Robert Nisbet (1913-1996)
In the Epilogue to his book titled Progress and Providence Nisbet ponders the question of what is the future of progress in the West. Since he ties all ideas of progress to religion in one way or another, he gives an appropriate answer to his question: it will depend on Judeo-Christianity. I remind you that in his interpretation even Marxism owes its emergence to religion.[6] In the present time, however, God’s importance has dropped, the author laments, same as the importance of other systems of thinking. “There aren’t many today who find either Spencer’s First Cause or Marx’s Dialectic convincing.” (p.353)
Nisbet apparently didn’t suspect that in the Constitution of the Chinese People’s Republic – the world’s most populous country – Marxism is designated, alongside Leninism (and the ideas of Deng Xiaoping at that time) as the basis of socialist China’s ideology. However, Nisbet did not have so global an outlook. He was stating what was going on in the West, naturally. He writes that in the early 20th century the West was represented by such personalities as Royce, James, Dewey, and Russell, but at the end of the century there were no personalities of this scale. Gone were also writers on the level of the Mann brothers, Pasternak and Hardy, to say nothing of the level of Goethe, Tolstoy and Dickens.
Nisbet explains it by the absence of genuine culture, which in turn reflects the absence of something holy, sacred, divine. He reminds the words of Tocqueville who wrote in his Democracy in America: “In age of faith the final aim of life is placed beyond life. The men of these ages, therefore, naturally and almost involuntary accustom themselves to fix their gaze for many years on some immovable object towards which they are continually tending, and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty, passing desires in order to be able to content that great and lasting desire which possess… This explains why religious nations have so often achieved such lasting results…” (quoted from: Nisbet, рp. 354-5) The idea is clear, although not universal; we should remember that China, for example, is achieving great results without any religion, while the super-religious Arab countries have only negative results to show so far. Nisbet is correct about the West, however: goals that are big and remote no longer interest the Western man; he requires “everything and right now.” This position does not presuppose the development of culture. Instead there is a “rebellion” against reason, the spread of irrationalism, occultism, narcissism, solipsism and other negative “isms.” All this supposedly made obvious “how fallible were and are the secular foundations of modern thought.” (р. 355)
After this pronouncement one feels like continuing: restore the religious foundations of thought, and right away everyone will come to their senses and restore the medieval societies which, according to Nisbet’s conviction, were exactly the progressive stage in the history of mankind. Nisbet also believes that progress has no future if things go on as they currently do on Earth (he means the “Western lands,” naturally). But for how long will “modern Western culture” stay unchanged?
As he supplies the answer to this question, Nisbet finds elements of optimism in history itself. He believes that throughout the history of mankind such negativisms were fortunately always destroyed by the forces which comprised the essence of culture and progress. Society has a chance to keep moving ahead as long as it preserves the minimal requirements that limit the egocentrism and hedonism which currently dominate in the West. Moreover, there are gleams of a rebirth of religion, at least in America; and that is the main condition for progress.
What follows is a hymn to renascence of religion which best characterizes Nisbet the philosopher: “And if it (the idea of progress – A.B.) doesn't disappear, my own prediction is that its survival will be nurtured, not by rationalist-secular confidence, once so great in Western society, now fast-diminishing but, rather, by a renascence of religion, a renascence that may have already begun, most evident in fundamentalist and pentecostal spheres. ….we may also expect religion to fill the vacuum brought on by those elements of modernity I have described - disillusionment with science, boredom, etc. - and with this, a shoring-up of the idea of progress from past to future. But that, obviously, is speculative in highest degree. Notwithstanding the futurologists to the contrary, it is not possible, and never will be possible, to predict the future. We are left with surmise, intuition, hunch, and hope!”[7]
Marxists say that practice is the criterion of truth. It is a great pity that Nisbet didn’t live to our day. On one hand, he would have been overjoyed at the renascence of religion in the USA and in other regions, at the strengthening of fundamentalism in Arab countries. On the other hand, he would probably be surprised that a war of mutual extermination has resumed between different religions. In the Arab countries the Sunnis kill the Shiites, and vice versa, while at the same time they together wage war on Christianity which is represented by the imperial policy of the USA in the Middle East. It is almost like Nisbet’s beloved Middle Ages; there is no longer any question of any progress. Samuel Huntington proves to be correct with his book Clash of Civilizations.
Nisbet wrote a useful book on progress without understanding what it is.
As if in response to his book and the ideas presented therein, several American authors spoke out; their reviews were placed right after Nisbet’s summarizing article on progress in the same issue of the magazine. One of them, R. F. Baum, writes with good reason: “Also erroneous is the notion that Christianity emancipated man from the imprisonment of historical cycles to the freedom of linear progress. This faulty view has persisted down to the present day, but is now receiving sober criticism and challenge.” (ibid., р. 40) On the contrary, Baum writes; progress not only didn’t grow out of Christianity – it is by its nature Christianity’s logical replacement, for it specifically rejects classical theism. In that period when the ideas of progress dominated, the state substituted for the church, and political convictions substituted for religious feelings. In his opinion, however, Leibniz, Hume, Popper and Kuhn distorted the concept of progress, and as a result there are some who arrived at the absurd conclusion that “only recourse to theism will enable human knowledge to escape the skeptical verdict,” and that “only by recourse to theism can morality be made intelligible.” Baum believes that history has been constantly oscillating between two extreme positions – theism and naturalism – which are both incorrect. The idea of linear progress must be realistic in the current of human achievements.
This is correct to a degree; however, to understand where history is going, we must determine what progress is after all. Let us see how other American scientists do this.