Who's on first
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlm, Jr. WHO'S ON FIRST AND WHAT'S ON DECK In the mid-1960s Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, remarked that the United States had won the cold war but...
...This scenario assumes, of course, that history moves like a pendulum...
...On the whole, however, it is doubtful that the pendulum is the key to history...
...then World War II and the cold war...
...The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe means that the United States and its allies have prevailed in the protracted struggle between Communist East and anti-Communist West that began in the aftermath of World War II...
...But all three were ideologies of modernization in effect even if they were not always so in intention...
...Another possible scenario is that we have reached the end of the era of modernization, or at least of ideologies of modernization...
...Quite the contrary...
...If, after several centuries of modern social and cultural evolution, we finally arrived at the most extreme form of modernization ideology (i.e., communism...
...Liberalism in its more moderate form, inspired by John Locke and Adam Smith, was typical of the English-speaking countries...
...Perhaps it will swing all the way back to the first ideology of modernization, Protestantism...
...Liberalism eventually became a self-concious champion of modernization, but in its early stages in the age of Jefferson, for example it wasn't clear whether its goal was to recover an idealized past, to move toward an idealized future, or to achieve a transhistorical ideal of virtue and happiness...
...But if a reverse swing of the pendulum is underway, why should it stop at liberalism...
...Liberalism, which once seemed to be a transition period on the road from Christianity to communism, may yet be a translation period: this time on the road back from communism to Christianity...
...Socialism is needed only in those societies that have no significant traditions of either Protestantism or liberalism...
...radical Protestantism was embodied in the Calvinist-inspired sects of Geneva, France, Scotland, England, New England, and Pennsylvania...
...Protestantism, liberalism, and socialism...
...Modernization, at least as an ideal if not yet as a fact, may well have played itself out...
...But there is of course no science of the human future, something many of our nineteenth-century forebears did not realize when they optimistically predicted the shape of things to come...
...Not all three were self-consciously proponents of modernization...
...For much of the twentieth century it looked as if liberalism was destined to be little more than a brief historical interlude, with no long-term future except possibly in one corner of the globe...
...In some ways it does...
...and if that ideology failed, and if history does not move in a pendulum-like fashion: then where do we go from here...
...WHO'S ON FIRST AND WHAT'S ON DECK In the mid-1960s Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, remarked that the United States had won the cold war but didn't realize it: his point being that the war in Vietnam was unnecessary from the point of view of American interests...
...Socialism alone of the three was always deliberately and self-consciously modernizing in nature...
...The collapse of communism (the radical form of socialism) may signify, as most seem to think it does, that the pendulum of modernization will now swing back to liberalism...
...radical revolutions, for instance, always seem to have their Thermadorian reactions...
...Well, whether or not we had won the cold war as early as twenty-five years ago, there is no question that we have won it now...
...or, since Catholicism eventually managed to modernize itself, perhaps to some transdenominational Christian theory of modernity...
...so what need has this society ever had to invest in socialism...
...It has often been asked why socialism never caught on in the United States...
...Each of the three has had its moderate form and its more radical form...
...Socialism in its moderate form was characteristic of Western Europe, in its radical (or Communist) form of Russia and China...
...The winner is liberalism liberal democracy in government, an economy largely free enterprise in nature, and a society based on equal rights and individual freedom...
...More typical of France, Italy, Spain, and Latin America was liberalism of the radical type: statist, anticlerical, often even anti-Christian...
...it is even an attractive scenario...
...Protestantism was an attempt to react against what it regarded as the corruptions of the then-modern age, an attempt to return to the spirit of the primitive Christian church...
...little wonder Christianity lost heart and ran for cover...
...Just to remind ourselves that we never know what the future will be, let me indicate two other possible scenarios...
...But now the momentum has turned in Christianity's favor...
...Then came 1989, the year of revolutions in Eastern Europe...
...In recent centuries there have been three great ideologies of modernization...
...After a seventy-five-year interruption, liberalism is once more on the move, stronger than ever, destined once again, it seems, to be what its nineteenth-century enthusiasts always said it would be, namely, the ultimate future of the entire human race...
...This is a plausible scenario...
...At least part of the answer to that question is that America, from the moment of its first settlement, already possessed one ideology of modernization, Protestantism, and eventually acquired the overlay of a second, moderate liberalism...
...Moderate Protestantism was to be found in the Anglican and Lutheran churches...
...The liberal ideal was set in motion in the eighteenth century, made great progress during the nineteenth, then went off the rails in August 1914...
...In other words, perhaps the collapse of communism portends not so much the triumph of liberalism as the revival of Christianity...
...As modernization took increasingly extreme form it became more and more atheistic...
...Next came Bolshevism, fascism, nazism...
...The human race, having exhausted one great historic option, may be on the verge of beginning a search for another.rch for another...
Vol. 117 • July 1990 • No. 13
