The “idolatry of the actual” is the target of Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History (2003) by J.C.D. Clark, Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas (who has also taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Chicago). Clark diagnoses and treats the chronic intellectual illness of “presentism”, the privileging of the present, the discarding of the past except as nostalgia, always a sentimental distortion, or the deployment of it for utilitarian purposes, at best in law, at worst for propaganda. Along the way Clark explores the nature of nationalism and the guff often talked in the name of “tradition”. There is a particularly good chapter on “Challenging the American Public Myth” - “History, indeed, labours under a major handicap in all societies suffused with a sense of their own rightness or inevitability”; while in the chapter “The End of the Special Relationship” there is the salient observation that “British exceptionalism and American exceptionalism were, indeed, linked themes, but the first has been fundamentally reconfigured where the second has grown in strength.”
This isn’t a book review, it’s a cri de coeur (actually, it’s just a rant) piggybacking on a book, but The Shadow of the Present is a pertinent piece of polemic against Whiggism and “the [prevailing] assumption … that events and episodes are more ‘relevant’ to the present the closer they are to it in time.” On the contrary: “For individuals as for nations, the most formative events are not necessarily the most recent: they may come early in the life of either.” (I guess Christians should know this.) Clark argues that the present is always “shadowed” by the past, confirming Faulkner’s famous dictum that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
But for Clark it is not only, with George Santayana, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, it is also that “To forget our history is not to be free, but to be mad.” This combination is the most worrying feature of presentism: it is an ideology of pathological hopelessness; its surface optimism is, in fact, infused by a deep-seated pessimism that sabatoges the future.
Of course there is nothing new in Clark’s thesis. As Cicero wrote: Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.) But then the people who need to know it wouldn’t know it, now would they?
(Btw, the patronising hauteur of the prevailing puerility, particularly in ecclesiastical circles, really pisses me off - e.g., the church fathers and reformers were writing in a pre-critical, pre-scientific era, so as people “come of age” (liberals usually, appealing, unbelievably, to Bonhoeffer, not to mention simplisticaly assuming a monolithic Enlightenment), we needn’t take what they say too seriously; or Karl Barth is passé (when he continues to make most modern theologians look like a bunch of odd-jobbers, if not bullshitters - cf. Stanley Hauerwas’ comment that there is “a ‘no bullshit’ quality to Barth’s thought”.)
Anyway, that’s my rant on what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Paul F. 08.25.10 at 8:55 pm
By “ecclesiastical circles”, do you mean clergy?
I could see how clergy trained at liberal seminaries may feel that way, but I find that parishioners tend to go the exact opposite direction. Theirs is an ignorance, not an arrogance, toward the past: “Karl who? Martin Luther did what? Why does any of this matter? All we need is the Bible to know how we get raptured!”
I know this may, of course, be a matter of geography.
Mark Byron 08.25.10 at 9:50 pm
It’s interesting that your focusing on reclaiming the theologians of the past as part of this anti-Whiggism movement. Is that consistent with the progressive nature of theology that you and others here tend to take?
That would make sense if you are looking at neoliberal economics versus progressive econ and cast the neoliberals as the Whiggish anti-traditionalists. There you’re on solid ground.
I’m not sure if that argument works on theology, where you and the gang here are more Whig than Tory.
Kim 08.25.10 at 11:27 pm
It’s interesting that your focusing on reclaiming the theologians of the past as part of this anti-Whiggism movement. Is that consistent with the progressive nature of theology that you and others here tend to take?
It’s the theological liberals who are the Whigs, the progressivists. You haven’t been paying attention if you think that I am in their camp. But nor am I a “traditionalist”, which has its own kind of fundamentalism. I’m on, say, Rowan Williams’ team. (It was Williams, btw, who gave the heads-up for Our Shadowed Present). Check out his book Why Study the Past: The Quest for the Historical Church (2005). In the introduction Williams writes: “traditionalists sometimes miss the point because they don’t expect to be surprised by the past; progressives miss the point because they don’t expect to be interested or questioned by it.”
Personally, honouring the fifth commandment (the fourth if you’re Catholic or Lutheran), I try to be attentive to the past, to its strange territory, to memories dangerous and disruptive, precisely in service to the ongoing, creative nature of the theological enterprise. It is the crucial insight of Williams’ great book Arius (1987, 2001) that innovation is necessary not to scupper continuity with the past but precisely to secure it (Arius, not Athanasius, was the traditionalist, the conservative). The question is always: what kind of innovation? Barth was a master of the right kind, J.A.T. (Honest to God) Robinson of the wrong kind. Barth I would call an innnovator, Robinson a progressivist.
Tim Chesterton 08.26.10 at 12:12 am
It’s also the typical traditionalist mistake to think that all the theologians of the past were pillars of the right-wing Establishment, like good evangelicals displaced into the third and fourth centuries. Lots of modern conservative evangelicals are shocked to discover that the Ante-Nicene Fathers tended to be pacifists, opposed the lending of money at interest, couldn’t afford to own their own Bibles (how on earth did they have their ‘daily quiet time???’), believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and had far more to say about the dangers of money than the dangers of homosexuality. And the early 16th century Anabaptists were very suspicious of those who bought and sold things for a living that they hadn’t made themselves, making money a commodity. I believe John Wesley taught that if you spent money on luxuries you were robbing the poor.
The truth is that the best theologians of the past were far more radical than we are.