judeo-Christian version, for supposedly his predecessors who developed the ideas of progress were closely connected to Christianity. These include not only Lessing, Kant, Herder, Priestley, Saint-Simon, Comte and even Mill; the funniest thing is that Marx’ name is again mentioned in this context. The priest writes: “As for Karl Marx, it is by now a commonplace to observe that his grand ideological structure of the dialectic of history was but a heretical variation on Christian themes.” (р. 19) It seems that no matter which topic a man writes on, the priests will invariably connect him to religion, especially since all the problems discussed by mankind are presented in the Bible, albeit in myth-creating form.
Neuhaus, however, has a problem with tying progress to the Judeo-Christian religion. He favors progress and even of religious progress, but without Jews. In this connection he decided to contrast to Nisbet Reinhold Niebuhr who, it turns out, was against tying progress to the Judeo-Christian religion. Back in 1939 he said in his lectures: “The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks.” (ibid.)
Niebuhr had no intention of complimenting Christian culture. He simply wanted to point out that the idea of progress proved to be a distortion of Christians’ identity. This secularization took place in the Renaissance epoch and intensified in modern times. In the process of secularization they took the idea of progress which emerged from the biblical understanding of the goal of history, but threw out the biblical truth that the fulfillment of history transcends the borders of history itself, and the notion of divine judgment was thrown out at the same time. In the secular variant there is “no consciousness of the ambiguous and tragic elements in history.” Of course, history is filled with endless possibilities, Niebuhr said, but the idea of progress forgets that these possibilities are endless both for good and for evil. “History, therefore, has no solution of its own problem.” (ibid.) To accusations of pessimism he responded that he was a “Christian realist” and that his “despair” was of a creative nature. History does not answer its own questions. Or: “We have learned, in other words, that history is not its own redeemer.” (ibid.)
By the way, two important topics are raised here against the backdrop of religious disputes. The first one: who is the subject of history? Is it history itself? That is, is there a certain process which is objectively moving toward progress? Niebuhr believed that the answer is no. Who then? To Niebuhr the answer is: the Almighty, of course. I will reserve my answer till another section. The second topic: is history truly moving forward? Not necessarily, Niebuhr thinks; I agree with him on this count.
Neuhaus himself answers these questions in a rather florid style. He writes that if we understand progress to mean a soft, almost automatic movement forward in time from bad to better, from ignorance to enlightenment, this can hardly be considered progress. But should we understand progress to mean that man is a free agent capable of participating in a transcendent purpose which is immanently inherent to history and contains a certain promise confirming that all this is truth, good and beauty, then of course the answer is “yes” (pр. 20-21).
I usually understand nothing in this kind of answers. I don’t understand in what “transcendent” purpose man must participate. And who can promise me that all this is truth, etc.? The priest surely had in mind the gods of the Bible – either Yahweh or Jesus. However, to take them seriously one has to believe in them.
Even so, moral progress is something different. In this area, Neuhaus thinks, we see no progress, but rather an actual regress.
He quotes as an example the scandalous personality of the Australian ethicist Peter Singer (Princeton University), the formal champion of animal “rights” who claims that animals have rights equal to those of man or even higher. What disgusts the priest most, however, is Singer’s proposal for a one-month trial period after the birth of a baby to determine which baby is defective and which is not; the defective ones should be killed (on account of this stance Singer was not allowed to talk at German universities). And this “scientist” is the author of the article on ethics in the Encyclopedia Britannica!? (In 1995 a book of his was published titled Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics.) What kind of morality are we talking about here?
Neuhaus also analyzes in brief the position of the well-known communatorial Alasdair MacIntyre and his book After Virtue.
In MacIntyre’s opinion, the Enlightenment project failed despite the monumental efforts of the most major philosophers, among whom Kant was the greatest; yet even he failed to create ethics. What resulted was the triumph of nihilism, and the nihilistic avant-garde is regress in the direction of barbarian rule. Barbarians are defined today - same as in classical Greece - as those who are outside the civilized cycle of the discourse about the need to put in order our communal life, about what is right and what is wrong, about good and evil. They are the ones who know nothing and insist that nothing can be known about these things (see: ibid., р. 22).
Unlike the barbarians of the Roman epoch, Neuhaus stresses, the current ones are not at all primitive; they are not Neanderthals, they are often perceived as the “brightest and best” among us. That is exactly the problem. “The new barbarians are barbarians not because they are unsophisticated but precisely because of the hyper-sophistication with which they have removed themselves from what I have called the civilizational circle of moral conversation. In simpler terms, that is called “traditional values.” The barbarians refuse to be limited by what we know, by the wisdom we have received, about good and evil, right and wrong. For them, the past is merely prelude.” (ibid).
So what is the future of moral progress? This depends on the answer to the question: what is truth? Once a long time ago Pontius Pilate asked that question of a prisoner standing before him. Neuhaus calls Pilate a predecessor of the barbarians who are currently in power. (The prisoner, by the way, failed to give an answer to the question, which is rather strange, considering the wisdom ascribed to him.)
And this is how our enlightened priest answers this question. He writes: “Those permanent truths are sometimes called natural law. In the Declaration of Independence they are called the laws of nature and nature’s God. Or they are called the first principles of ethics. First principles are, by definition, always first. Moral analysis cannot go beyond or behind them any more than human consciousness can go beyond or behind human consciousness. … The Tao draws support from all religious and moral traditions in inculcating certain rules such as: general beneficence toward others, special beneficence toward one’s own community, duties to parents and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the laws of justice, honesty, mercy, and magnanimity. Whether drawn from the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, Chinese Analects, Cicero, or the Bhagavad Gita, these are the truths that constitute the civilizational circle.” (ibid.) (These are evidently both the moral knowledge and the moral truths.)
The priest substituted very cleverly the rules of communal living for the question about truth. This is what he didn’t explain for some reason: all these rules were formulated millennia ago – so why doesn’t mankind follow them? Why, as MacIntyre justifiably said in the quote presented, we are still governed by barbarians? Everyone appears to agree with these rules, yet they don’t work for some reason – therein lies the question.
One can also agree with Neuhaus’ following statement: “There can be no progress beyond but only within the civilizational circle of the moral truths into which we were born, by which we are tested, and to which we are duty bound, in the hope of sustaining the circle for those who come after us. The alternative is the willed ignorance of nihilism.” (р. 23)
The alternative is unfortunately more diverse than that, and it can be concealed under any fancy words unless you turn words into concepts, in our case the concept “progress.”