R. R. RENO is Professor of Theology at Creighton
University. He is the author of In the Ruins of the
Church (2002) and Redemptive Change: Atonement and
the Christian Cure of the Soul (2002). He received his
doctorate from Yale University.
Adam Webb has the right enemies. He
worries that elite culture is in the grips
of a cosmopolitan sentiment that makes war
on tradition. We are increasingly dominated
by atomistic universalists (to use his telling
twist on C. B. Macpherson’s original term,
atomistic individualism). They see particular
religious and national loyalties as dangerous
temptations to fanaticism. Against the fervor
of faith, they endorse the cooling effects of
critique. In place of the strong forces of
devotion to family, clan, nation, and God,
passions that have long glued men and women
together into communities of common purpose,
they wish to substitute impartial international
institutions, the bloodless machinery
of law, and the calm governance of experts.
It is, as Webb sees, a post-cultural, even anticultural
ideal: a globe governed by a
deracinated elite able to manage without the
baggage of commitment. The all-seeing eye
of reason—or the unbridled id of desire and
experience lapping up “difference”—will
rule.
By and large, Webb is not concerned to
expand our understanding of atomistic universalism
and the post-cultural personality,
though he certainly catalogues its depravity
and threat. Instead, his most important contribution
is to point out an important weakness
in conservative criticisms of liberal
modernity. Defenders of tradition ignore
one of the main strengths of the modern,
anti-traditional project: its ability to project
itself into the role of global manager and
peace-keeper. To counter this unchallenged
claim, Webb seeks to outline a conservative
cosmopolitanism, what he calls a substantive
universalism that can compete with the atomistic
universalism of liberal modernity.
It is not entirely true, as Webb suggests,
that those who have resisted whiggish analysis
of human conflict and the conditions for
peace have failed to articulate an alternative
cosmopolitan ideal. Alasdair MacIntyre shows
how traditional forms of Western intellectual
life respect others by actually offering them
arguments rather than smiling and smothering
them with critique. Erich Auerbach
outlined a mysticism of particularity that he
imagined gains in human generosity precisely
as it abandons itself to the givenness of
human life. Nonetheless, it is largely true that
the old, high-modernist, cosmopolitan cri
tique of liberal modernity (Webb mentions
T. S. Eliot and José Ortega y Gasset) has
“fallen mute.” Who these days reads F. H.
Bradley’s (whom Webb should have mentioned)
devastating critique of abstraction in
public philosophy, Ethical Studies? For that
matter, who even knows about Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church
and State, which depicts a society as vigorously
rooted as it is dynamic and open? So,
yes, I think Webb has put his finger on a real
problem. Defenders of tradition can be quite
articulate about the shallowness of our new,
post-cultural liberalism, but they have yet to
find a compelling way to talk about how
commitment can unify rather than divide the
world.
Webb’s own attempt to fill this void,
however, leaves much to be desired. His
heroes are the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius,
the Islamic philosopher al-Farabi, and the
Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci.
On Webb’s reading, these figures “bridged
differences not by bracketing them, but by
translating across them.” They recognized
the necessity of concrete traditions for the
instruction of the masses, but in their own
thought they pushed upward “to the higher
layer of truth that transcends civilizations.”
They were not disloyal to their own cultures;
instead, they had the capacity to see the
kernel of universal truth in the husk of
cultural particularity. These heroic figures
exemplify the virtues of what Webb calls
“the old-style humanistic intelligentsia.” That
elite was both committed enough to a particular
culture to reinforce its basic patterns
of thought and action, but broad-minded
enough to ride softly over specific doctrines
and norms when it was time to discuss higher,
more universal truths.
The view endorsed by Webb has a long
and inauspicious history in Christian theology.
For the first centuries, the recalcitrant
particularity of the Old Testament and the
historical Jesus grated against the spiritualized
universalism of finer minds. Marcion
tossed out the offending texts, but others
saved appearances by placing the history of
Israel and the Jewish Jesus into a larger
pedagogical scheme. For Gnostics the pedagogy
was metaphysical. Lower, cruder, and
particular forms of testimony and religious
practice press us forward, they reasoned
(with exemplary cosmopolitan sensibilities)
to higher, more sublime levels of participation
in the cosmic One. In the early modern
period, this pedagogical scheme shifted from
a metaphysical to an historical plane. In The
Education of the Human Race, Lessing treated
the specific doctrines and teachings of historical
religions as provided by God to guide
humanity in its infancy and childhood toward
a mature “gospel of reason.”
Lessing contributed to the revolution in
historical consciousness in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century. Herder and
Hegel, for example, saw that the concreteness
of our historical identities was precisely
the medium in which we found and expressed
our universal humanity. Later figures
such as von Ranke and Mommsen
carried forward the humanistic project of
historical scholarship: we meet and realize a
fuller humanity in and through our immersion
in historical particularity. There were
many differences in detail, but the general
picture remains constant. We get closer to
the truth as we lift ourselves out of the
limitations of our immediate cultural context—
but (and this is what makes the nineteenth-
century historical rebellion against
the Enlightenment so important) the drive
toward transcendence emerges out of very
dynamism and genius of historical and cultural
particularity itself.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Christian thinkers mined this turn
toward history very deeply. What was
wanted was a so-called modern belief, something
sufficiently substantial to count as faith
and at the same time sufficiently mobile to
permit full intellectual and political participation
in an increasingly secular Western
culture. If we substitute “cosmopolitan” for
“modern,” and “global” for “secular,” then
we pretty much have both Webb’s problem
and his solution well in hand. If we see that
history and culture mediate universal truths,
then we can recognize the crucial need for
localized, particularized commitments in
order to acquaint the many with these truths
and prepare the few to transcend them. We
need (to advert to the Hegelian side) the
animating faiths of Gemeinschaft in order to
prepare the soul for the higher vocation of
philosophy.
