Chantal Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the 20th Century

# Book report: Chantal Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity.

The following is a paraphrase of some of the author’s main ideas. We think of ourselves as having left totalitarianism behind, as having triumphed over it. But we do not realize the extent to which we agree with the ideological assumptions that made totalitarianism possible. We are indignant, for example, regarding the way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews, but we are blind to our own practices of dehumanization. We condemn the condemnation of people as “radically other” while we also engage in othering.

Utopian schemes sow death. We are so slow mentally that we have to see the truth of that statement actually demonstrated before we acknowledge it. Utopian dreaming is premised on the idea that human beings are self-sufficient self-creators. The belief that there are no limits to our ability to refashion the world leads to violence without limits.

Ideologies such as Nazism and Communism sought to break down traditional ties between people, such as family and congregation, where personal virtue was nurtured, to replace those ties with worship of the state that would be enforced through suspicion, threats, and informing on others. The nihilistic culture that we foster today also seeks to break down traditional ties that nurture virtue, though the means used, such as ridicule, sarcasm, and ostracism, are less brutal. It is as if we feel a need to finish the uncompleted work of the ideologies. We call our escape into nothingness “progress.”

We define progress as the sweeping away of all scruples. Scruples are those cultural memories that prod us to defend the dignity of each human being; they are the voice within us that resists the destruction of morality. Our finest eugenicists are sometimes plagued with scruples; they realize that the rational course of action is to eliminate the substandard beings, but they hesitate. After we have “progressed” further as a race they will no longer hesitate. It will go without saying, because it cannot be said, that at that point we will prove ourselves to be the true spiritual heirs of Hitler, the one who burned scruples at the stake. The totalitarian ideologies destroyed traditional moral selfhood and the common world of neighborliness that it made possible. We have decided that we like living in that destroyed world. If anyone seeks to restore the common world that was lost we will brand them as a heretic.

In our world people are afraid to ask deep questions about the meaning of humanness. We withdraw from that activity of questioning that is our true path toward wholeness and transcendence. We think that there is no need for questioning and growing because we are automatically self-sufficient as individuals. We are isolated individuals who enter into relations with others that are either contractual or predatory. We do not want to give or forgive; we do not want to need or suffer; we do not want to recognize that we are finite and fallen or that we are called to live by grace. We think that we are capable of inventing ourselves and of governing ourselves; we presume that we are the God of our own individual world. The utopian dream sought god-like power to achieve the goal of “saving” society. By embracing individualism we think that we have rejected that dream, but we are actually prolonging that nightmare. We seek to be individual demiurges instead of collectivist demiurges. That is our definition of “change.”

We like to think that if a person believes something strongly, with a sense of certainty, then they will become a fanatic who oppresses others. Therefore, the preferable alternative is to not believe anything, to not think, to be vacuous on the inside. We are very good at resisting the temptation of building up beliefs that could structure our lives. Because we have no inner depth or moral backbone, we live in a superficial wasteland of cultural fads and fashions. We are shaped by these social trends because we lack coherent selves, although we never stop bleating about how we enjoy our perfect “freedom” as individuals. Because we are passive we always hold others responsible for what is happening in the world, rather than being responsible ourselves. In truth, to become a real individual requires participating in a coherent culture that can foster our rationality, our growth in personal virtues, and our sense of responsibility for ourselves and others.

People today tend to live in a perpetual present moment, cut off from a meaningful past and a hopeful future. We have fashioned very small, narrow cells for ourselves in which we choose to live cut off from the flow of time and from true community. And then we wonder why our preoccupation with our small selves leaves us so bored.

When we do venture out of our solitary cells, we join collectives of “like-minded” people who share our “identities.” In this way our individual narcissism is lifted up to a social plane where we think that we have “strength in numbers.” It is often the case that these collectives seek to outdo in each other to see who can make the strongest claim to being victims of tyrannical oppressors. These identity collectives arise out of the psychology of the self-sufficient isolated individual who is seeking to reinforce his or her inner convictions. This individual wants to join in a group which consists of mirror images of him or herself. A true subject, on the other hand, a growing person who is open to transcendence, is more open to genuine diversity and pluralism, because he or she is not narrowly self-interested but is seeking to foster a common world in which all can participate. The growing person is drawn in hope by a vision of a better future, rather than trying to defend an idolatry of origins. Collectives often claim that they are able to define their own vision of good and evil, morality and law, in defiance of tradition and of the contemporary need to build a common world with other human beings who do not belong to the collective. A collective may even claim that each individual in the collective is able to define their own view of good and evil as an individual. This reduces human life to an absurd Tower of Babel. It also smuggles in the assumption that since the individual is defining good for themselves then they will always do good and never evil—by definition. Anyone who criticizes the individual who has thus self-interestedly defined their own self as good must be an evil imposer of alien standards.

Collective thinking presumes that the members of the collective are good and outsiders who can be labeled as members of another group (“the Jews!”) are evil. People are not evil because of what they have done but simply because they had the misfortune to be born into the wrong group. In this way individual responsibility is obliterated, both for the members of the collective and for those they are attacking. A true community is rooted in the principle of individual responsibility, that is, in a recognition that all people can make good or bad choices. We have free will. There are not separate sub-species within the human race; there is only one human race made up of persons who are called to live ethically before God and in relation to others.

The totalitarian ideologies have twin goals: recreating human nature according to a utopian dream and personifying evil in some group. The revolutions of 1989 in Europe were seeking to expose the falsity of these ideologies; they were seeking to actually learn the lessons of the twentieth century. We must reject the notion that we can recreate ourselves and society from scratch, ex nihilo. We must love ourselves, our neighbors, and our Creator more than we love the plans, dreams, and ideologies that arise out of our own immature minds. If we understand this, then we will realize that the creation account in Genesis protects human dignity more effectively than any modern forms of “reason” can.

We need to be gardeners, not demiurges, and the chief way we can do that well is in how we raise our children. To nurture and raise a child is to help him or her emerge into the world as a person who is wounded by the tragedy that is the human race, without being overcome and undone by that wound. We need to pass on our love and accumulated wisdom to the next generation so that they have a chance to become authentic subjects who know that they are incomplete beings on a journey toward truth, beauty, and goodness. To be incomplete, to be half-created, is God’s gift to us which evokes our freedom and makes it real. If we reject the ideology of self-sufficiency and live into this freedom, then we have begun to learn the lessons of the twentieth century.