How Protestants Made The West Great

The Social Pathologist, a Roman Catholic, blogs Dec. 24, 2021 (hat tip to Aaron Renn):

Protestantism gets a bad rap among many on the right and I think some of the traditional criticisms of it are justified. However, as I’ve mentioned before most analysis of Protestantism lack quite a bit of nuance and I don’t think that Protestantism is as much of a bogeyman as some traditionalists make out. Many Catholic traditionalists tend to draw a straight line from Protestantism to liberalism and while this may be theoretically plausible real world observations are a bit more complicated.

Most of the readers of this blog know that I am a Catholic, so it may surprise many of you when I say that the main reason why the West is imploding in the moment is primarily due to the numerical collapse of “sound” Protestantism, Catholicism largely being irrelevant in the West’s fate. And the reason why I have come to this view is based up my reflections on modernity and how each religion handled it.

Executive Summary: Protestantism was able to tame modernity, Catholicism wasn’t able to engage it at all. The “slouch to Gomorrah” happened when sound Protestantism collapsed.

Richard Weaver was famous for advocating that ideas have consequences but he neglected to mention that so do have material circumstances. The problem with most approaches to understanding modernity is in thinking that modernity is primarily an intellectual phenomenon. This ignores the “carnal” dimension of it. Modernity isn’t simply the habit of thinking according to certain ideas, it’s also the mode of existence that is generated when the practical application of technology transforms life from an agrarian mode of living to that of an industrial one. What destroyed the old world wasn’t just “enlightenment ideas” but fertilizer, the electric motor, railways, radio waves, sewerage etc. Modernity is just as much about “things” and services as it is about ideas.

Modernity’s ability to provide goods which satisfy human nature are what powers it. Modernity’s ability to deliver carnal goods such as better foods, pharmaceuticals, comfort and transport make pushing back against it a fools errand, because in the end human nature wins. Even the Amish go to “modern” doctors. The Taliban use AK-47’s and mobile/cell phones. No matter how “traditional” there’s always the concession to modernity.

The human demand, and reward, for technological advancement which provides benefit to human nature is limitless and given the more two centuries since the beginning of the industrial revolution an incredibly vast and complex logistical, economic, academic and legal infrastructure exists to provide the “fruits of modernity” All of this is staffed by hundreds of millions of highly specialized individuals who need to be trained for their tasks. These people and the institutions they man are the infrastructure of modernity.

The key point here is that modernity can’t happen without this infrastructure, and who controls this infrastructure controls modernity.

When Max Weber wrote his, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism it was well recognised that Protestant led countries were richer and technologically more advanced than the Catholic ones, they were effectively more modern, they still are. Interesting too, was the fact that the flow of immigrants were from Catholic to Protestant lands and not in the other direction.

Weber felt that religious reasons were the main drivers of this divergence in economic performance and I agree. Weber dwelt a lot on the Protestant virtues, I want to dwell a bit on the Catholic vices.

Charles Peguy felt that one of the reasons that the Catholic Church had lost its grip on the modern world is because the clergy “had reversed the operation of the Incarnation”. Whereas God wanted to bring himself into the world, the Clergy reversed this operation and was trying to keep God out of it. And I think the Peguy was right. The issue is how each church viewed holiness.

Holiness, particularly in the Catholic Church is strongly tinged with a sense of asceticism, clericalism and monasticism. As Catholics materially understand it, the practice of a deepening of the relationship with God involves a “renunciation” of this world: a turning away from it. More asceticism, more poverty, more prayers and the assumption of holy orders: monasticism and it quasi equivalents. There even a ranking system, with the saints and martyrs on top, clergy in the middle and laity-those involved in the day to day operations of the world–on the bottom. The conception of holiness, as Peguy correctly sensed, was an operation away from the day to day affairs of the world.

Culturally, this produced a society which was strong in reasoned argument, great art, deep philosophy but with poor roads, minimal industrial infrastructure, widespread grinding poverty and lessening real world influence.

Contrast this with the Protestant world, which emphasised the role of the laity and holiness of a honest vocation, be that in plumbing or philosophy. Protestantism where it was honestly practiced, sought to bring a Christian spirit, be it to education, science, engineering or banking. Protestantism christianised the carnal world. It kept alive the operation of the Incarnation, the bringing of God’s love into the material being of day to day life. The result was the world that Max Weber noted.

