When the ‘G’ word became unutterable

Some years ago, I wrote the book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, inspired by the financial disaster of 2008.

The main point was that our financial problems were a symptom of an underlying civilisational malaise caused first by the Reformation and then by the contagion inexplicably called ‘the Enlightenment’.

The former was a rebellion against apostolic Christianity; the latter, one against Christendom as such, not only its religion but also much of the civilisation that the religion had produced.

That included a specifically Christian take on economics, summed up in the past by “not by bread alone”. However, “not by bread alone” didn’t mean not by bread at all.

It’s just that Christianity established a pecking order in which money and everything it bought occupied a low rung on the ladder of values. Such things might have been important, but some other things were more so.

It was as if Jesus had told compulsive money makers, “By all means, go on if you must. But never lose sight of what comes first.”

The Reformation, especially its Calvinist offshoot, perverted that pecking order by treating riches as God’s gift, His reward for virtue. For the first time in history, acquisitiveness received a divine blessing. (Such is the origin of what Weber described as “the Protestant work ethic”.)

Following what Ortega y Gasset called the ‘revolt of the masses’, the Christian pecking order collapsed altogether and was replaced with naked rationalist materialism. The pursuit of material possessions, otherwise known as happiness, was elevated to a secular moral height it had never scaled before.

This eventually led to rapacious, impatient consumption with no holds barred. Happiness, which is to say material possessions, was treated as an inalienable human right, and millions of people tried to defend it by taking promiscuous risks. In due course, the sum of all risks became too heavy for the financial system to bear, and it collapsed.

Such is the schematic representation of a rather involved argument touching on aspects of history, theology, philosophy, politics and economics. Obviously, since I was writing about a civilisational shift from A to B, I had to devote quite a few pages to A, which is to say Christendom.

Anyway, after the book was published I gave a copy to a well-known journalist, at that time my friend and editor. My friend was – still is, God bless him – a highly intelligent man, touching on the upper limit available to an atheist. Hence I was sure he was going to review my Crisis in a high-circulation paper.

No review appeared for a month or so, and finally I asked him if he had had the chance to read the book. “Oh you mean the one about God…” he said dismissively, and I realised my Crisis would remain unread and unreviewed, at least by him.

The book wasn’t “about God”. It was about economics considered historically and philosophically. But mea culpa: words like ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ did figure prominently in the first half of the book – they had to be there as essential parts of the argument.

Yet such words have become optical taboos: as far as the modern mind is concerned, they don’t belong in a serious discussion. A modern editor casts a quick eye over the text, espies a profusion of the offensive words, and his eyes glass over. The book is ‘uncool’. It’s not worth reading.

Now, I’ve described my friend as highly intelligent, but he won’t be offended if I suggest he isn’t one of history’s greatest minds. Yet several Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries who could have a valid claim to that distinction suffered from the same myopia.

The word ‘God’ burned their lips with the same singeing intensity, and I for one am amused by the dexterity of the mental acrobatics they displayed when trying to zigzag around it. The ‘G’ word was unutterable to them – even when they clearly had it in mind.

They talked about ‘defence mechanisms’, while refusing to mention the existence of a mechanic able to design such protective devices. They discussed the ‘laws of nature’, skipping the need for a legislator who could have laid such laws down. They talked about nature as something endowed with a mind, which wasn’t especially clever.

Thus, in no particular order, Herder insisted that the world is a natural organism designed to produce higher organisms within itself. Designed by whom exactly? Well, nature itself, if you insist. Quite.

But that endows nature with a rationality for surely it takes reason to design anything. I’m unable to discuss the matter with old Johann Gottfried, but had that discussion taken place, he would have doubtless explained that he was speaking metaphorically. If so, the metaphor didn’t quite work.

To Kant, nature had a rational plan, and human nature was the matter through which that plan was to be carried out. The plan was teleological: eventually, at some time in the future, a rational millennium would be achieved, but not quite yet.

Again, unable to utter the word ‘God’, one of history’s greatest thinkers resorts to a lame metaphor that simply doesn’t work. While implicitly agreeing with Herder that nature is predetermined to evolve from low to high, Kant reverts to primitive pantheism by assigning to nature an ability to draw long-term plans.

Kant’s able disciple Schelling treated history and nature as two great realms manifesting the Absolute from the beginning of time. Yes, but what exactly is that Absolute, Herr Professor? And how did time begin?

The Absolute, explained Hegel, is man’s thought expressed through actions. History is nothing but the dialectical development of this Absolute Spirit, or Absolute Thought, if you’d rather.

If I understand correctly, which with Hegel can never be taken for granted, the world is graced with the presence of some collective intellect, of which we all partake. Like any individual mind, this collective intellect develops with age, growing from primitive to intricate, which is to say from a cave dweller to Hegel.

But what is it? Where does it come from? Why didn’t he just admit that he was talking about God? Hegel couldn’t make that admission. Neither could Kant, Herder, Shelling or Fichte. Neither could their French counterparts, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire.

None of them could admit what all of them knew: only God makes man, history – and, for that matter, nature – intelligible. Even the greatest thinkers, which all of them were, couldn’t credibly dispense with that essential starting point. That’s why they had to concoct variously convoluted crypto-theological metaphors to get around the offensive ‘G’ word, hoping their readers wouldn’t be able to decipher their codes.

One thing for sure: my editor friend is in good company, and one of long standing. Not quite as long-standing as mine, but one that’s much more up-to-date. This seems to be the ironclad requirement of modernity: everything has to be up-to-date, progressive and forward-looking.

Never mind intellectual rigour and honesty. Such virtues have gradually faded away over the past couple of centuries.