The Treason of the Clerks Asked to name the most important event of the century, the temptation is to look to technology. The first industrial revolution was based on big centralized power sources. This century saw a second industrial revolution built around devices like the quarter-inch drill: small, portable, high energy devices allowing decentralization of production. No sooner was that well begun than we had another industrial revolution built around robotics. Then came the computer and the information revolution that has only well begun. All of these events have profound effects on everything we do.
Then there's medicine: this century saw sulfa drugs and penicillin, the most radical expansion in medical capability since the discovery of the germ theory of disease, and in a sense the first real cures doctors ever had; prior to anti-biotics the most physicians could do was facilitate healing.
And of course many science fiction writers believe the discovery of nuclear energy so important that they dated their future stories in the Atomic, rather than the Christian era.
These are all important events, but I think the most important event of the century is only marginally connected with technology. I believe it is the treason of the clerks, the abandonment of Western Civilization by the intellectual class and intellectual institutions. For good or ill, the West must face a future in which every individual has enormously increased power for good or ill without any coherent support from the intellectuals: from those supposed to be our intellectual betters, the best and the brightest among us.
Not only have the intellectuals completed Nietzche's murder of God, but they exchanged the God of Jacob and Jesus for a false god that failed. But even after the gnostic god of Marx proved false, the intellectuals remained more sympathetic to Marx, Lenin, even Stalin, than to Jehovah. They remain so still. It is far less embarrassing on the modern university campus to confess residual sympathy for communism than for Christianity.
It is indeed the end of the Christian Era, not because the discovery of Atomic Energy is so important, but because Christianity has become intellectually so unimportant. It has all but vanished from our public affairs; indeed, our public institutions actively war on any public signs of religion.
Today when we face profound questions of morality, our television announcers turn to "ethicists," intellectuals of no discernable qualification beyond being presented on the evening news as moral and ethical authorities, who may as well draw their pronouncements from thin air as from any religious source. How could it be otherwise in today's anti-religious order?
When I was a young man, it would have been inconceivable that a major civic event - an inauguration, ground breaking for a new civic building, a parade, launching a warship, graduation from public institutions - could take place without the participation of clergy. Smaller events might make do with a single protestant minister, but larger ones required both a minister and a Roman priest, and really important events brought in a rabbi as well. The event would open with an invocation and close with a blessing. The effect was to show that the civic elders believed in a Power higher than themselves.
Today the very suggestion that we as a nation owe any kind of thanks to Divine Providence provokes lawsuits, and while the majority of the populace still wishes for the old rituals, the people have been persuaded by their intellectual leaders that this is improper, and what was common for the first two centuries of the Republic was in fact forbidden by its Founders.
Whitaker Chambers went to Columbia a "Coolidge Republican." It did not take long for his intellectual leaders there to laugh him to scorn, to convince him that his theistic beliefs were contemptible. Like many of his generation, Chamber did not merely abandon religion. He persuaded himself that western civilization pointed unerringly to Stalin. Much the same thing happened to me as an undergraduate. If you were to be in tune with history, you moved to the left, at least as far as anti-anti-communism. One might not BE a communist, but surely it was contemptible to oppose those who were.
That attitude prevails today. Anyone applying for an academic position would do better to admit having held fast to Stalinism right up to the collapse of the USSR than to have been a Cold Warrior.
Religion has not been the only casualty. Everyone knows that the entire canon of what we once thought were the essential works is gone. When I was in 8th grade everyone in Tennessee read (or had already read in a previous grade) Hiawatha, Paul Revere's Ride, The Skeleton in Armor, The Lady of the Lake, Treasure Island, The King of the Golden River, Evangeline A Story of Acadia, and a dozen other such works. By the time high school was finished we had encountered a large sample of the treasures of Western Civilization - and in doing that we had come to at least a partial understanding of what was, and was not considered proper behavior. We had a common language with which to discuss vice and virtue.
No more. There is no canon of respected works. The very idea has fallen into contempt. Real intellectuals, we now understand, are above all that; above and beyond mere "texts".
For better or worse, Western Civilization was religiously based, specifically Christian or if you like Judeo-Christian, since the ethical considerations are reasonably equal and somewhat different from the Graeco-Roman traditions.
No serious intellectual now defends Judeo-Christian society and in fact the intellectual leadership of Europe and America is the declared and steadfast enemy of what used to be the basis of Western Civilization. Most of them went over to the Communists, and when some abandoned the Left to become neo-conservatives they didn't bring with them any real basis for a social order; indeed many of them, and all the rest of the intellectuals, purport to have great respect for the intellectual class which went over to the Communists, made anti-anti-communism a sine qua non for being an intellectual, and pathetically clung to Gorbachev long after even Russia had given up.
We now have greed and money and power on the one hand, hatred of the bourgeois and the power of money on the other, and damned little in between; we no longer have a moral basis for a society in so far as you could find that among the intellectual class. When we have moral questions we go to "ethicists" as if they had any moral authority whatever, or any basis for their pronouncements.
There remain some Christian intellectuals, but they aren't admitted to the ranks of the anointed on campuses. The universities are, except in the sciences, dominated by the left who have an aimless hatred of wealth (or an excessive envy and greed for it), continue to believe you cannot be an intellectual unless you are an anti-anti-communist, and have no well spring for their "ethics" or justice; who have turned the "best Shakespearian theatre in the world" into a place where Cordelia is mute and speaks in sign language; in which the intentions of the authors mean nothing; in which not even deconstruction is taken seriously because nothing is taken seriously. To get tenure in "liberal arts" or "social sciences" you must profess to believe nonsense such as the "fact" that Dow-Corning was guilty in the silicone implant business, the Earth is in the Balance and Global Warming can't even be questioned, and a myriad of other junk science.
Thus we face a world in which there is unprecedented economic and technical power devolved to lower and lower levels of the social order with no intellectual leadership class, no consensus on what society or even humanity is FOR, and no one to set examples for us. We are to be led by "ethicists" who hardly lead by moral example or continuity with any past tradition.
We may find our way out of all this. Technology gives us the means to communicate with each other directly, without mediation from the clerks. It may even be that we don't need the intellectual class.
Let us hope so, because the intellectuals climbed aboard the flywheel of history and marched into the machine; now that the Marxist dream has betrayed them, they have no God to replace the God that failed. And THAT is the most significant event of the century.
Poster Comment:
It's not hallucinations about remote-controlled airplanes and non-existent explosives in the WTC, or fantasies about three shooters on Kennedy, or comedies about the moon landings being shot on a stage. It's the fact our intellectual classes have become traitors.