Protestantism ended up being the custodian of modernity and subjugated it to it’s version of Christianity, Catholicism was left in the lurch because its theology made it unable to do so.

Which brings me to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve always enjoyed the movie but only recently have seen some of its deeper theological significance. While Catholicism has been a factory of saints, Protestantism has been a factory of George Bailey’s. (Casting Jimmy Stewart was perfect) It is true that he is fictional character, but he is also an archetype of the a type of man that we all know, and the type of high minded Protestant man who is slowly disappearing due to the cultural forces that have been unleashed since the sixties. Although the movie is fictional it, unnervingly, is beginning to resemble real life. Bedford Falls may be a fictional town but I remember the world I grew up in strongly resembling it, the world I live in now is slowly turning to Pottersville. The genius of the movie is the depiction of what world would have looked like without Protestant George Bailey. The irony of it is that is was made by a Catholic.

Now I do have disagreements with Protestantism, but my intention here is to praise one of its strengths. And its strength was to produce thousands of George Bailey’s, who in various fields and in their own small way were able to transform the world. Catholicism may have a great theology of the Incarnation but Protestantism, at its best, produced the goods, and bought Christianity to the day to day affairs of men.

Unfortunately, Protestantism, like Catholicism was gutted in the sixties and its drift toward radical liberalism is far more catastrophic since it controlled the infrastructure of modernity, the mantle of leadership has now been past to men who see George Bailey as a quaint anachronism, not someone to emulate. Catholicism is unable to fill the void.

Aaron Renn writes:

What’s key to Bailey is his institutional orientation and civic mindset. Bailey takes over the Building and Loan after his father’s death and treats it as his personal responsibility to sustain that institution through depression, war, and relentless outside attacks by Potter…

Without his civic minded and institutional spirit, the town would have turned into a slum, something we’ve seen happen all too many times in today’s world, one with precious few George Baileys.

sometimes you choose your duties, sometimes your duties choose you.

George Bailey didn’t want to run the Building and Loan. He wanted to go to college. He wanted to travel the world. He wanted to have a honeymoon. In every case, he could have folded and pursued his own dreams.

But he didn’t. George Bailey saw a need and stepped into the gap.

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The Hidden Costs of Defending Others Online

Aaron Renn writes Jan. 9:

You should think twice before rushing to the defense of someone online.

What I’m talking about here specifically is defending someone who others are attempting to cancel online, especially when it is powerful people attempting to destroy a weak person.

I don’t say never come to someone’s defense, but rather to think carefully about when to do it. This is for three key reasons.

1. You may make enemies out of powerful people. …moral influence is a finite resource. Spend it defending strangers online, and you may find yourself bankrupt when it truly matters. We have to be wise and judicious in how we deploy our influence. Where are we investing our talents such that they will generate a return?

We’ve only got so many bullets we can shoot. Before using one, we need to make sure it’s the right place by asking questions like: Is this aligned with my mission?

2. You expose yourself to the risk of publicly supporting a dodgy person.

…The stories that most inflame our sense of justice are often the ones we understand the least.

3. The person you defend probably won’t even appreciate it – and may not even want you speak up.

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Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives—But Why?

Aaron Renn writes Feb. 11:

Tanner Greer wrote a great piece about [Tom] Friedman’s story arc that explores what happened. Friedman studied the Middle East, then ended up as a New York Times correspondent in Beirut and Jerusalem. This gave him profound insights into the globalizing world that he used to write multiple influential books like The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat. It’s hard to overstate the extent to which the latter book made Friedman into a prophet like figure for corporate America.

Fifteen years later, Friedman was something of an internet joke. People would write parody columns in which he explained the world through a conversation with his cab driver. As a superstar columnist, he spent his days doing things like hobnobbing with other elites at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He wasn’t on the streets of Beirut anymore gaining insight into what was coming next. Those elite conversations are important, but they are also one dimensional. Perhaps Friedman overly relied on his proverbial cab driver because riding in a cab became one of the few times he interacted with the kinds of people he used to talk to daily when he was a foreign correspondent.

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How the Right is Finally Learning to Take Over Institutions

Aaron Renn writes Feb. 13:

Conservatives can’t use the long march strategy because the left isn’t dumb enough to let them penetrate institutions. Instead, conservatives need to do the equivalent of a private equity buyout and restructure institutions from the top down.