The problem here is not that Webb is
reinventing a well-worn modern solution to
modernity’s tendency to undermine cultural
loyalty. Instead, I object because it no longer
works, if it ever worked at all. Reading his
account, I found myself thinking that it all
sounded very familiar. I can hear the dulcet,
reassuring tones of the liberal Protestant guru
Paul Tillich: “Don’t worry my fellow believers,
my theory of mediation saves everything.”
I could feel the impatient universalism
of the Catholic modernist George Tyrell:
“Why can’t those earthbound dogmatists see
that the whole point of it all is divine and
spiritual?” Unfortunately for the plausibility
of Webb’s proposal, in these early years of
the twenty-first century, we know that the
followers of Tillich, Tyrell, and other theologians
who invested in historical mediation
have given us a liberal Christianity that
currently plays a very important role in
forming our atomistic universalists. So, I am
afraid that this Christian conservative cannot
sign on to Webb’s project of taking back
the cosmopolis, at least not as he theorizes its
inner logic. I’ve seen this Trojan Horse
before.
Webb’s error, I think, is to be found in his
commitment to a false truism that fails to see
the enduring, powerful role of cultural particularity.
“History shows,” he writes, “that
those who do not claim the widest horizons
always lose ground to those who do.” Imperial
Rome encouraged an elite culture that
moved fluidly across the diverse indigenous
beliefs and practices of their empire. It was
not liberal in our sense of the word, but
Roman cosmopolitanism, embodied in
Marcus Aurelius, one of Webb’s heroes,
made a strong claim to the widest horizon,
the broadest experience, and the most comprehensive
sensibility. And yet, this articulate,
philosophical, self-consciously universal
elite culture lost ground—to faith. To be
sure, ancient Christianity was confident that
it, not Stoicism or Neoplatonism or any
other form of classical cosmopolitanism, possessed
the widest possible horizon: Christ, the
Alpha and Omega. But more decisive for the
kind of reflection that Webb encourages,
Christianity seems to have overtaken classical
cosmopolitanism by thickening, rooting,
and intensifying the concrete source of its
universal beliefs. In this instance (I could
adduce others), pace Webb, history shows
that deracinated cosmopolitans always lose
ground to rooted ones.
For this reason, while Webb is very right
to challenge true conservatives to shift from
criticizing liberalism’s rootlessness and toward
formulating an alternative, positive
vision of a global cooperation, he is not a
trustworthy guide. Rooted cosmopolitans
have many resources with which to formulate
basic conditions for human cooperation
across cultural differences—natural law, orders
of creation, human rights, and so forth—
and these resources provide the intellectual
basis for any conservative to encourage and
participate in consensus about finite goods.
However, contrary to Webb’s vision, this
universalism is always peripheral and preliminary
to what matters most. To draw on
one of G. K. Chesterton’s images, a rooted
cosmopolitan plants his flag in a particular
place. The deepest truth is not abstract,
fungible, and merely human. The focus of
loyalty and love is concrete. The rooted
cosmopolitan is a partisan, a defender and
promoter of the place his flag represents.
Doubtless this brings conflict, for passionate
loyalties and loves cross (again, recalling
Chesterton) like swords. But conflicts of love
are as much a source of intense cross-cultural
fellowship as they are of bitterness and enmity.
A rooted cosmopolitanism will not
promise the relative peace of violence suppressed
and controlled—a promise that liberal
modernity has utterly failed to fulfill—
for it knows that the human heart lusts more
for dominion than truth, more for power
than for righteousness. But against the cool,
disengaged, and manipulative ethos of atomistic
universalism, it can promise to meet
others in the full bloom of their loves and in
the full force of their loyalties. It lets men
draw their swords. I have always thought
that taking a man’s sword seriously and
meeting his convictions with a forceful vigor
of one’s own is the essence of cosmopolitanism:
respect.
A rooted cosmopolitan is not a lover of
humanity in abstract, nor does he collect
cultures or religions as museum specimens to
be catalogued, preserved, and analyzed. For
this reason, I do not believe true conservatives
can ever give Webb what he wants: “an
alternative vision of world order.” The
pseudo-philanthropy of liberal modernity
will always have the advantage of sweet
dreams of reason. However, a rooted cosmopolitan
can describe the conditions for a
true philanthropy that neither makes false
promises of peace nor fantasizes about a
supra-cultural order (itself an oxymoron). A
defender of tradition respects actual human
beings by seeing them and engaging them as
men and women who love and believe with
all their hearts, all their minds, and all their
souls—and he can do so because he knows
himself to be just such a man. Perhaps, then,
the motto of the rooted cosmopolitan should
be a Johnsonian one: He who cannot love
London more than humanity, cannot love
humanity at all.