…ownership of Twitter marked the first time someone on the right actually acquired ownership of a major culture shaping institution and leveraged that ownership for political and cultural change. This arguably played an important role in Trump’s election, and Musk now plays a key role in the administration (for now at least). The Twitter ownership change is also probably one of the big factors in the recent “vibe shift” in the culture. And this was from controlling and fully leveraging just one institution.

The other interesting thing is that it is the left that chose exit from Twitter, largely leaving for the startup Bluesky app, which has become a low quality left wing echo chamber. They intentionally marginalized themselves from the discourse because by and large the mainstream, including most major journalists, stayed on X.

Musk’s Twitter takeover is the exact opposite of the typical pattern. Conservatives took over a liberal institution, and the left exited for a lower quality, culturally marginal platform.

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The Wounded Prophet

Aaron Renn writes:

Rod Dreher has a knack for putting his finger on the pulse of what people are going to be talking about next. He did this with his Benedict Option, and I believe has done it again with his work on re-enchantment.

But that comes with a heavy price. Rod is a deeply wounded man, one alienated from many of the institutions and people who shaped his life. He’s written about this publicly many times, including again recently:

As you longtime readers, as well as readers of Living In Wonder, know, I did not understand what St. Galgano had to do with me until 2020, when, in the depths of my depression over my failed marriage, I stumbled upon Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, in which I encountered myself as an alienated writer who was marooned in his head, unable to fully live in the present because he longed deeply for the past.

After JBP’s [Jordan Peterson] talk the other night, it has come back to mind. I have traveled far from the paralyzing nostalgia I had for family and marriage that had been lost to me, but I have not yet made the full transition into what my life is supposed to be, in God’s plan. I have a lot of new subscribers here, and what you new folks may not know is that my experience over the last two decades has been one of sustained radical loss.

Then, in early 2002, the Catholic sex abuse scandal broke big; by 2005, I had had my capacity to believe in Catholicism stripped from me, in an experience that was like a flaying. I also lost faith in my ability to be certain about Truth, as I had never imagined — literally, had never thought possible — that I could lose my Catholicism. But it happened. (As you know, I became Orthodox, and though I believe in Orthodox Christianity, the palms of my hands were burned so profoundly from 2002-05 that I can never grip, with my painful scars, any form of the Christian faith with the same ease and feeling that I did Catholicism.)

Around that time, I lost faith in the leadership of my country, and in the Republican Party and organized political conservatism, because of the Iraq War, which I had fully supported (this was another reason I lost faith in my own epistemological capabilities.)

Then, in 2012, when I learned the dark truth about how my Louisiana family regarded me and my wife and kids (as “city people,” not to be welcomed or trusted), and their refusal to admit that they had been wrong, the basic emotional base for my understanding of the world vanished overnight. That same awful year, because of the trauma of that catastrophe, my marriage began to collapse, a drawn-out process that immiserated me and my ex-wife for a decade.

It’s so often the case that the people who have the deepest insights into our world and our institutions are wounded men, those deeply hurt and alienated in important ways.

Ross Douthat wrote a column about such a man back in 2018.

The first time I ever heard the truth about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., finally exposed as a sexual predator years into his retirement, I thought I was listening to a paranoiac rant.

It was the early 2000s, I was attending some earnest panel on religion, and I was accosted by a type who haunts such events — gaunt, intense, with a litany of esoteric grievances. He was a traditionalist Catholic, a figure from the church’s fringes, and he had a lot to say, as I tried to disentangle from him, about corruption in the Catholic clergy. The scandals in Boston had broken, so some of what he said was familiar, but he kept going, into a rant about Cardinal McCarrick: Did you know he makes seminarians sleep with him? Invites them to his beach house, gets in bed with them …

At this I gave him the brushoff that you give the monomaniacal and slipped out.

That was before I realized that if you wanted the truth about corruption in the Catholic Church, you had to listen to the extreme-seeming types, traditionalists and radicals, because they were the only ones sufficiently alienated from the institution to actually dig into its rot. (This lesson has application well beyond Catholicism.)

This link between woundedness and insight is almost a cliché in the world of art. We fully expect great artists to be tortured souls, or certainly at least strange. But it’s true of intellectuals as well.

This is actually one of the great themes of science fiction: Some truths are too terrible to know. Learning them will drive one insane.

… the deepest insights, and most contrarian yet true thinking, often comes from deeply wounded people.

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